I just saw an amazing video shot by one of the best microstock photographers I’ve ever come accross: Yuri Arcurs. Take a look at his daylight studio:
Amazing stuff. Take a look at his site for more information on his amazing work.
Discoragement and beer are wonderful things. After coming back from the Zoo I allready knew my images were crap before I looked at them. I just could not get into the groove of taking anything that day. That feeling of knowing I had not captured any images I was going to be happy with even before I looked at them was the apex of my slump. Matt and I spent that evening BSing and enjoying some local libations and I decided that I needed to re-focus my photography. The next day we went to one of my favorite places to take pcitures in the area Multnomah Falls. I’ve taken 100’s of pictures here before but the majesty of the falls still allways captivates me.
This day I went out with a purpose. My goal was to experiment with shutter speeds to create that allmost dreamy smooth water look. This was somewhat tricky as it was overcast and I didn’t have a decent tripod with me so everything was shot by hand. But under those contstaints I still got several images that captured this quality. I also got a few very interesting shots just shooting by instinct.
So Lately I haven’t really been feeling the photo thing. Pretty much all aspects of photography have been eluding me for the past few months and the quality of my shots definitely show it. These two shots in this post are the only shots I liked from a 2 hour photo walk at the Oregon Zoo with Matt. I have never come back with so few decent images from a zoo before.
Shallow Depth of Field
Something I’ve been struggling with getting back into photography is I have forgotten all the photography concepts that I learned in school when I was shooting film. Things like how aperture and shutter speed work together, how to control the depth of field ect..
I’ve been slowly re-learning but most of my shots I’ve let the camera figure it out for me. While this has worked out most of the time so far, it does not allow me to truly control the resulting image. This becomes necessary when I try to not only capture a specific subject but capture it in a specific way with a specific look.
In my quest to refresh my memory on the basics of photography I stumbled upon a nice explanation of how to control depth of field from a Sony/Minolta shooters blog. Nice basic article that gives you a conceptual idea of how it works so that you can implement it yourself (with some practice of coarse).
flicker logo
Now let me start by saying I really do like Flickr the service, I think its a very interesting way to develop community around photography. There are millions of talented people on there doing incredible things and many are willing to give advised to others.
However and maybe this is just me, I feel like the yahoo login system is a real pain in my ass. First the login system seems awkward, they didn’t do a very good job of integrating it into the flickr sight so its actually kinda disruptive when you go to login. Second you have to use a yahoo account, which basically means you have to sign up for yahoo mail. So I get that this has a positive aspect of getting you access to all of yahoo at once but I don’t want a yahoo mail account. I would never use a yahoo mail account. So if you give in and sign up for a yahoo mail account and then get access to flickr your all set. I however since all I am using from yahoo is flicker, will forget what my yahoo account was (CFlux132543<randombs>2355@yahoo.com maybe?) by the next time I have to login. This means about once every 2 weeks I need to ask them WTH is my loging name?
I feel yahoo really needs to take a page from some of their competitors and allow you to sign up using an email address you actually use. They can offer you a yahoo address which then would give you access to everything including yahoo mail but why not let people just sign up for things like flickr with non-yahoo owned address. The only reason I can think of is its basically marketing for them, if you have to sign up for a yahoo address then you may start using their email and then maybe their messenger then maybe their homepage ect…
I just really dislike that when I go to Flickr the experience seems to be damaged by the ever present specter of yahoo. But as I said maybe that’s just me…
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