Month: September 2005

the more I read about lenses, the more I realize I don’t know.

I know this, though. The lens I have works. Harumph.

So I went and reshot my construction site yesterday, shooting in RAW format instead of JPEG. If you are serious about your photography and intend to print your photos in even a semi-professional way, I have an article that will really convince you why you should be shooting RAW.

Anyway, the only down side to shooting RAW is that I get significantly fewer pictures on the card, about 100 or so, which is just under three rolls of film. That sucks because when I used to go out shooting, I took anywhere from 4 to 7 rolls of film with me. I need another damn card just to keep up. The other down side is now I can’t copy my card to a CD-R 1:1. I have more than a CD-R worth of pictures. So now I’m looking at portable digital image storage devices to see what would be most cost effective.

Heather makes a good point (over ICQ while I type this), I may be getting ahead of myself. If this semester doesn’t go as well as I am optimally hoping that it will, I may not need anything like this anyway, I may go back to just shooting for fun, in which case I won’t need so much storage. I guess I’m just being optomistic, but I think that’s how I should be thinking. I should be saying I ca do this – and that I will be taking a lot more pictures a lot more often. I guess I’ll keep my eye on sales, ebay, amazon, etc for the cheapest alternative I can find. It doesn’t have to be great, it just has to work. I don’t need extra features or anything, I just need it to grab my photos and take them off my card.

So I went out for my first day shooting, today. Not sure if I feel successful or not. I took a lot of photos (150) and I like a bunch of them, but I don’t know if they’re going anywhere. I was looking for a particular location, and when I drove past it, I realized it wasn’t going to be as accessible as I had imagined. I may have to have someone drop me off there and come back and pick me up… either that or I’m just going to have to commit to a longer walk than I had planned on. I also wore shorts because I expected to have to wade in a bit of water, but at the same time, I have to walk through a lot of brush to get to the location. I may just have to look for something similar, in a more acessible spot.

I’m still not sure where I’m going… but I think I can get there with enough pictures. The problem is, if there’s something technical wrong with these, I’d have to go back and re-shoot, and it would seem like the moment would have passed. I dunno. It was about half way through the shoot I realized my camera was on JPEG high, and I think I’d rather have it on RAW high instead. Less compression, which would mean I could blow them up a lot larger. I want to see how big I can get these things. I’m going to print out some contact sheets tonight and see if I feel like they’re worth anything. I think aesthetically, they’re okay… but I don’t know if I feel like they’re exactly what I’m trying to say, but then again, I don’t really know what it is that I really am saying.

The thing is, I want to be ecologically minded and environmentally concious in my work, I want to say something about the fact that we’re eating up our planet in leaps and bounds. But at the same time, the area that I shot today was the site of a future housing development. People need a place to live, right? I live in a housing development, though it was developed in the 60’s – its still a development itself.

So then I started thinking about the new shopping centers that are being developed. There’s a bunch of them around here, as well as down by corwin75 where I’ll be driving later. But again, I like the convenience. I remember how excited I was when they built a Best Buy in town. I’m a walking contradiciton… maybe I need to explore that somehow. I just dont’ know… but then again, thats why I’m taking this class.

We’ll see what happens in a couple weeks.

Posted by: peloquin3 on Buzznet

I really should be asking my mother…
…but what kind of plant/flower is this?

Its the optimizing that takes the longest.

I used to like They Might Be Giants a lot more than I do now.

I’m a little sad about that, but I guess its all part of growing, changing and evolving. That’s not to say that liking They Might Be Giants is childish. Its not, its just I’m a different person. I’m sure other people have grown to like them in the same age brackets as I’ve grown away from them.

Gas boycott day must be a failure, I just waited behind four cars for gas.

Update: My little 15 gallon, 300 miles on a tank car just cost me $44 to fill up. How can people actually buy SUVs?

Okay, so I’ve started this new Graduate Photo thing and I have to admit, I have no idea what I’m going to shoot. When I look back at my old photos, I notice that the best ones (in my opinion) are the ones that involve people – the ones where I had a model and I set up an emotion for the model and then just let them do whatever came to them. I’ve never used real models, I’ve always used my friends and they came out fine. I wasn’t looking for picture perfect people, I was looking for real people. But back when I was shooting my friends, I was never doing more than 5-10 shots. 20 photos that will (hopefully) start stringing together into a larger body of work, my friends are going to get old. Plus, and no offense to my friends, we’re not as young and athletic as we used to be.

And to top it all off, we haven’t even had one class day and I already feel like I’m behind. My shooting time is going to be restricted to primarilly the weekends and I’m only going to have one or two of those before our first barage of crits. At least I got online last night and found a paper that might be just the weight and lustre that I want. I just hope my little photo printer at home can produce the quality I need. If not, there’s always the über printer over in the photo building. I’ve heard it’s finicky, so I’m not sure what to expect.

Another dilema I realized yesterday, is that I used to not crop my photos when I was enlarging them… I exposed them full frame to show that I was composing through the lense – but with digital, thats not really going to be an option. there’s nothing but photograph. No film edges, no sprockets, no nothing. I could digitally add them, but that would defeat the point. I’ve got some ideas I’m monkeying around with, but most would be more trouble than its worth.

Well, it’s class time now, so I gotta go.