Am I Just Getting Lazy?
August 22nd, 2011
Kaslo BC - Canon G11
I write this post from BC Canada, on a vacation at Kootenay Lake with my family. I brought a photo backpack loaded with my D700 and a few choice lenses, flashes, other miscellaneous doodads, plus my tripod. After 8 days, I’ve not put one click on it. Not that there isn’t enough material. It’s beautiful out here, and I like landscape and nature photography. It’s just that I have two young children and can’t seem to get away on my own for any significant amount of time to concentrate on my photography. I could bring the gear along wherever we go, but it’s so clunky. It’s big, heavy, and since it’s expensive stuff I have additional reservations about leaving it in the car for any length of time, at daily stops when it’s not practical to schlep it along (say while getting groceries or grabbing lunch etc.)
The Breakdown Of Vision
July 11th, 2011
Okay, so this example kinda sucks, but you get the idea
No I don’t mean breaking down like your 1981 Ford Fiesta. I mean breakdown as in divided into parts for analytical reasons. I have known amateur photographers that had great equipment and a very competent technical knowledge of their equipment, but still had a hard time capturing images that any random group of seasoned photography enthusiasts would overwhelmingly deem to be more than just a “nice snapshot”. That’s when I realized that old saying some of us guys have heard before, “it’s not the size of your tool, it’s how you use it,” was actually true. Well, at least in terms of photography equipment.
Learning By My Mistakes
July 2nd, 2011
This is perhaps the most useful aspect of blogging about photography for an aspiring amateur like myself: documenting success and failures in technique. When a certain type of shooting opportunity is approaching, it’s great to be able to look back in a technical diary of sorts and see what worked and what didn’t in the past. Of course, if you keep a well organized database of image, you can always just look back and see what the results were, but you don’t always save the bad images from a given event, and you can’t always remember what you did- beyond the EXIF data.
Here is probably the first time I photographed people in a church, or at least first time in this church for sure, with flash. I had no assistant and was not about to bring lightstands or tripods into the church, so it was on camera. I did okay, but for future reference here were some mistakes and observations:
Lighting in Photography | Light Painting Technique & Tips
June 20th, 2011
This is a pretty cool technique I’ve been meaning to try for years now, and still have not got around to it. The article was on the Nikon website, written by Dave Black, an excellent photographer. Here’s the link:
