Yearly Maintenance

At this time of the year my photographic project is to go over all the images I took in this past year and make sure all is in order. I check and add tags, revisit my rating system, make sure all are backed up, and so on. This year I decided to, also, sub divide my huge catalogue into a bunch of sub catalogs while still retaining my huge catalogue. This is no mean feat as I have 40 years of photographs.

In the process I revisited some images I had forgotten about. 

This particular image is about 10 years old. My original image, intentionally, is dark to reflect  night descending. The software, I used back then, took my darkness away and normalized the image to daylight. My present software was able to make the image far more palatable. Often revisiting and image can be rewarding.

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Specializing

Evening Grosbeaks by Robert Bateman

We love birds and we do feed them through the winter. Today a group of Evening Grosbeaks flew among our feeders then headed off to dine on some wild rose bushes. Why would they want to eat from our feeders when they had fresh rose hips to pick from? They will eat their fill and move on.

While we won’t see them again it was a joy to see them today.

Icebreaker

People who want do street photography are often a bit apprehensive of the reactions they are going to receive. For my part the vast majority of reactions are positive and the rest very neutral.

I came upon some linesmen replacing a a worn out pole. Walked up to this fellow and snapped his image with a standard lens. He was fully aware of me and once I took the imaged turned and said, “Wow someone that still shoots film.” I explained that it looked, felt and smelled like film but was indeed digital.

We then had a wonderful conversation about cameras and the joy of photography. I suspect he wanted to talk for hours and hours but his job called him back. I walked away with a warm feeling.

Photographers are kindred spirits and the camera is often an icebreaker.

Simplicity

While the artistry of photography is a life long challenge the technical aspect of is, or should be, very simple to learn.

Unfortunately with the advent of digital photography this is not the case as the cameras today add a layer of obfuscation to the game.

Stepping back to the days of film, before you went out to shoot you had to have already decided on the film you wanted to use, and therefore the direction of the shoot was to take. When you got in the fielding, once you composed and focused, you had the few choices of setting aperture and shutter. With my first camera, if my math is correct, I had 920 possible combination and most were obviously wrong.

Now in the age of digital you can set out with nothing preplanned. Like film you do have to compose but unlike film focusing is optional. Then you have a choice to let the camera handle everything, which is not teaching much, or custom everything. With my present camera, which is not the most advance, the number of combinations and permutations of choices is well over 3 trillion and most are not obviously wrong. I think it is very difficult to impossible for a person starting in this art form to get their head around all the choices.

Even in these digital day if a person is new to photograph and wants to learn the craft quickly they would best be served by simplifying.

Street Making Photography

I know, I know this is a very bad joke.

It seems Street Photography is now a very popular form of photography. In fact they even sell cameras specially for this type of the art form.

When I was younger we called it Candid Photography. Seems the more things change the more they stay the same.