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All in Photography
As we have for the past several years, Melody and I went to the annual Seattle Times 2015 Pictures of the Year presentation, which continues to be a fun event.
When taking pictures, it's all too easy to focus just on the central subject and not see what's going on in the rest of the frame. I've gotten to the point where I can see a lot of things when I'm processing photos, but what that means is I see the things that I didn't notice when I was actually taking the photo.
When I take photos, a lot of thought goes into technical and artistic details, but I put at least as much work into selecting which shots to publish. Only after that's done do I edit the images themselves. That triage process will usually result in the same set of photos no matter when I do it, but my particular style at the time has a large impact over whether a particular shot gets thumbs up or thumbs down.
For the last few years we've gone to the annual Seattle Times Pictures of the Year presentation at the downtown Seattle Public Library building. Each year the work of a couple staff photographers are highlighted, and they get to tell the story behind some of their favorite shots. This year's event was a couple nights ago, so of course we went.
While we were in the Los Angeles area last month, Kellen, Noël, Melody, and I did a lot of playing tourist, which involves a lot of taking pictures. Kellen took a few of me, and I thought I'd take the opportunity to show his photos, what I was photographing, and say why I eventually didn't decide to use the shots
Melody and I were more intrigued with Tim's Vermeer than we expected to be. It was amazing the detail Tim Jenison went through to just try to recreate "The Music Lesson" as accurately as possible, even though he had never painted before. In the same vein, photographer Drew Gardner has been recreating paintings using descendants of the subjects.
I've been thinking about my lens lineup, trying to decide where to go next with my travel kit. To give me a feel for one possibility, I rented a couple lenses each with a constant f/2.8 aperture.
We enjoyed last year's Seattle Times Pictures of the Year presentation so much, we made sure to go again this year. Not only are we glad we did, but we remembered to get there early enough to grab good seats. In fact, we sat very close to where we did last year. The highlighted photographers this year were Steve Ringman and Erika Schultz.
The Chicago Sun-Times made news by laying off all 28 of their full-time staff photographers. It's not surprising that a lot of people have begun to rally behind the photographers, especially since the paper is counting on the remaining journalists to become mobile photographers.
Every year the Seattle Times gathers what they think were the best pictures they published. The 2012 Pictures of the Year collection covers a wide array of topics, but was just a launching point for the discussion held at the Downtown Branch of the Seattle Library where the Times talked about a couple of the year's big stories.
A couple years ago I rented an ultra-wide lens and had a great time seeing Seattle Center in a new way. I saw a used one go up for sale at a very good price, so I bit the bullet and got it, just in time for us to go to Vancouver. I ended using the lens well over 95% of the time.
While I've been thinking about it for a while, a couple weeks ago I decided it was time to get an external flash for my camera. Thus began a lot more research and a little bit of luck also came into play.
Looking at the lenses I have right now, there's what seems to be a plethora around 50mm. In fact, all the lenses I'm using right now either are 50mm or are close to it. While it would be nice to say there's a master plan behind that, it's really part by design, part coincidence.
A few months ago I rented a Panasonic 7-14mm ultra-wide zoom, and had a great time using it. Since I'm using a micro 4/3 camera, it's the equivalent of 14-28mm on a full-frame camera. Unfortunately, it's very pricey and holds its value well, so the number of times I would use it doesn't justify the expense. However, I noticed that there are some very inexpensive ultra-wide adapters, and thought it would be worth the $10 to experiment with one.
I took the opportunity to rent the Panasonic 7-14mm f/4 ultra-wide zoom the other day. I thought it would be interesting to experiment with such a lens, but didn't anticipate having as much fun as I did.
One of the reasons I ended up with my Panasonic G2 is the ability to buy adapters for almost any other lens available. Because the camera has no mirror, there's plenty of room for the adapter to place the adapted lens at the correct distance from the sensor (the Nikon F adapter is a hair over an inch long). I don't have a lot of legacy glass, but have had a good time trying them out. It's also a relatively inexpensive way to play with different kinds of lenses, narrowing down where to invest in the future.
While it can be argued that the most important aspect of photography is everything that happens up to the point the shutter button is released, in many ways equipment influences the photographer's creativity. While my equipment has changed over the years, at first I thought it was the vision and thought which happened before the shot which had the most impact. To be fair, I still feel that way, but I didn't realize (or more correctly, didn't really internalize) how much equipment enables that creativity.
For years I had a pretty consistent workflow from taking pictures to posting. However, within the course of a month I've changed practically every step. Why would I do such a thing? I can tell you it wasn't change for change sake, since I'm usually pretty set in my ways, both in photography and computing.
Getting a new camera used to be a momentous occasion for me, but with point-and-shoot digital cameras being pretty commonplace (even ones on the higher end), it's not unusual to replace cameras somewhat frequently. That made me think back on my camera history, and how I went from 35mm SLRs to compact, but am now back to interchangeable lenses.
It seems odd that Project 365 is over, but it was enjoyable. Below I have some of my favorites for the past few months, as well as a few of Kellen's recent pictures which I really enjoyed. After the photos are my thoughts of the project.
