Work With What You’ve Got

While this isn’t a spectacular photo, I wanted to use it to share a little story about working with limitations and keeping your cool. Things go wrong sometimes and you have to just go with the flow. Easier said than done, I know! That rhymed lol.

Here’s the situation. Monica brought along her point and shoot canon to take photos on our little trip. She goes through cameras at an alarming rate because they always get sand or dirt in them. (Its understandable when you work with horses and live by the beach.) Fairly early on, during the first day of our trip, her camera began to malfunction. The lens cover wasn’t opening fully, blocking at least a third of it. Instead of getting upset, and cursing the canon gods, she saw it as a new challenge. She had to find a way to still get images she liked with the equipment she had. That meant tilting the camera and planning to crop later in post. It was inspiring watching her shake it off and keep her attitude of gratitude. She was just so grateful to be in a beautiful place with good company.

Now you’re probably wondering whats going on in this photo. She loves details and she kept noticing mushrooms along the trails. It took me a while before I began spotting them too. I’ve always heard that women are better at spotting details. Anyways, she wanted her photos to be from an insect’s perspective, so we can appreciate the world as they see it. To do that, she had to drop down to their level. Sure enough, every time we saw a mushroom, she got down and dirty without hesitation. I haven’t seen her photos yet, but they’re probably better than the ones I took while squatting because I didn’t feel like laying in the dirt =P

One Flower

Last year I took on the challenge of taking 500 photos of one subject with my old Nikon D60. This is the orange flower I chose out in the garden. It looked interesting and I thought it would be pretty easy to take a lot of pictures of it. It didn’t take too long before I was out of my comfort zone of taking my usual pictures. This is what a challenge is for, pushing you beyond your comfort zone and forcing you to try new things.

I shot from my normal distance and I also shot from as close as my lenses would allow.

I used the two lenses I had at the time, my 18-55 and 55-200. This one below was with the 55-200, shot through a chain link fence. This is probably my favorite shot from the whole shoot. Normally when I’m shooting a flower, I don’t think about moving away from it and shooting through something, but look at those results!

Heres a similar angle with a much different edit.

I also tried a kinetic shot. I had recently heard about kinetic photography and was experimenting with that technique. For this one in particular, I believe I was zooming in while pressing the shutter. It certainly adds some interesting motion to the image.

I felt like I was running out of ideas towards the end, so I switched to manual focus, just to try something different. At one point when I was adjusting, I went almost completely out of focus and saw something interesting happen. The photo turned into a painting.

Since I’d done a whole lot of shooting with the flower open, I wanted to call it a day and come back in the morning when the flower was wet and still not open.

Don’t be scared to try anything you can think of and don’t worry about how you look when you’re doing it. When I first got my Nikon a few years ago, I wasn’t comfortable being that guy that always had his camera around his neck. Eventually, we all have to get to a place where we’re ok with looking like a weirdo crawling on the ground with a camera.

Symmetrical Flower

Yesterday I bought an app that was on sale and had a lot of good reviews called FX Photo Studio. After a few minutes exploring it, I felt like a sucker because its filled with 20MB of fluff. There are a lot of filters, but I found like 7 that I might actually use. There are hardly any adjustment sliders to edit your photos, so I wouldn’t call this an editor. I’m not impressed at all to be honest and I’d save your dollar if its still on sale for that price. If, however, you are a teenage girl, you might like this app because of all the cheesy butterfly or flower frames.

This image was created with the Symmetry Vertical filter. It basically copies the left half of the image and flips it to make a symmetrical image. There are 3 symmetry filters that might make for some interesting creations, but I don’t know if I’m going to keep this 20MB app on my phone just in case I want to use one of them once a month.

More Macro!

I gotta say I love exploring the world of macro. I was going to save this for tomorrow morning, but I really like this one, so I’ll share now. To provide a sense of scale, thats a water drop on the left side of the image. I got too close at first and the water on my lens rubbed off onto the flower…oops.

Its been windy lately and some of the anemone’s got blown over. Instead of trying to do macro work out in the wind, I snapped off one of the anemone’s that was laying on the ground, but still in good shape. I brought it into my bathroom, put the flower on the counter, and set my iPhone on a container of hair gel that was just at the right height to focus on the stamen. Then I took about 30 pictures with camera+.

Just a quick edit in Snapseed to crop, add a little drama and structure, and I was done. Their structure tool is pretty awesome in their photoshop plugins when it comes to pulling out detail in an image. I seldom use it in Snapseed with my iPhoneography because it also adds noise (grain) to the image. So, if you do use it, be careful not to overdo it.

PhotoViva flower

Photograph:  a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.

~Ambrose Bierce

I used PhotoViva to paint this myself using a few different brushes. I have to say it was a fun process. Its much more engaging than selecting a filter that can give you a similar effect. I’ll give it a proper review after I use it on another image in the next few days.

This is what the image looked like before. Its another macro shot of a daisy bush. The flowers can’t be more than 2-3 inches wide.

Another Macro & A Discussion

Before I talk about today’s image, I’d like to spend some time talking about something that Karen brought up in the comments of yesterdays post. She wrote:

I have a pet peeve and the quote you used only reinforces it for me: photography is a creative process, one in which your mind is engaged. For me, saying you’re going to “snap” a few pictures degrades that process. The quickie “snaps” are thoughtless motions, done without engaging your brain. You, my friend, do more than snap photos. You make pictures. I’d love to see you drop the word “snap” from your vocabulary when you talk about your photography.

I was waiting for someone to bring up the terms we all use to describe the process of photography. Its not something you ever think about, but the terms we use are pretty militaristic: take, shoot, capture, snap. They don’t even really describe what the photographer is doing. How should we describe the process? I’ll let the master clarify things a bit.

You don’t take a photograph, you make it.

- Ansel Adams

I have to agree with Karen that terms like those above tend to take away from what the photographer is actually doing. I don’t go out, point my camera at something, and snap away. I have an image in my head before I even point the lens at whats in front of me.

A photograph is not an accident – it is a concept. ~Ansel Adams

When I’m ready to make a photograph, I think I quite obviously see in my minds eye something that is not literally there in the true meaning of the word. I’m interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without.

-Ansel Adams

Photography is an act of creation. Instead of those military terms, we should use more accurate words to describe what we’re doing with the camera. Ansel liked to say he made photographs. Kenneth Morgan, an awesome photographer and mentor, likes to use the word “create.” Instead of telling a client he can’t wait to shoot them, he would say “I can’t wait to get together to create some beautiful images together.” Which sounds better to you?

What other words do you think more accurately describe what you’re doing with a camera? I’d love to hear any other ideas.

Ok, now on to today’s image. I did some more water drop macro shots yesterday. I’ve always been intrigued by macro photography in the past. The only thing stopping me from really getting into it is the cost of the lenses. This free technique finally allows me to explore the macro world a little bit until I get a real macro lens for my phone or camera. I’ve been a little uninspired lately, partly because I’m bored of the central coast and can’t wait to move to Oregon and begin exploring there. This macro photography opens up a whole new world and I find myself actually having fun again because of the ability to explore the world on a new level.

Created with Camera+ and edited with Snapseed. Then I blended two versions together in ImageBlender with soft light as the blending mode.

Macro With Water

I’ve seen a couple people using water on the lens of their iPhone for macro shots. I set aside my fear of destroying my phone with water and gave it a shot. The results weren’t perfect, but some of the shots are very useable and impressive considering it doesn’t cost a thing. I found that having just a little bit of water on the lens was better than having a larger drop hanging and jiggling around with every slight movement. If you’re going to try this out yourself, you have to get extremely close to your subjects before they start to come into focus.

The first image is an unripe strawberry and the second is a ranunculus from the garden.

Stay Still!

“If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”

-Robert Capa

I downloaded cinemagram today and I’ve been playing with it all afternoon. Its pretty fun and adds even more creativity to the iPhone. Basically you shoot a short video and select a portion of it to be animated while the rest is a still picture.

I already have a few more that I like, but I’ll wait til tomorrow to share some more cinemagrams.