Only Exhibit Your Best Work
Published January 29th, 2008 in Obsessions Tags: Arizona, Personal, Photos, Squalor, Travel.
A month into 2008, I’ve finally settled on my so-called “new years resolution” — to take better pictures. Time to set aside the automatic modes of my point-and-shoot. Instead of composing quirky sentences to delight the Bostworld visitor, I find myself trying to memorize the various formulas of f-stop, focal length, ISO and depth of field. I’ll need to brush up on my math as well. (What’s the reciprocal of x times 1.6?) The whole thing reminds me of balancing the chemicals in my swimming pool. If the black algae spots in my plaster are any indication, 2008 should be a banner year.
Anyway, I’ve finally finished my yearly task of archiving last year’s photos, and already my nascent education is affecting what I consider worth keeping. Suddenly, a whole new catalog of errors jumps out at me: blown out skies, camera shake, clueless use of flash, noise, chromatic aberration, and of course, mediocre composition.
But they say that a healthy part of any education is putting your work out there for better or worse, so here’s the short list from 2007. It’s no surprise that my favorites of the bunch are actually the ones taken by my wife. But this year, I hope to surpass her in at least the math department, which she hates.
I thought everything looked great. You have (or your wife has) a good eye for composition! The General Dynamic building just doesn’t have the inherant beauty of the beach in Florida or Chicago skyline, but it does have it’s own industrial charm. Obvious that someone had been to the Sears Tower! Keep up the lens work….
Well, these are the good ones. But even still, look at the pics of the General Dynamics building. For one thing, I could have used a wider lens, but more important, it was so bright out (middle of a summer day in Phoenix) that the camera’s automatic settings caused the photo to come out underexposed. Wrong lens, wrong exposure, and above all, wrong time of day!
The General Dynamics and the Santa Rita Ballroom would also make nice black and white matte shots. I find black and white more forgiving in funky lighting situations. At least if it comes out looking like crap you can claim it’s an “art” shot. Just curious, do you experiment with film or are you entirely digital? If you can lay your hands on a cheap decent medium format film camera, landscapes and urbanscapes can come out looking amazing. Of course you really have to know your stuff, especially if you end up with a twin lens reflex camera- two lens framing two slightly different images!
I’m strictly digital.
I’m not so much interested in black and white photography as much as I in this sort of thing:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/charlesbodi/123158595/in/set-1777343/