2010.023 Getting Reacquainted

Christmas brought me a couple of books on photography, one about shooting nature John Shaw’s Nature Photography Field Guide, the other exploring composition The Photographer’s Eye: Composition and Design for Better Digital Photos. I’ve been working my way through the composition one, gradually recalling the lessons learned through countless hours of shooting and developing as a youngster. It’s hard not to giggle in relief at the memory of the log books I kept in those days, painstakingly logging the details of virtually every image… film type and speed, aperture, shutter speed, lighting, not to mention date, time, and location. Now, it’s all there in the metadata, the image’s trusty sidekick file of minutia.

Well, some things have not changed. Those old exercises in exploring contrast, light, texture, balance, setting, intent, and other characteristics are just as valuable now as they ever were. Yes, ‘gestalt’ is back in my life. Being able to shoot hundreds of photos in a few minutes does not mean that I want to shoot without thinking. I really don’t want all those extra images to catalogue, and the whole idea is to know what I’m going after before I go out and find the shot. A lot of the photos in this 365 were taken for a specific reason, including today’s. This antique dress is one in our collection. I processed this shot a couple of other ways and posted them HERE. Several decisions went into this image… light of course, contrasts in texture, and in line. There’s more, but the point is, I learned much from this sleeve in the 20 minutes that we spent together!

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