This month has been a whirlwind of photography for me. I’ve found the social photography website Flickr and I have been networking like crazy. It’s a thrill to connect with great photographers and get to exchange feedback with them. I’ve been participating in various voting games where people often leave feedback on your work explaining why they voted the yea or nay.
I have absolutely no problem having my work criticized. In fact, I love it. There is this notion of a cliché photo and many people will vote something down if it’s “cliché”. It’s shot that is taken frequently and gets seen a lot. That’s fine and dandy, but I’ve quickly learned that this is VERY subjective and it’s downright intellectually dishonest. Does a commonly shot subject automatically make it a bad photograph? If someone tells me my shot is cliché, the first thing I do is look for their work. I want context for their reasoning because calling some cliché is vague at best. Next I look for critiques where they are supportive of people’s work and try to understand how they think. It’s not easy to shoot with the expectation of pleasing people.
In the end I’ve found that these type of people when presented with something that is truly unique and different, they don’t like it just the same because it falls outside some standard of what a good photograph looks like. So you’re standing at this revolving door of hypocrisy where if you follow the “rules” you are cliché and if you don’t your work is too unusual and it breaks the rules.
So in the end, photography is about shooting what you love. If you want to shoot your flowers in the garden or your house cat, who cares if it’s been repeatedly done and might be considered cliché? If you want to give your portrait a heavy vignette with a red color shift like my shot above, do it. If you truly love what you’re shooting, your work will be great. There are ways to form stronger compositions and get better color with better light, but as a basis, you need to have passion about what you’re shooting first. Next, take the picture that best depicts your mind’s eye.
Having read a really interesting caption under Dave Coppedge’s photo of a waterfall, it really made a few ideas click about how a photo may require some post processing to get it to match what you saw with your own eyes. For most of my life shooting a photograph was an exercise ins documenting my life. Once in a while I might capture something cool and really have little understanding about why it was good. It was pure luck, but your brain knows what looks good and I could see it. That’s the challenge we face as photographers.
My primary goal when I take a shot is to capture what I’m seeing. It’s very easy to see something fantastic, take a shot and find it dull and uninteresting. Reading what Dave explained about how the eye works, it lends a lot of credibility for post processing. A modern digital camera is fantastic, but it still cannot capture the dynamic range your eye can, not even close. Sometimes it’s necessary to take multiple shots exposed at different levels and later blend them together to get a more even exposure. Sometimes the colors caught by the camera are flat and boring and need more saturation and contrast.
I used to be a purist thinking I needed to capture the shot perfectly in camera with little to no post processing. For me it’s about shooting. I would rather be skipping across rocks to shoot a landscape than pinned to a computer screen for hours on end which is the other extreme. Many people will spend hour upon hour tweaking their photos. Recently I’ve found a place comfortably in the middle.
I’ve adopted using Lightroom to process my RAW photos. Its a very streamlined tool which makes it extremely easy to do advanced modifications. 95% of my processing is done there. From time to time, I still need Photoshop. Photoshop is needed to blend multiple exposures together. It also has powerful selection tools to isolation certain portions of your shot to make modifications. In CS5, the content-aware healing tool makes mundane tasks like removing power lines trivial. Keep in mind, post processing will not take a bad photograph and make it good. You cannot correct a bad composition and perspective.
I have learned to love post processing, but my first love is the actual photography. It’s the “being there” and “getting the shot” experience. I’ve been shooting so much this last month that my collection of shots out weighs my time to process them. That’s just how I like it.
Today, I met up with my brother’s family after work and we all went up to Wiskeytown Lake to cool off. We were swimming near Brandy Creek and near the end of the day, the light was pretty good. While this shot isn’t one of those jaw dropping shots, I think I captures the serenity of this mild creek flowing by these very round rocks. There’s a bit of a hot spot in the back right corner, but overall, the shot is pretty evenly exposed. I still feel like I’m learning how to compose shots like this. I tried ten or so vantages before I took this. I knew it was the one when I composed the shot. I found these really cool rocks for the foreground. You can see all the color from the other rocks just under the surface and I’m standing right in the middle of the stream. I used my .6 stop ND filter to get my exposure over a couple seconds.
As every day passes, I read more and more about how our American freedoms are getting encroached upon. This story about a photographer well within his rights to shoot a traffic accident who was incorrectly told by four officers that it was illegal to shoot them without their consent. This isn’t that uncommon, with worse reports of equipment confiscation and threat of arrest and prosecution.
Recently, I’ve had a mild encounter with a security officer guarding Keswick Dam. It was late afternoon on a Saturday when I set out on foot walking across the dam. I was doing my thing shooting all sorts of details and vantage points. I wasn’t being discrete about what I was doing and I was doing it all from the sidewalk, a public walkway. This security guard was sitting in his vehicle parked on the dam. I walked right past his open window and politely said “Hello.” He kindly returned the gesture. About 20 feet past him, there were really large gates that can be lifted to release water in the reservoir. They are lifted by a chain where the links are about a foot across which is really impressive. I got close to shoot them and this alerted the guard. He pulled his vehicle up along side of me asking me, “What are you shooting?”
Thinking to myself this must be a trick question because it seemed pretty obvious I was shooting the dam. I answered plainly, “The Dam.”
“What specfically?” he asked.
“I’m shooting the huge chain links,” I responded. He nodded when a car was approaching behind him and he moved on as to not impede traffic. At that point, I was done shooting and headed back to my car. When I was loading up my gear, the guard drove up and parked close. Curious about the exchange I asked, “What was your concern with my photography?”
He explained, “Most people shoot wide shots of the whole dam. I was curious about what you were doing because it was different.” I explained why I was getting close and exchanged some small talk for a few moments and left.
While this encounter was very benign, it really caught my attention because I’ve never been questioned. It prompted me to investigate what my rights are as a photographer. Basically, if I’m in a public place, I can legally shoot anything in public view. That includes people, children, police, buildings, bridges, factories and government buildings. Anything in public view. If I’m on private property, the owner has the right to deny me the right to shoot. Be sure to be armed with the knowledge of your rights.
Three months ago, I revamped my website. It was running on the Kohana Framework and it’s main job was to pimp my freelance web development career. While that’s fine and dandy, I found that while my work pays the bills, it’s not what I want to invest the rest of my life into. I don’t want to be glued endlessly to a computer monitor.
The last three months have been a whirlwind of photography. I’ve grown tremendously and I can’t stop thinking about it. I know this honeymoon will wear off eventually, but I want see the world one photograph at a time. I want to make a living doing that. Today, I’m reintroducing my website as a photoblog. This blog will showcase my journey and will serve as motivation and encouragement. Here we go!
The month of June has really been a productive month photographically. The creative juices have really been flowing. So much so that it’s bleeding over to my wife.
She started shopping for cameras when my Dad offered to give her his aging Canon Rebel XT. Despite its age and cracked (but working) LCD, it still takes great photos and it’s just what she needs to learn how to balance exposure, shutter speed and ISO. I haven’t been able to keep up with her wanting to shoot everything.
I am trying to make the jump from amateur photographer into a semi-pro, so I want to get my work out there. I’ve had a gallery here since I refreshed the design with exposure in mind. I was hosting it myself using the yet to be released Gallery3. Going further down this road, I have come to need much more than a way for people to see the photos. Read the rest of this entry »
There is a lot of photography advice on the net and most of it is technical in nature. The very few times I find someone stop to write their thought process when shooting, I take notice. I don’t care how they setup their camera, I want to know how they saw the photograph before they pulled the trigger. I want to know what caught their eye and how they setup the shot. I want to know what it took to get the images I see. So I thought I’d start blogging about my experiences behind the camera and how I captures some of my shots.
I’ve been spending a lot time think about what direction to take this blog. I want to be able to impart my readers with some knowledge and be entertained. I know a few things, but I wanted to find my niche of sorts where I could write about something that isn’t blogged about at nausea already. So my plan is to cover the PHP framework, Kohana.
