Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Thor Heyerdahl Slept Here


Or, why I try to carry a damn camera all the time.

Found this right around the corner from where I live. Which, even through I am not well to do, is a fairly well to do neighborhood in Manhattan. Took a little correction to remove the barrel distortion and get the perspective right, and I still fine myself wondering why a small stone head a a la Easter Island is sitting in front of an Upper East Side Townhouse.

Read "Aku Aku" when I was a kid and those things freaked me out to no end.



Sunday, November 28, 2010

Can't Be Accused of Compulsive Blogging....

I simply done do it enough...

Here goes:

A belated and endlessly edited entry

I realized that there is one thing that irritates me about my Canon - the lens shades are somewhat hard to get on and off... however a friend with another brand of camera has lens shades that fall off and tend to start rolling away when he's standing at the curb and the light has just changed.

One other small thing - the image stabilizer tends to give me the fantods as the image swims around the viewfinder for a moment.

After having shot for stock for a looong time, I still find myself fighting the urge to shoot for stock - loosely defined as a photography that Illustrates a Point and Tells a Story. Carrying a camera all the time (well, mostly) and shooting stuff that catches my eye without regard to it's ultimate use is freeing as all hell. And since film is not an issue (my rough calculations show that since May, I would have had to spend approximately $10,000.00 on film, processing and scanning to equal the amount I've shot digitally, and the faint, but ever present, nagging thoughts about the cost of said film, are gone. This frees one to make great pictures, regardless of whether or not I think I can sell them....

However, selling them is nice.

Anyhoo. Someone once said that they loved writing, but hated the paperwork. I love writing (blogging) but I despise typing. Having taken typing in school in the dark ages of manual machines my left hand sort of knows it's way around that part of the keyboard. I fumble and stagger around and rely on spell check, and am just too damn lazy to sit around and practice typing.



Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Shut Up and Shoot


There is all sorts of annoying yammering and arm waving over the technical aspects of photography - get any group of painters together and they aren't going to sit around and talk about brushes for hours on end.

Generally speaking if I bracket, and am mindful when I hit extremes - like the one on the left - stuff works out pretty well. I don't have to spend hours in a darkroom playing with paper brands, grades, and developers order to get a print that has a solid range of tones - so why spend hours and hours calibrating and metering a scene to death...