It’s official, I’m obsessed with my photo-a-day Project 365 now. In addition to carrying a camera with me everywhere, and I mean *everywhere* (you get weird looks coming out of a public washroom with a camera around your neck, that’s all I’m sayin’) and looking at everything in the world around me as if I were holding a camera up to my face, I’ve started dreaming about taking pictures. Yep, obsessed.
You wouldn’t know it to look at my pictures from the last week or so, though. I’ve hit one of those creative dry patches, pretty much summed up in day 43’s entry:
I’ve been doing a lot of reading about photography, and spending a lot of time trying to deconstruct other people’s photographs to see what makes them work. In a way, it’s good because I’m getting ideas and learning how to go beyond simply capturing moments, but bad because I’m realizing that I’m not nearly as clever as I thought I was. As if that weren’t bad enough, I’ve also been endlessly frustrated this week that what I “see” and what the camera creates are not really the same — sometimes not even close. In other words, the theme this week is “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing”!
One of the 365 themes suggested this week was toys, and I actually had a little while to set up this shot and play with it a bit. I liked it the best of all the ones I took, and it seemed to have a lot going for it: nice depth of field and colours, leading lines, more or less follows the ‘rule of thirds’, and a little bit clever because I *almost* managed to get a self-portrait in the shiny bit of the magnet.
But the angle is just a little bit off, and now that’s all I can see. Plus, the self-portrait really isn’t clear enough. And although I played with a couple of different exposures on this one, it’s still not quite right — but I’m not sure why. I can’t figure out how to take my pictures from “okay” to “wow”, yanno?
This was also the week that I learned to love my discards. I was not originally happy with either of these pictures, but they’ve grown on me:
(as I captioned it on Flickr, nothing says “Happy Birthday Granny” like an armload of laughing grandsons!)
Here’s the rest of them from the past week or so:
I read somewhere that your first 10,000 pictures are your worst. Somehow, that makes me feel better! If the internal meter on my Nikon is to be believed, I’m more than half way there!
Here a word from the wise…not that I am that wise, just shoot and look change setting and shoot some more. You do not need to delete till they are on the computer. YOU Never know what is really on there.
And from what I see you’re doing GREAT!
I never get bored from taking pictures…which reminds me to pack mine on our trip to the National Art Gallery.
Hugs
From a fellow obsessive, I’d like to offer these words (which, now that I’m thinking of putting them down, seem appropriate for someone who hasn’t blogged since December) – not everything’s a photo. When I started blogging, every little thing was fodder. When I started Facebook, all day long, the status updates came fast and furious. Everything’s a status update! It’s why I don’t Twitter – soon I’d be thinking, “Is this a tweet?”. It’s hard to stop. Digital cameras have made it so that the world is now full of beautiful, shoe-gazing photos of lovely things in sweet vignettes – or beautiful buildings, close ups of plants or birds on another f^&*#ing wire. They’re pleasant for a moment, but ultimately unsatisfying and tell no stories. I’m guilty of them myself. And I’m sick to death of them. A photo a day is a great idea, of course, and I love the ambition and value them most how they capture the minute changes in people or tell stories. The new term for collecing vintage snapshots is “vernacular photography” — they capture an ordinary language, or dialect which has now become more valuable with time, and because back then, they were more sparing in use. You take lovely photos. But don’t create work for yourself when the inspiration isn’t striking, and if a photo isn’t there, it isn’t there.
As for the angle issue, a steeper one with the direction of the train’s eyes would have created some great tension — is it swerving off the tracks? For a straight-on shot, there’s a feature in Iphoto that lets you straighten things, but you can also use a stand or tripod. But that tells no stories, it’s a nice picture all the same, but not gripping or memorable. Which has value, in honing skills – but I like it best when you tell stories with your pictures.
Marla, as always, you give me WAY too much to think about. Your comments about photos that tell stories are spot on, and one of the things most driving me crazy. The “so what?” factor. Why the picture of the train, the keyboard, the mardi gras bead. Why?
But on the other point you make, “don’t create work for yourself when the inspiration isn’t striking” – that part I disagree with. By pushing myself and forcing myself to take pictures, I think I’m learning both discipline and new ways to see things, yanno? I’m not just relying on the easy situations where the photo presents, but actually trying to find that story to be told. And cluttering the internet with a lot of useless photo rejects. It’s a lot like blogging, actually, where the process is as important as the finished product. Not all posts are gems, but the body as a whole is more than the sum of the parts. (Didn’t your motherlode presentation touch on that?)
Must percolate more on this…
The thing that stuck with me from that article I linked to the other day, was the part about pros shooting even when they don’t feel like it, and that being a path to better pictures. I think there’s some truth to that.
When I started making pictures, I kept holding myself back. If I’d already taken one picture of a parking meter or ladder on its side, I wouldn’t let myself take another one. Who needs a catalogue of these things? But now I just let myself go and shoot however many parking meters or whatever. I do try to be smarter while I shoot, and try new perspectives or approaches.
You mentioned exposure. You might want to think about shooting RAW and using Lightroom for post-processing, if you don’t already. You get way bigger files but you have a lot more flexibility on exposure, and you can make pretty dramatic local adjustments to exposure without breaking the pixels, like with jpegs. Someone once told me with RAW files you can change exposure (and white balance) by up to 4 stops, compared with 1/2 a stop with jpegs.