I Met Someone

I got a call on Friday from a woman named Eve. And she needed a portrait for a book.

"Cool!", I thought as it was a chance for me to make some money (and as a student, money is very, very important).

So I packed up my lights, stands and umbrellas and headed to her house. What I found when I got there was not at all what I was expecting.

Eve was a tremendously friendly and funny woman who invited me into her life and showed me her house and some different locations we could shoot in and it all was great but I couldn't help but notice the obvious: she is a cancer survivor.

Now, she told me on the phone that the book was about cancer but I didn't know that she herself was a multiple cancer survivor.

"Yes", she said as she laughed and joked with me about this and that. I was blown away. I was blown away by this woman who was on a break between chemo treatments was not feeling sorry for herself or hiding away somewhere. She was writing a book, following action plans, getting on with her life.

This is a woman who already had a life full of horse competitions and traveling.

She wasn't going to let cancer get her down. She didn't say this to me. She didn't have to - it was obvious in how she carried herself.

I admire her. I admired her after being around her for 10 minutes. This was a woman who has met death and refuses to be shaken by it. As I took her portrait, she slowly started to really enjoy it. And I enjoyed it more, too. There is a certain look in her eye that I tried to capture. A certain courageous, dignified look. I think one photo got it. She actually liked the same photo.

The portrait isn't that amazing really. It's lit well and composed well but that isn't what this was about for me. Not at the end of this meeting. It was about trying to show her courage. I can only hope that I did her justice.

So, Eve, I know you thanked me for coming and taking your portrait, but I would like to thank you, too: thank you for letting me take your photo and meeting a remarkable person!

More Tits!

More photos of tits: a very cute, and extremely shy bird.

My First Night Time HDR PHoto!

I See the Light!

I have to admit that I know nothing about lighting.

Ok...maybe a little but not nearly enough to say I am confident.

So, I am going to spend the next couple hours doing experiments with my 2 speedlites. I have really nice ones, I may as well use them...right?

Starting off:

4:29: going to try to do some "low key" photography. I bought a 1 euro spatula to see if I can do it.

Off I go!

Result:

Not quite what I wanted but not a terrible start.

Better...

More to come.

What I and My New Camera Can Do:

P.S.

And at the request of my buddy Dan, here are the numbers:

Aperture: f/32

Shutter speed: 1.6 sec

ISO 100

Tamron 17-50mm at 17mm

Canon 40D

Processed using Aperture2

:-)

Ewwwwww....

I don't like this time of year.

Not because of the world coming back to life with Spring, no.

It's the pollen. I am allergic and have hay fever terribly here.

So, I was doubly disgusted when taking pictures of coffee in my homemade light box today.

See??

Nice, huh?? Well, the stock photography site won't take it. Because if you look closer, you will see this:

Pollen everywhere! Damn pollen! *shaking fist at the heavens*

What Have I Been Up To?

Hi all.

I have been a total slacker lately. I know. I should write more often.

But, I have been trying to get out and enjoy the warmer weather and taking photos.

Yeah, same 'ol, same 'ol.

But I had an idea the other day at the breakfast table: I am going to try to submit photos to stock photo sites.

Why not? Some of my photos are great and I can improve when I have "someone out there" judging whether the photos are good enough for purchase or not.

Plus, it's free and they (whoever they are) have to look at my photos! Hee hee...

So, I'll be blogging about that and maybe I can make some money. I figure if I can make even 50 bucks, I'll be happy and can say I am a semi-professional.

I like the sound of that.

Strawberry Attention

This is a bit of work just for one strawberry but I have to do it.

I made a suggestion to Lou to do a bit of a "competition" and choose a theme and shoot it.

So he decided "food" would be it. 

So I decided to take advantage of my time and single-ness (two things he doesn't have) to get started.*

So, using just normal household things (paper), I set up a small macro studio and started shooting a strawberry. I also tried onions and port wine.

But the strawberry is my favorite so far. I have another 3 weeks to finish the project but this is what I have so far:

*As of this writing, he made a mistake and forgot his camera before going to eat Asian food!

 

Getting Myself Sorted

Sounds quite Zen-like, huh? (Well, sort of—no pun intended)

Well, when you have more than 2 or 3 thousand photos* (I can't imagine professionals with 100 thousand!), it's time to trim the fat, so to speak, and sort the photos to designate the keepers from the non-keepers.

I went to this site and—I don't know if it's a he or she so I'll use "they"—they set up a bunch of articles and one is about sorting. Aperture has a 5 star system and, honestly, I find it hard to rate my own photos honestly since I have the emotional attachment to my photos. Factor that into trying to rate a photo with 5 (or 6 if you count deletion) different possibilities makes it almost crippling.

When you are staring at a keeper, is it really 5 stars? 4 stars? 4 1/2? (where's the half star key?)

I sat here and split hairs. It was so demotivating.

Well, this site had an article about sorting photos. It basically told you to unemotionally skim through and rate from 1 star to 3—forget the 4th and 5th. 1 star was "internal/don't show, 2 stars=good/show, and 3 stars=great/show.

The 'ol sort and process 2 or more stars!

I whipped through a project and yeah, it was maybe 400 photos, but I got it down to about 80 "keepers". Then I went to work on processing them. That saved a lot of time! Holy crap!

So...I am a bit better sorted and my perspective on sharing photos has been changed a bit. I mean: who wants to see my duds? I am going to try this workflow from now on and I hope that it gives me more time to do other things like, oh, taking photos??

*I have about 4400 photos but most of them are not good enough to share. I'd say maybe 1% are truly good exposures.

HDR

Here's my disclaimer: I am not an expert at HRD photography.

HDR or High Dynamic Range is a niche in photography where you try to have a perfect exposure by blending 3 or more pictures taken at different exposure settings to create one picture perfectly exposed.

(did that make sense?)

Basically, with manual photography, the camera reads the amount of light going onto the camera and adjusts the shutter speed for the amount of light going into the sensor so that you can have a "theoretically" perfect exposure. The problem is that most photos include sky and a foreground that do not have the same light levels. So what you get is either a completely blown sky (white) or completely dark foreground (black) and a nice blue sky.

Well, HDR works in blending 3 photos into one so you bracket the exposures: one for sky, one for "mid-ground" and one for foreground.

It's an interesting technique and one that I want to try to pursue a bit just because the effect can me really dramatic.

The following pictures are not the best ever, but it gives you a feeling of what HDR does.

This:

is this:

And this:

is this:

It's a neat effect and it will offer an image that is a bit unnatural because our eyes are not used to seeing something so balanced.

But hell...it's a new thing to try and it was fun trying!

The Anger Step...

I am experiencing what they call a bittersweet feeling. It's after the excitement and before the acceptance.

I know I am obsessed with Aperture now, and I know that in a few weeks the novelty will fade away and I'll be left with a program that does, in a way, what it should do:

Show me how much I really need to improve with my technique.

Don't get me wrong, I know that I am better than I was 2 years ago, but I have so much further to go.

And I'll keep pounding away on Aperture because it's an investment I've made in my photography and it's forcing me to rethink exposure in every step from turning the camera on to post processing.

And it's bittersweet because of this. I love it. And I am ashamed of my photos.

And I hope that acceptance comes soon.

A Mild Rant

I had a student, in a way, ridicule me for having a DSLR camera.

He visited my photo website and told me he thought most of my photos were photoshopped. 

"Some", I said

It wasn't ridicule per se. But he very smugly, in a way only Germans can, showed me a picture he took with his SLR camera.

"No Photoshop" he said.

"I like pictures that are more natural and 'hand made'." he said.

Stuff it up your kraut ass, I thought.

Because he wasn't really saying his preference, he was telling me, and the thousands of other digital SLR owners out there, that what we do is less creative and less natural and less valid than he and his little bag of filters and "was that the correct exposure?" film camera simply because we use a computer instead of a photo lab to process our images.

Seriously, can we all please get off the dogmatic SLR vs DSLR argument? The pictures look AS DAMN GOOD with either now, and there are some things you can do with a DSLR that you cannot with an SLR and visa versa.

I've seem over-processed images from both platforms. Underexposed film that was push-processed 2 stops to purposely give it a grainy look, or digitally enhanced images to make colors saturated.

They are creative tools and each has a use.

And I don't tell someone with an SLR camera that they are stuck in the stone age (photographically speaking) and laugh when they show me an absolutely plain "nothing special" picture. 

So stop implying that digital photography is somehow less relevant because you are too fucking cheap to spring for a DSLR body because you bought your SLR just before they went out of style.

Stop telling me that photoshopping is "not real photography" because you cannot afford the program, or you are too impatient to learn it.

I'm not sure if that is why he was so anti-digital, but I know often people are so against something when they either fear it or don't understand it. Digital photography is no less relevant and no less valid than any other kind of photography. And the way he spoke to me about the pictures I take was not called for. I am not the best in the world, nor am I the worst. He was curious about the pictures I took, so I let him see.

Nice Picture to Share

OK, 3 in one day...but this was a picture I just processed and found I really liked it more that I thought I would have:

Lou and Sophie

Lou is my mentor as far as photography is concerned.

He got me into the DSLR thing, and he got me into the whole world of composition, post-processing and all that comes with digital photography.

So, it's no surprise that when we got together, we did some studio shooting. He's got a studio in his basement, so, using each other as "models", we did some shooting.

It was a lot of fun!

Towards the end, his daughter came down and he picked her up and posed for the camera for about 10 seconds.

This is what I got.

I love it.

Great Tits!

I know what you are probably thinking.

But it's NOT true.

There is this bird, the great tit, and it is not easy to catch with a camera. They are surprisingly shy: I can't get more than 40 feet away from them and they scatter.

And it is my mission to take as many pictures of tits as I can.

Photographing great tits.

Oh sweet...I can't make this up any better!

Great tits are...well, great!

I love great tits!

Great tits are wonderful in the morning!

And in wikipedia.com, it says this:

"...most Great Tits do not migrate"

Finally! Tits that don't migrate!

LOL!!! Come on!!! You know it's funny!

When you haven't got anything to say...

No news is good news?

Seriously, I have no idea why I have avoided blogging about anything. No issues; no comedy.

Nothing.

Why?

I dunno. I spent last Sunday evening taking pictures of candles to try out my new flash setup and when you get done and all the busy-ness of it wears off...you still have pictures of candles.

And not good pictures, either.

Mediocre at best. And I'm ok with that really, but what kind of life is this for photographers?? A few will become famous for that landscape photo or that funny one with the politician flipping off someone, but most wind up in their homes doing still life or photos of cans of cat food or something else as stimulating.

There are the rich and famous anythings, and then there are the working somethings.

Rock star. Studio musician.

Famous fiction author. Poet.

Movie star. Theater actor.

Sure the line can be blurred from time to time. But you have to, sometimes, swallow your dream along with your pride, shut up and fall back into line.

And get back to photographing candles.

My Fate

I have this meeting tomorrow in Berlin.

I decided, since it was a holiday here in Germany the next day, to visit a friend and come back the day after.

And I want to try to get a good picture in Berlin. Just one picture that takes my breath away.

But it's not easy.

And it's supposed to rain.

I hate it. Why can't the weather be nicer for me??

Clarity

It sounds like a wonderful Zen topic.

Something peaceful and something holy.

But I am not talking about your soul.

I am talking about some photos and lightroom.

The new update includes this little slider called "clarity" and I didn't really pay it much attention till the other day when I was farting around with my Italy photos.

The difference was amazing!

The picture went from this:





Nice, huh?



to this:*



Unbelievable.


*I also boosted saturation, but this clarity thing is amazing!

Photographing Lightning

In theory it's really easy. You set the shutter to be open for 10+ seconds, set the timer and go!

Well, it's harder than it seems.

It went kind of like this normally:

10...9...8....7...6...5...FLASH...4...3...2...1...click.

Or:

10...9...8...7...6...5...4...3..2...1...click....close...FLASH.

So, in 30 minutes of trying to get a lightning bolt, this is all I could get:




I'll try again some other time.

What Do I Want? (Alternate title: A (Mostly) Shameless Plug)

That is the question I have been getting, and since it's my birthday, I can understand people asking.

But I have no idea what I need or want that is less than 1000 dollars.

(Shameless plug coming!)

So, if you want, go to rbrown-photo.com and look through my pictures. If any of them speak to you, buy one.

That would be cool because it'd give you something as well, and it'd boost my ego a bit—even for a day.

And even if none of them look good to you or you don't want to buy any, the site will look good because more people are visiting it than just me constantly checking to see if others are looking.

And that would make my day.

I'm out.