…a spider. Taken at Chestnut Ridge the other day. More from that hiking session here. (Life got better when I discovered (a) that macro photography exists, and (b) that my camera has a special macro-focus mode.) Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….
I took this quick photo of Carla and Rosa, enjoying the sun by the patio door, last week. It was just a quick “Hey, that’s cute, let me grab my phone” kind of thing; I didn’t put any effort into composing the shot in any way. I just liked the way it looked. Looking at the result, with the shadows cast across their bodies by the upright parts of the sliding door, reminded me of a conversation I had with a photographer friend years ago, and a lesson he tried teaching me that I didn’t understand at the time. HisDown the rabbit hole….
My Sunday Photography Walk was at Buffalo’s Outer Harbor again, with a side-trek into the Tifft Nature Preserve. Photos here…but these are my favorites from the day’s work: This next is my favorite photo from yesterday. This makes me think that maybe my time practicing photography is not actually time wasted! Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….
Heavens, I think I may be actually getting better at this photography thing! I know it’s only been a short while with this camera, but I’m getting to the point already where carrying this camera around feels natural. Looking around feels natural. Thinking in terms of, “How can I capture this? What’s a neat way of looking at it?” is becoming natural. Or…at least more natural than it used to feel. This past Sunday morning I ventured up to Chestnut Ridge for the second time in three weeks. (Titling this post “The Ridge, again” might be a bit confusing, since IDown the rabbit hole….
And who, you may ask, is this? Well, may I present the Formerly-Named “Hulk”. (We’re working on his new name. Stay tuned.) It’s funny how when you lose a dog, people wait a respectable amount of time before asking, “Hey, do you think you might get another?” We held off a bit because we didn’t want memories of Cane to color our expectations of and relationship with any new dog; plus, we figured that Carla had her own process to get through. Cane’s passing was a deeply difficult time, and we didn’t want to fall into any trap of failingDown the rabbit hole….
One thing I’ve noticed as I approach photography seriously is that it’s not just about learning new stuff, like all those technical aspects of photography. It’s not all learning about ISO and shutter speeds and aperture values and how to compose photos and more. It’s also about unlearning old habits that were ingrained from years of my cell phones being my primary photo-taking devices. In the case of this particular photo, the lesson is that I can’t just take the “Whip out my phone and take the picture” approach to using an actual camera. I need to slow down, compose,Down the rabbit hole….
The Erie County Fair opens today! Huzzah! This, from 2011, is still my favorite of all the photos I’ve taken there over the years. Maybe I was a budding street photographer all those years ago, and I didn’t realize it! Full size version here. We’re going to the Fair on Friday. I’ll have the new camera with me. We shall see what I manage to do, photographically! Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….
I took these on a whim the other night: I opened up one of my Complete William Shakespeare collections to Henry’s Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V, laid my glasses on the book, and took a few photos. It was an experiment in composition. I’m not sure which I like better, to be honest! What say you? I have a slight feeling, as I write this, that the second photo is better…but I’m damned if I can say exactly why…. Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….
Some shots from my photography session down at the Buffalo Outer Harbor this past Sunday: More photos from that day, with full-size versions, in this Flickr album. By the way, I think I am now going to start using HUE as an acronym: Happy Unplanned Element. I think Bob Ross (“There are no mistakes, just happy accidents”) would approve. “Accident” still sounds overly negative in my ears, though. So, a HUE is an element in my photo that I didn’t plan on capturing, either because I didn’t know it was there or because I couldn’t avoid capturing it. Always look for your HUEs,Down the rabbit hole….
Continuing the adventures of photography! Now that I have a camera where I can actually change pro-style photographic settings, I’m learning a lot about…stuff I never knew before. One of the biggest things I’m learning about is aperture control, and along with that, depth-of-field. Put simply, depth-of-field refers to how much of the camera’s image is in focus at any particular time. Low depth-of-field means that only objects in a pretty narrow area will be in focus, while those in the background will be blurry; high depth-of-field means pretty much the opposite. Like any photographic effect, what degree of depth-of-fieldDown the rabbit hole….