Thursday, June 18, 2009

It's about Redundancy, noob...

It's a term you don't think much about until it walks up and smacks you in the back of the head.
Take this morning, when I woke up at 4 and went out to check out the sunrise from a different perspective. Over the years, I've gotten some beautiful sunrises from the front yard on Scollard Road. Today I walked down to the West Grand Ave side of the Pier to photograph a different view of Saco Bay. As I composed my first shot, the camera shut down on me. I tried to turn it back on, but the batteries were dead. I swapped them out, not realizing that the rechargeables I had in the bag were also dead. Thus, I packed up my gear and began the walk back to my home to a growing palette of yellows, oranges pinks and blues. As I continued my walk, I watched as an entire flock of Canadian Geese, in v-formation, flew before my eyes ( apicture I will watch patiently for in the coming weeks). The cloud cover this morning was made of appoximately 10 horizontally banded streams in what can best be described as an opened clutch fan held before you at about a ten degree angle, with the convergance point to the right of the skyline. It was a beautiful sunrise.
From it, I learned to have a backup of a backup with regards to my batteries.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

The Green Box and Presets: Unleash your art...

Many people live their lives in a number of boxes...the work box, the church box, the family box. Many snapshootists, shutterbugs and photographers spend their lives in the Green box, the face box (portrait mode), the sports box (sports mode) and so on and so forth.
My challenge to you, as a fellow artist, is to unleash your art by not allowing your camera to tell you how to take a picture and what settings to use.
I offer a brief illustration; The following pictures were taken the other morning. On this shot, I decided the white balance, iso setting, shutter speed and aperture opening. Afterwards, I tweaked various elements in photoshop, but not by much. I did a simple levels adjustment to darken the entire image slightly, followed by +20 bumps in saturation levels in the reds, yellows, blues and cyans, to really work the definition of the shot.



This shot was taken using the camera's landscape mode with no post processing.

This is the same image, post processed in a similar manner to the first.

While I like the look of what the camera presented for settings, I just feel the composition I got by switching to manual mode and working all the elements worked with more dramatic lighting elements. Again, I encourage you to unleash your art and learn how to work the entire dial on your camera, not just the presets. They give you a safe picture, but not always the one you wanted.