Photography
Here's a photo that was taken with my Canon film camera 12 years ago. Yes, film! If you look closely, you will see white specks. Those are dust specks on the negative. And if you look closely again, you will see film grain. Holy cow!My workflow for this photo was as follows
There you go. And, if you ask me, I like the photo but it's not all that special. As if no one else ever stood here and took the exact picture. . . .
This photo is the result of a totally serendipitous process. I have been playing with a Canon Speedlight and a Canon infrared trigger (the ST-E2) off and on for the last few days. I have also been using a snoot to focus the light on macro subjects. I started with the Christmas cactus I photographed in natural light a few days ago. I then moved to a freshly printed dollar, thinking that bright, focused, angular light might result in something cool. (It didn't). And then, just a short time ago, I went prowling for something with shape and texture and I found a Shure microphone I just happened to have lying on my den floor. (Why? You ask. There's no good answer for that question other than there are a lot of things on my den floor.)And this is the result. I like the picture but, as I've often said, that doesn't mean it's a good picture. What I like, though, is that I think I've made a fairly usual thing look interesting because of the the point of view and, more importantly, the way I've used light. The other thing I like is that I used a iPad mini box as a reflector on the right side of the subject. Beyond that, my "studio" is nothing special in this photo. In fact, here's what the shot set-up looks like:
There really was as much ambient light in the room as you see in the snap shot. The reason everything besides the microphone is so dark in the final photo is that the Speedlight was bright, it was very close to the the microphone and the light was focused by the snoot.Canon 5DIII 1/60s f/9.0 ISO200 100mm
Wow! Yet another "How To Be A Better Photographer" blog??!!! Yes. The story is that a year ago, after assigning a blog project to my Social Media Marketing students, I decided to create a blog that does something different than this one: I use explicit teaching tactics rather than the subliminal ones I use here. (You didn't know that I was often secretly trying to educate you?)And so (a year later!) I have launched "The Better Photography" blog. My mission is to teach and enlighten and, from time to time, to talk in more technical detail about how I create the photos that show up here. So how about visiting my new blog? And you really should subscribe to it because it won't be quite as regular and this one. What? You haven't subscribed to this one yet? Just go to the bottom on this page and put your email address in the blank provided. No obligations. And you can cancel at any time.
This photo is the last photo I took in 2012. I was entralled by the fact that the bag of chips got puffy as our airplane reached altitude. It was taken with my iPhone and given what I was trying to capture, it is a failure. It was also the 18,791st photo I took last year.I am posting a throw-away photo today so I can talk about two things that are running through my head:First, this photo is obvious proof that every shutter click doesn't generally produce a gem. My rough calculation is that I might get something that is close to as good as it gets for me about once every 1000 times I take a photo. That's a ratio that isn't very good and which is no doubt one of the evils of the digital era of photography. I have been reading about Edward Weston and he was much more deliberate and calculating in his photography. I need to be more like him.Second, I accept Malcolm Gladwell's thesis in his book Outliers that what we call "genius" is often a combination of the right genes and the right environment. But you also need to add in 10,000 hours of concerted and guided practice. By my calculations, not including all of the time I spent teaching photography last year, I put about 800 hours into my craft in 2012 (including the production of this blog). Eight hundred hours equals twenty 40 hours work weeks.The reality is that by Gladwell's suggestion, I have several years to go before I have a chance of being a genius. Or at least really, really, really good. Do I have the will? Will I find the right teachers? And will I ever feel like I've reached some kind of peak or pinnacle?The answers to the first two questions are "Yes" and "I hope so." The answer to the last is "Probably not." I quoted the poet Robert Browning yesterday in my first year photography class: "A man's reach should exceed his grasp. Or what's a Heaven for?"But at least we strive. . . .
As far as photographic experiments go, I would say that this photo represents a successful failure. I spent time yesterday learning about the quality of bokeh produced by various lenses at various degrees of focus. In the midst of this, I had the idea of putting a full glass of water in front of our Christmas tree. I imagined that the round bokeh would show up in the water glass, given the lens effect that water can have. But I imagined wrong. Oh, well. . .What I like about this photo is that everything is soft and round - except the way the light shows up in the water glass. Here, it is sharp and linear. Too abstract? Boring? Maybe. I suspect I will revisit this idea to see if I can end up with something better.
I like the fact that lowly shepherds play a role in the Christmas story. So when Deb was shopping for Christmas decorations, I couldn't resist buying two figures from a Nativity collection. I would have bought more sheep but they were $1.98 apiece and I didn't want to invest too much into what I knew would result in one photo.Incidentally, I have assigned a bokeh photo to my students and so I offer one here. And since I've done a holiday bokeh thing two years in a row (2010) (2011), I guess I've established an annual tradition by offering one now. . . .
If I were an M&M, I'd be brown. I am an introvert who would rather blend in. And, in most observable ways, I am a conformist. And, when I am immersed in my photography, I disappear. . . .Check out the Shutterbug article featuring my blog.
I would call this an editorial photo. Instead of creating something that is artistic and packed with emotion, I wanted to take a photo that would help reinforce the technical aspect of how cameras and photo editing software see color, which is referred to as RGB, or red, green, blue.This was initially going to be a full color photo with all of the RGB M&Ms clustered in the front. But my colleague Dennis (click to visit his blog) suggested that I use selective coloring in Aperture instead. And voila! Here you have it.Check out the Shutterbug article featuring my blog.And did you know that you can subscribe to my blog by filling in the email form at the bottom of the page? Yes, you can!
There are a few things that are unusual about this post. First, it comes from the same file as a previous post. I rarely do that. Second, it is cropped unconventionally. What possessed me to eschew the 2:3 or 4:5 ratio? No one knows. Finally, it is heavily filtered. And I teach my students that we filter photo when the photo is substandard to begin with: we plaster over the flaws, so to speak. Thus, I discourage filtering. But I guess I don't always practice what a preach.
Here's another portrait from the archives (2007). This shot is of Gabe H. and the location is a short distance away from the abandoned farms that I have posted several times in this blog. What made this photo special to me was the subject: Gabe was relaxed, happy and, being a country girl, in her element.The timing was right, too. This is a beautiful field of ready-to-harvest wheat and the setting sun was strong enough to create excellent backlighting. To balance the sunlight, I put the camera in Aperture Priority mode and used a shoot-through umbrella and a Canon flash running off of a Canon IR transmitter. This lighting set-up is very user friendly and does a good job lighting Gabe, especially her eyes. Because South Dakota is a windy place, using an umbrella lighting set-up outside is risky. But on this particular evening it was calm and quiet.I could return to this field on the same date at the same time for a decade and not get the conditions I had on this evening in July. I certainly believe that good timing is the essence of good photography and this photo may be evidence of that.Canon 1D Mark II 1/160s f/4.0 ISO200 59mm
I don't normally endorse products, especially alcoholic beverages, though my title gives you a little insight into how I feel about the general subject being photographed. However, I haven't sampled this bottle of Cardhu Scotch since I wanted it full for the shot. (It's another kind of Scotch in the glass pretending to be Cardhu.) Why this brand? Well, it came in a short bottle and I figured that would help the composition. So, yes, I bought this Scotch just because it would fit the photo. I think that's certainly a form of sacrifice. . . .Click here to see a quick snapshot of the lighting setup. In summary, the main light is set up on the left with a small soft box and the background light has a 20 degree honeycomb grid to create a small glow behind the shot. The "studio" was our dining room, which has a perfect deep brown accent wall.Canon 5DIII 1/160s f/7.1 ISO100 95mm
My friend Jack H. asked me yesterday if teaching photography has helped make me a better photographer and he had barely finished the sentence when I said, "Yes." I then went on to say that in finding words to describe thought and physical processes that are the result of 10 years of fairly random reading/looking and endless practice based mainly on intuition has made me more aware of the complexities of finding, framing and capturing my subjects.Beyond that, I am much more sophisticated in how I use software. And this photo is an example. Frankly, I have posted a nearly identical shot of this place in this blog already. The difference is that I was "playing" with software that I didn't have a few years ago and with processes like sharpening, white balance, saturation and contrast that I didn't have as of understanding as I do now.Is this a better photo? Maybe not. In fact, the casual observer may not even see what is "right" about this photo. I would like to think that my second year photo students would because I see clear evidence that they "get it": that they see and understand the 10,000 minute differences between the simple and the sublime.Here's the previous version: