Paul Lester Photo

The road ahead

I’m sitting here next to a strange instrument, or at least strange to me. My new guitar. Oh! You didn’t know that I had a guitar or that I played?! Well, I didn’t have one until today and no, I don’t play. I am going to start taking lessons this week. It is a pretty inexpensive guitar as far as guitars go. Looking at the various prices, $99 – $3,000+, for acoustic guitars can be daunting; however, having the guidance of a good teacher in this regards is priceless.

My teacher met me today at a guitar studio where he teaches. They also sell a few guitars there too, but he has nothing to do with the store other than renting a space. Surprisingly, the guitars there were very competitively priced. He asked the owner what he had in stock, he picked out a couple of them up, played them a little bit, rejected one of them as bad and possibly having a manufacturing defect, then gave one to me and said that it was a great sounding guitar. He should know, he’s been playing for over 30 years. I knew enough to know that I knew absolutely nothing. I was prepared for big sticker shock. The owner said that that particular guitar was on clearance. List price was $375, clearance price, $135. I said, immediately, I’ll take it! So now I’m the proud owner of an Avondale guitar, an instrument that I’ve wanted to play for a long time, but never had or took the time to learn. Now is the time.

The ‘experts’ say that you become an expert at something after practicing it for 10,000 hours. Well, I’m on hour zero right now. As my lessons won’t start until sometime later this week, possibly, if he has an opening, I’ve not started the timer just yet. I did strum on it a bit, though. Now I have that daunting newbie feel. It’s hard to believe that I ever felt this way with a camera, but I know that I did. Now that old feeling is back. A feeling of newness, confusion, a small amount of anxiety, and a lot of excitement.

I met a lady in the store who said that she’s been playing for 6 months and she loves it. She showed me her fingertips. They were pretty well calloused and you could see impressions of where the strings fit perfectly! She started playing at age 50 and was shunned by her family because they were all classical pianist and she just wasn’t into it. She just wanted to play for fun. They couldn’t understand it so they rejected her and don’t even speak to her. How shallow is that?!

Anyway, hour zero is a fun place to be, full of excitement. Many instruments, when played well, have the ability to transport me into what seems like another dimension. Certainly music is mood altering. I wonder what the creation of music will feel like? I can see myself sitting by the ocean, one day, strumming away in rhythm with the waves. Alas, I must be careful of my expectations and simply enjoy the journey as I have all of these many years with my camera. I never tried to get anywhere. I’ve always just practiced because it was something joyful and fun to do.

‘tude!

Mike, over at T.O.P. had an interesting post called The Tenset. Here, stated very directly in his opening paragraph:

I’ll come right out with this…I wish every photographer’s website started out with the ten pictures (of their own, I mean) they love best. Call it a tenset to give it a name…a set of ten. A core set. A key set. A photographer’s ten best, or ten favorite, or ten most characteristic pictures, up front. Even if they recur in later categories.

Is that asking too much? (Mike Johnston, TOP, The Tenset)

When I read the entire post I got the feeling that he wanted photographers to customize their websites to suit his particular need. That is, he wanted to get in, discover quickly, and then get out. Mike does a periodic feature called Random Excellence. In it, he points out a photographer that he thinks does excellent work. As you may know, TOP gets lots of hits and if your website is mentioned there, you’re going to take a serious spike in hits for that day. Your 15 minutes of fame, so to speak.

The rest of the article goes on to have a discussion about user interface issues, etc. That part of the discussion is actually fairly interesting as it talks to the topic of usability. But, overall, I think that the article has a slant towards selling your photos or making it convenient for others to navigate the waters so to speak.

As it close to the end of the year, I think that thoughts naturally turn toward not only the coming year, but the there always seems to be the year in review thought as well. I know that it certainly has crossed my mind a time or three already. I start to think doing things like Mike suggested, a core set. But, what would that core set consist of? Would it be a set of 12, one from each month? Unfortunately, for me, creativity doesn’t really flow that way. It is kind of fits, starts, and clumps sometimes. Also, my favorites at this moment may not be my favorites tomorrow. What I feel represents my photography may change just as quickly. I was looking through this year’s photos and noticed my sudden shift to black and white and people photography, away from landscape. Now, here in December, I’m falling in love with the landscape again. Things change.

I do rather agree with the less is more principle. That is, if you can, pick about 10 or 12 representative pieces and display them on your website neatly, with easy to navigate images.

Overall, I’d say that I’m very lackadaisical in updating my online galleries. It’s just not so important to me. I feel that my daily photos that I choose are the ones that spoke to me the most OR, perhaps fit the post in some capacity. Further, when you choose those 10 or 12, do you get the same type of feeling that Chris said in response to a previous post that I wrote::

I struggle a bit with the following inner dialogue: “am I posting this image because I like it or because I think the people who read the blog will like it?” (Chris Klug – Patterns of Light N Dark)

In the end, who are those images for? What do you think about this Tenset idea? Further, if you are a blogger, do you feel that this is even necessary?

The above photo is from my lunchtime journey to Riverfront Park. It’s quite a relaxing place to sit and eat, especially on a warm and partly cloudy day. If you look, you can see two men in a small fishing boat near the shore. To the left of me were two other men doing pretty much the same as I was doing, watching the ship head on upriver. I continue to read the book Death of a Hero, Birth of the Soul. I continue to find it fascinating.

One part of the book talks about the male community:

If a man is lucky, he will also discover his need for other men at midlife. Men to talk to, to share life with. He needs to replenish himself with forms of male spirit and community that were totally absent in the competitive quest for status. (Johnson, Death of a Hero. p 35)

As with so much of this book, I find this to be true. I find that I yearn to find other men, similar in age and temperament to talk to and to share this journey, my journey, their journey, a man’s journey. Further, I seek, also, to find older men, elders if you will, to gain a bit of their wisdom and friendship.

I have a very good friend, Gordon, and many are the times that I wish that he were nearby so that we could talk, laugh, or even cry without feeling embarrassed. Of course, in American society, when you see two men who are frequently together or perhaps having dinner together, all sorts of homophobia starts to surface. Men aren’t supposed to be close unless they are gay. Ridiculous!

Of course now that I’m reading about this and thinking of it, I see all sorts of men hanging out together. In the past two days I’ve seen 3 such two-man groups, all of them by my estimation, over 40. I guess that it’s kind of like when I first bought my car, I had never paid attention to gray Toyota Camry’s. After I got my car, it seemed like everyone had a gray Camry! I guess it just opened my eyes to see.

When I started writing this post, I thought that I had more to say, but I guess that I don’t. I’ll leave it right here for now. Perhaps I’ll have more to say later.

I’ve not written one of these for a long while because I didn’t really know what to write about; however, I guess that it’s time to write about using that scary “M” on the camera.

The above photo is not “properly” exposed. Were I to have trusted the meter it would have tried to make sure that all of the shadows, rather than being inky black, would have been more of a gray tone. I wanted this shot to provide a bit of mystery. The gym was almost completely dark, save for the spotlight on the players who were being introduced to the audience. Here, the only answer was manual. Had I used flash, it would have destroyed the look that I was going for. I took a few shots adjusting the shutter speed or aperture to get the effect that I wanted, which as just to provide just enough detail to see the players while blacking out the background. I guess as an alternative, I could have used my spot meter mode and exposed for the highlights, but manual is simply easier.

Indoors
Another advantage, especially when shooting sports, is that the camera need not do anything extra with the constantly changing background. What I’ve found is that in the fast paced environment of sports and the venues in which they are held, this can lead to vastly different exposures, some underexposed, some overexposed. For example, let’s say that you are shooting at a basketball game. Further, let’s say that the fans are are really into the game. One team wears blue uniforms, the other white. One side of the gym is sea of blue, in support for their team. The other side, a sea of white because they are good supporters, too. Initially, when you took a reading of the area around the playing area, let’s say that it read f/4 @ 1/125 @ ISO 1600 (This, for my son’s school gym is pretty typical.). If you keep your camera on aperture priority and take shots that include the crowd, some shots will be f/2 @ 1/125, if you are pointing your camera towards the crowd wearing predominately blue clothes. Swing it the other way and you’ll get maybe f/8 @ 1/125 because the white clothes dominate the scene. Either way, your basketball players will be over or under exposed, which is not what you want. Using manual mode, I simply set the camera at one setting, then shoot to my hearts content. You’d be surprised at how consistent the exposures are.

Outdoors
Manual mode works well outdoors, too, especially on cloudy days and for night shooting. I say especially on cloudy days and for night shooting because in those situations, there aren’t many chances for the light to vary. Again, this makes for consistent exposures. I frequently do this when I go to the gardens at UNCC. I take a couple of readings, decide which to use, and shoot with that setting most of the time unless I have a reason to change the setting because of depth of field or perhaps needing a shorter or longer shutter speed.

I know that there are many others who visit this blog that use manual mode. It’s nothing to be afraid of. Also, using it will help you learn more about exposure. I’m sure that others would be happy to chime in about when, how, and why they use manual mode.