Photography

That’s not how I remember it

Posted by Paul on November 5, 2012
Posted in: Personal, Photography. Tagged: .

When I think of the end of fall, I seem to always remember what job I had to complete before the snow set in. My father would insist that I rake the leaves in the backyard and bag them for collection. If you had asked me back then, that was an insurmountable task! I mean the WHOLE backyard??? We had a huge maple tree there and, in actuality, the backyard was quite small – as I found out when I became an adult and had a chance to the look at the yard through adult eyes. It was comically small, actually. :D But, as a kid, I could make that an all-day task!

This evening as I was walking, trying to cat those last rays of sunlight, I saw the neighborhood clean up crew getting rid of all the leaves. They would blow it into large piles, then come by with a truck with a large vacuum on it and make quick work of those leaves.

I could have used such help when I was a kid, but then again, I wouldn’t have had the fun of jumping into the pile when I finished raking it.

Fall back

Posted by Paul on November 4, 2012
Posted in: Photography.


Alas, it is that time of year in the northern hemisphere when we “fall back” – Early this morning, we moved our clocks back and hour. It’s light a bit earlier and dark, at what seems like a lot earlier.

This morning I got up, fed Hobbs, and headed over to the UNCC gardens. I’d not been since early summer. Usually there are few nuggets to be had in the garden such as the top photo. This morning, however, I thought that I’d have to leave empty-handed. Nothing caught my interest. There were lots and of leaves scattered about, evidence of the large amounts of wind that we had over the past few days.

This time of year, I think, gets to be challenging for some photographers. It’s the grey time of year. We are well past the verdant greens of spring and summer, past the exuberant colors of fall, heading deep into the quiescence of winter. The time, according to Chinese medicine, etc, for hibernation, healing, slowing down.

During this time, some of us may drop back to doing things left undone in the summer months like printing, or learning more about Lightroom, or perhaps installing and learning Photoshop CS6. I’m sure that there are plenty of items on everyone’s to-do list. However, the winter can be interesting. Living in a part of the country where snow is a rarity, I like the occasional snow day. It’s a great break from the crystal clear, cold, blue skies of the winter.

Once again, looking into the archives, I noticed that most of my photos in December and January are inside shots, long shadows, etc, mixed with a bit of still life and flash photography. I’m sure that it’s no coincidence. :) There are a couple of notable exceptions, winter of 2008 and 2009, I have lots of beach photos – I was living in Charleston, not so much warmer than Charlotte, but the beach is still interesting in the winter, but with less people.

For the Newbies – Risk Taking: Sharing your work

Posted by Paul on November 2, 2012
Posted in: Photography. Tagged: , , .


Why is it all blurry?

I will not usually repost a photo, but I think that this one deserves to be reposted because there is a story with it. :) Most of you who blog and share your work already know this – Any time that you share your work, there is a chance that someone will not like it, or perhaps they will not understand it. Here’s what happened to me the other day:

As I was cruising through the archives, I came upon a photo of my friend’s daughter having a good time on the swing. I remember taking this photo and what I was trying to do was to get her in focus and the background as a blur, but as it turned out, that didn’t happen; however, I still really liked this, played with it a bit, and posted it the other day to the blog. In the meantime, I sent him a copy of it saying: James, here’s a picture of your daughter that I thought that you might like. I got no reply. We both work for the same company, so I chatted with him on IM and asked if he got the photo. The conversation was something like this:


Paul: Hey, James. Did you get the photo that I sent you of your daughter?
James: Yes.
Paul: I thought it was pretty cool. Did you like it?
James: It was blurry
Paul: That was the intent – to show motion – you know, artsy.
James: I would have considered it artsy if the background was blurry and my daughter was in focus.
Paul: To each his own – feel free to delete it, if you wish.
James: No. I’ll keep it since it is a photo of my daughter. I didn’t mean to offend you.
Paul: No offense taken. Everything is not for everyone.

Truthfully, I was not offended in the least. James is a very good friend of mine and we’ve had similar discussions before. He’s very literal in what he likes. He’s not going to like much that is abstract or needs much thinking/feeling beyond what is apparent. I’ve joked with him about being so literal, but that’s just the way he is.

Know that any time that you put your stuff on display, there are going to be some who love it, some who hate it, some who just don’t get it. This is fine. Just as long as you keep doing what you want like to do. Of course, if you are working for a client, you have to go with what they like – they are paying you, after all. Criticism certainly won’t kill you, and some of it might actually help.

There’s nothing new here, actually, just sharing. No matter how long you’ve been doing photography, you can bet that somewhere there is someone that just doesn’t get it or like it – it may even be a close friend, maybe even a spouse. I’m sure some of my fellow bloggers have stories to share! :D

Lastly, if you’ve been visiting and haven’t commented – if you have something to say, please do!

More laid back now

Posted by Paul on October 30, 2012
Posted in: Photography. Tagged: .


Toes up and having fun!
I’m having a great time going back through my photographs and doing lots and lots of clean up. I’ve expended a great number of hours doing it and probably have as many more to go.

I was thinking while cleaning up that I’m a lot more laid back in my photography now. Previously, if I had gaps in the dates that I took photos, or even posted to the blog, I’d wonder why. I’d wonder what was going on. What was wrong. True, there were some times when that was the case, but there are other times when life gets in the way, or perhaps I’m in a rut and just can’t ‘see’ anything to photograph.

Now, I don’t worry about it … not much, anyway. This trip back through the archives has yielded some wonderful stuff and a lot of trash. I’m taking out the trash and it feels good, but what feels better is not having a care that there are some rather large gaps in the photography. Now, after all of this cleanup, I’ll have no idea if I didn’t photograph that day or if I just deleted all of the photos from that day. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that when I’m out there, it’s without force, just having fun like the girl in this photo!

Ribbonwalk – I’d forgotten about this place

Posted by Paul on October 27, 2012
Posted in: Personal, Photography. Tagged: .


Those Loblolly Pines seem awfully orderly. Hmmm
Probably, if you asked a random sampling of Charlotte residents about Ribbonwalk, the most popular response would be: What is that?

Like the city in which it’s located, the preserve’s name is derived from Queen Charlotte, wife of King George III of England. The Queen’s mother-in-law owned a woodland garden known as “RibbonWalk” because of how the paths “ribboned” their way through the forest. Purchased as 155 acres in 1987 by Mecklenburg County, the forest was operated under a management agreement with Charlotte Botanical Society, later called RibbonWalk Conservancy, Inc., until July 2005. Additional acres have been purchased over the years and the forest is now incorporated into Mecklenburg County Park and Recreation Department’s nature preserve system.

This is not surprising as Ribbonwalk is nestled in an out of the way neighborhood, not next to any lakes or rivers, and doesn’t have a lots of picnic tables or facilities. In fact, there is but one “Porta John” at the entrance to the park and that’s it for ‘facilities’.

I used to come here often when living on this side of town, but had completely forgotten about it until I started key-wording my photos and ran across a few of my favorites taken at the park, like this one of a Green Heron taking flight.

One of the advantages of taking my camera to lots of places is that I can know exactly how long that it’s been since I’ve been to a place. My last time there was on March 30th, 2007 when I took some photos of my friend, Chetana.

I have no idea how I found it, initially. I don’t think that another photographer told me about it, but perhaps that is how it happened. It’s just a little known part of Charlotte. Only hikers seem to know about it.

This morning was cloudy and slightly breezy, therefore, a great day to take a walk through the forest. I’d always wondered about the large number of loblolly pines in the park, some of them standing in almost exact rows, like they had been planted like that. This morning, I saw an informational plaque indicating that this area used to be both loblolly pine plantations (aha!) as well as various cotton plantations. So, there was the explanation of the almost perfectly placed trees near the entrance.

It was a nice walk in the park this morning, getting reacquainted. As usual, there were very few people. Only one car was at the entrance when I arrived. I stayed for about 90 minutes. When I left, there were only 4 cars, including mine. I saw 2 joggers. The only sounds that I heard were the footfalls of the joggers on the leave strewn paths and the sound of squirrels scampering around, collecting acorns, I suppose, or the occasional shriek of a Blue Jay.

I didn’t spot any Green Herons, but that was alright – It was a very pleasant morning.

Ruthless editing, Keywording, Memories.

Posted by Paul on October 24, 2012
Posted in: Photography. Tagged: .


Tony, age 12. Practicing the French Horn

For about 5 or 6 days, I’ve put in a couple of hours each night consolidating my digital photos. Previously, I would make a new library each year. One day, I believe it was Earl asked: Why don’t you keep them all in one library. I had though that it might be a bit too big, but what the heck, I was in the mood to try this weekend, so that’s what I did. After I got them all into one library by importing the other libraries so I could keep keywords, etc, I set about reducing the size of the overall number of photos.

Over the last 5 days, I have deleted some thousands of photos, on the order about 35 GB of data. Some of it was really easy to get rid of. I had old basketball games of Tony’s from 2004 on up. Each of the games I would shoot close to 1000 shots, maybe more. I quickly winnowed that down to a few shots of Tony per game and deleted the rest. After that, I attacked soccer. :) There were also so many photos of things that I had no interest in, just moments that I clicked the shutter and lots and lots of repeats, sunsets and such. I was able to reduce those down quite a bit too. I don’t feel that I lost anything.

While doing all of this, I had to look at a lot of photos and make decisions on keywording. I came up with a handful of keywords, broadly based, matching my style of thinking. Mainly, I’ll remember where I took a picture, though not necessarily when. So keywords by location really work for a good majority of my landscape photos. Then you have pictures with people in them and a sub keyword of “family”. That takes care of the folks, etc.

Overall, it’s been a fantastic experience and trip down memory lane. I’ve only finished pass one and see that I’ve got lots of photos to print … good thing that I ordered ink! I’ll have to put some of these in less expensive frames, around the house, rather than hanging on the wall. :)

The other photo, of course, is Pedro on his graduation day from Ohio State. A proud moment for us all!

Funny. I see the photo of Tony and can hardly believe that he is now 20 and in college … in Nebraska of all places and that when I took this photo, back in 2004, I was just in my early 40′s … a young man! :D

Who knew? I like matte paper!

Posted by Paul on October 22, 2012
Posted in: Photography. Tagged: .


McDowell – Reaching peak colors

I do my best to keep an open mind about things; however, I do have certain things that, let us say, don’t change so easily. One of them is paper. From way back in the day, I liked to have good contrast and deep blacks on my photos. So, in the darkroom, I used Poly Contrast paper and used the appropriate filters to make the photos pop. Regarding surface textures, I started with glossy, but soon found that it was too high maintenance, so I moved to luster type surfaces, and there I stayed. I printed a few photos on matte papers and high fiber content, or rag papers, but those were special occasions.

Now, I have before me, a box of Red River sampler papers. Everything from glossy to fine art papers. I did order some ink, only to have to order some more because I didn’t notice how low my Light Magenta was, but I have enough to print a few sheets. This weekend, I printed some of my favorite photos on different types of paper, glossy included. My thoughts:

Glossy – I still like punch and the deep blacks, but don’t like how easy it is to get fingerprints on the photo. Also, I don’t really like all of the glare that you get when viewing at angle.

Matte – I didn’t think that I would really like it; however, the blacks are pretty deep, though not shiny, and, the photos still pop and don’t have that annoying fingerprint problem, nor do they have the glare when viewing at angle. I tried several different matte types that they offer and I liked them all, but my favorite was the 60 lb Polar Matte Plus. It’s a nice, heavy stock, and has brilliant whites. I cannot really tell the difference between the Polar Matte and the Premium Matte. I printed the same photo on both and cannot distinguish between the two. I guess that I’ll go with the less expensive.

I am curious, though, about their “Natural” papers which don’t have brighteners in them. Those work well for portraits and subdued images, say like fog.

Canvas: I just loved the 60 lb Paper Canvas. I think that if I were doing formal portraits, this would be ideal. It’s got a lovely look to it.

River linen: I’ve not used this sample just yet. It’s got a nice texture to it. I’m just looking for the right photo to use it on. I know that I have one, but just haven’t found it yet. :)

Overall, I guess that I would say that I will use the above mentioned matte paper, but may keep some other papers on the side for that special print, or order that paper when needed. After all, no one says that I have to stick with one type of paper, right?