This was going on across the street when dropping my daughter off at her school:
Building on Fire
It was a pretty busy scene, so long I did not linger. Better to get out from underfoot than add to the difficulty of saving lives.
Still, it was good to have a relatively decent camera with me. As I’ve mentioned before, when missing opportunities, that one should always carry a camera. A good one, even – cell phone cameras, even the iPhone, aren’t up to this particular task.
“Owning more than one lens assures that you will always have the wrong lens on the camera for any given picture”
-T. Orland’s Compendium of Photographic Truths
This seems to be one of the great truths that I’m experiencing these days. It’s getting harder to get out the full SLR kit with lenses, save for specific activities. Most days I’m running around with the LX3, it seems – and on full wide-angle mode. Despite the zoom, I’m using it as if no zoom existed.
Some of this is mindset, I suppose. When I have too many choices, I get option lock. With fewer choices, I tend to just make ‘em work.
This is likely a good lead-in to my next project: going back to film. I’ve decided to do a short trial run similar to TOP’s Leica for a year challenge. The purpose isn’t really to follow what Mike Johnson is recommending – although I hope to get some of the same benefits. Rather, in my case: having always used labs to do processing, followed by jumping into digital, I never had the chance to develop my own negatives. Or to make my own prints. Or to get back to the original ways of how this was done.
Overall, my goal is to gain the skills it would take to be an old-time war photographer. Take a fully manual camera and a wad of film into the field, use it over the course of several days, and return for developing. Or even create a make-shift development kit on premises & process there.
We’ll see where this takes us.
Now a month & a half later, I find myself reminiscing about the hour or so that I spent at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park. The feature at the time was rock & roll, and I managed to see many original items that were only dreams beforehand.
Mind you, I’m not a big fan of Rock & Roll photography in general. But to see Annie Liebowitz’s work in person (including the final portrait of John Lennon)? To see the images of Jim Marshall? It was astounding. Seeing the work of people I could only dream of living up to.
But that wasn’t the biggest takeaway. The biggest shock to me came when I noticed that two similar photos (sorry, I forget the ones) hanging side-by-side were processed in totally different ways. One was a classic silver gelatin print, the other a modern giclée (harumph. Bubble jet crap.).
Here’s the thing: I’ve been brought up believing that the best detail can only come from a printed page. Here I was looking at two images at relatively low ISO, and there was *no* functional difference. Not in the shadows, not in the highlights – nowhere. In fact, I would have placed the bubble jet at a slightly higher quality than the traditional print.
So now I’m a bit confused. Perhaps it was the processing, but I suspect that these days it just doesn’t matter. High-end printed images are just as good.
… I posted a self portrait:
Self portrait
Since photography is a bit of a passion for me, this is one that I’ve always struggled with. I’m too excited about the image that I’m engaged with to follow the rule, but it’s important:
Before sharing, sit on it for a couple of days.
Take the other day’s post, for example. I only posted it to point out the oversaturation; had I not waited a couple of days, I wouldn’t have noticed – I would have been too excited about what I was seeing in my mind, and not detached enough to see what was really there.
Want to improve your image? Wait a day or two before sharing ‘em.
How about an overly-saturated HDR for a post?
Backyard Sunset
There, isn’t that nice?
Well… I like some parts of it, actually – that’s why I’m posting. This HDR was taken with three frames on the Panasonic LX3, handheld. That it came together so well, I like. The saturation? Well, I didn’t realize how over-saturated it was when I did it. But I sat on it for two days, and now the sky and grass just feels radioactive.
So I’m posting this as a reminder to everyone: don’t oversaturate your HDRs!
The crater basin on Haleakala
If you’ve never tried it, I highly recommend it. It’s extremely cool – especially if you go from sea level to the top in one day.
We did this almost a year ago, on Haleakala. It was amazing: at the summit, you have a short walk up to the top of a nearby peak. This is no more than 1/5th of a mile, yet we could barely catch our breath. ‘Course, I won’t talk about how pathetic my conditioning is, either
On the way down, I nearly passed out – just from trying to take a pic of a bird nearby. The action of squatting down, tensing, and constricting my oxygen intake was enough to almost drop me.
It was cool, in a weird way.
The guy who nearly did me in:
Bird on Haleakala
Sunrise in HDR
Originally posted (today, in fact) to Flickr. The more I look at this, the more I like it. It’s not without faults – he home is a bit off-kilter and oversaturated, and the trees could use some aligning, but overall I’m quite pleased. The reds in the leaves are wonderful, the sky is alight as I would like it to be, and the sharpness is spot on exactly where I wanted it to be.
Check it out on Flickr in the full size for maximum effect.