Learning from the past

I spent time this morning looking for a particular image and it gave me an opportunity to review images from the past.  In 2006 I decided I wanted to really learn to be a better photographer. I had always been happy as an amateur but I found myself out of a job and thought "what would I like to be when I grow up?" The answer immediately came to me - a photographer because I enjoyed taking pictures so much. A mentor recommended that I shoot for at least an hour a day, every day, and select one image as my favorite and throw all of the others away.  While I was never able to toss the entire shoot, I did learn from the "select the best" method and I still do that today.  Looking back on the ones I should have deleted, I see that I have learned a lot in the past few years.


This should be titled "Things Not to Do."  I was trying to capture a friend's Ichibana creations and thought natural light would help - but look at that BUSY background. It totally takes away from the flower arrangement. This one is a little bit better...



But the background is still competing with the subject.  Today I would bring some solid backgrounds along and  provide some diffuse lighting so that the flower arrangement stands alone.

I just read some good landscape tips by Matt Kloskowski on Scott Kelby's blog (http://www.scottkelby.com/blog) today. Simply put, they are: 1.  Get up earlier than you think (an hour before sunrise) 2. Get ready the night before - this is important - make sure you've got everything you will need and all batteries have been recharged. 3. Shoot and move - don't just stand in one spot. Look around for other sweet light opportunities. 4. Try photographing people and 5. It's all about luck - sometimes it's just being at the right place at the right time. 

Keep shooting!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day Trip with my Daughter

Image
Between Covid 19 and moving from Texas to Maryland, I really haven't seen much of the world this year and that is hard on this travel-loving girl.  Here I am living an hour away from Baltimore and Washington, DC and we are stuck in an unending state of quarantine.  I needed to break out so I asked my daughter if she'd take an early morning trip to Annapolis with me. "How early?" she wanted to know. She is not normally a photographer and, with two young children, unaccustomed to our "pre-dawn" starts.  "As early as you can," I tried and she and the kids showed up slightly after 7 am.  Popsie stayed with the kids who grumbled that they just wanted to go back to sleep, but Nova was game for a new adventure and we happily drove 35 minute southeast to the beautiful city of Annapolis.  Court house showed some signs of life. Mask covered guards stood at the door. Maryland's capital city, located on the Chesapeake Bay is a lovely, his...
Read more

Visiting Switzerland - Zurich

Image
My husband and I recently had the opportunity to join a group of photographers, led by Joe Brady and his wife, Diane Bollen , to visit five different cities in Switzerland - Zurich, St. Moritz, Zermatt, Grindelwald and Lucern.  Despite never hearing of these places before now, we had such an enjoyable trip that I want to share this experience with you. I plan to write 5 blogs, one for each city, to show some of the beauty we encountered and remember this wonderful trip. We arrived in Zurich very early on a Saturday morning in June. We chose to go straight to sleep in an airport hotel, to ward off jet lag. When we woke in early afternoon, we were right near the trains which were in a giant "mall" building with all kinds of shops. We asked which stop we needed to get off, and proceeded to navigate the train system to see some of Zurich's sites.  The streets were festive with vendors and people shopping.  After walking around and trying to figure out where we needed to meet...
Read more

Doing my best to capture Austin's weirdness

Image
Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home. I discovered an awesome PhotoWalk yesterday thanks to Photographers Adventure Group and Trover . The concept of Trover was brand new to me - it's a phone app that helps you share life's hidden gems, through photography, with others, and it is evidently very popular in other places in the world and is becoming a hit around here. So, the walk encouraged me to use my iphone as a camera way more than I would normally use it. That didn't stop me from taking close to 300 images with my camera - but it did open my eyes to the social networking capabilities of iphone photography and one of my fellow walkers also showed me some outrageous editing capabilites it has as well. We were instructed to upload our photos as we took them, giving a bit of a description and posting them to the Trover site. This was a technological challenge for me, but I love a good challenge and, at the end of the day I actually won a pretty cool p...
Read more