Waffling about springing for a Utilikilt?  Nut up and pull the trigger.  It's summer and the time is perfect for the freedom, comfort and all-around badassity of a Utilikilt.  Hit www.utilikilts.com/store/webslog to make your purchase.  I'll get a commission on the sale and you'll become a part of a growing worldwide movement of people saying "nae" to pants and "aye" to the freedom and comfort of the Un-Bifurcated Man Garment.

But so help me God, if he turns out to be brilliant but also tortured and eliminates his own personal map DFW style, I'm giving up on fiction authors altogether and devoting the rest of my life to reading the entire Chicken Soup for the Soul series. In large print. With a book group.

Just finished going through 300+ images I shot at my cousin's wedding party this weekend. I rented a Nikkor 80-200 f/2.8 AF-S with the intent of getting lots of mid- to low-light candids at the party. And for all of the experience I had with both the lens (none) and shooting people well (less still), some of the shots came out well. Problems persist, however, that are 100% operator based.

First and foremost, good subject matter, great light and a fast lens can make up for a multitude of sins. 

Things to work on:

1) If you can't wait for the frame to clear to get the shot, move to get a better shot.  Any number of reasons why, not the least of which is that a step to the left or right, in closer or backing out would have saved me two hours of Fauxtochopping.  I was behind what I think was the actual wedding photographer and this shot, as it originally appeared, had her flash unit overlapping the sleeve of his shirt.  I was able to do a hamfisted job of retouching it out (on which, more, later), but the better move would have been to lean a little left or right.

2) Fauxtochop saved the shot, but dented the integrity of the image along the way.  I was blessed by the photo gods with absurdly nice light and a looooong golden hour ... more like a golden 2 hours 25 minutes.  It meant that I was able to get some tasty skin tones and that the expressions on people's faces was relaxed, natural and un-squinty.  Score one for not having to futz with skin tones in my post-shot workflow.  However, I did have to Photochop extensively to clean up the included flash that intruded into "my" image.  It's not something I'd done before very much and I learned that doing clean up is waaaay more time-consuming than I thought it would be.  Too, this was the first time I've used PS to change what was actually in the photo/fix a mistake I made in shooting the photo (poor composition choices).  While I don't see myself on any sort of moral high ground, I do like to know, personally, that what shows up in my pictures is what was actually in the frame, rather than what I wished was in the frame.  Won't lose an enormous amount of sleep over that.  But I will pay closer attention to what's in the frame before I pull the trigger next time.

In particular, had I opened the lens another half or 3/4 stop, (3.2 to 2.8, the lens's max), I think I would have made my hyperfocus area a little shallower such that the people in the background would wash out a little more than they did.  Too that would have meant less need to applying the Vignetting tool to close the image in around the bride and groom and move peeps deeper into the background.

3) I manage to do a pretty decent job of walking right past pretty good shots looking for great shots.  Similar to my challenge with the train tracks I talked about previously, I spent an entire evening moving to fast.  The result was a lot of forced composition and trigger pulling before I should have.   Next time, a few minutes spent in meditating my way into the assignment/project before I start shooting anything that moves would be time well spent. 

That's all I've got on this one.

Cheers.

As soon as I took "real" literature classes in school, I became facile at the parlor tricks that would carry me through high school and a degree in English; these included decoding what I read based on symbolism, historical facts, and the life of the author. 

While she doesn't call down jihad on literary critics, her essay does begin to tease apart the knotty relationship between the creator and the created, between the maker and the consumer of any art, literature, photography or otherwise.

I've always read and looked at art as a combination of reading a page out of an interesting person's diary and sociocultural puzzle.  That is to say that the person making the art was an actual human citizen who lived in a time and place different from mine.  When I consume his art or read her books, I'm reading what the person wanted to say based on the fact that they existed in a real time and place.  Of course that artist is going to be shaped and influenced by the sociocultural soup he's floating in.

It is valid, I think, to ask oneself if what an artist has to say is relevant.  But as a reader, I grant the work that relevance by feeding their product through my filters.  If I'm black, I may resent the fact that Iago the bad guy is cast as a black person.  But I think I do Othello a grave disservice if I write the entire play off as racist claptrap simply because the world Shakespeare wrote of doesn't ideologically align with the world I live in today. 

As she concludes, Nichols writes:

What is gained by the picking, the dissecting, the categorizing and the smug analyzing of what was intended, in the first place, to be an expression of something personal and unique, floated in the literary ether to be absorbed by readers only imagined by the writer?

It's worth remembering.  Because while it's fun, and sort of like a treasure hunt, picking through a work for hints of latent "isms," overly analytical interpretations can drain a work of its essence as effectively as a bucket of leaches at an Open Wound Festival.

Nor funny strange. 

But funny like when you wake up at 6 am on a Saturday morning ready to accomplish 20 things and by the bottom of your second cup of coffee, you've relegated half your list to tomorrow and the other half to maybe next weekend if then.  Funny sad.  Or funny overwhelming.  Or funny in the way that your creativity can wander off looking for a Twinkie and your concentration, the good kind of mindfulness you welcome with the onset of a new creative act, is shot for the day.  And it went a little somethin' like this:

I had been eyeing this stretch of railroad tracks for the better part of a week.  It crosses under Mack Hatcher and had a set of flatbed railroad cars sitting on the unused right-hand track. The track crosses Southeast Parkway at the Superior Essex Plant, so it was an easy walk up the railway bed to where the cars sat idle.

So I walked about a quarter-mile in before setting down my gear and beginning to look around for my first shot (as though I'd "lost" it, right?).  And try as I might, I could not plug into the site, to my camera, to  whatever it was that I was trying to scratch shooting this place.  A total "it's not you it's me" moment.

I underexposed.  I overexposed.  I swapped out lenses every ten minutes.  I misfocused.  I misjudged the light.  I kept shooting then looking at histograms figuring they had the answer to whatever it was that I wasn't accomplishing.  My long shots fell short.  My close-ups wandered around looking for critical focus.  And with every click of the shutter, I was growing farther and farther away from whatever it was that I knew how to do.

I did manage to squeeze out a couple of decent frames.  But nothing that really hit me.  And while a bad day's shooting may beat a good day's work, the entire feild trip left me feeling annoyed and, worst of all, empty.

I'ver been thinking on this for the last couple of days and while I don't have an answer, I think I do have the beginnings of a way to try and minimize the time spent in this kind of creative/soul fugue state.  I've often thought that I need some sort of warm-up or centering activity, no matter how small, to get out of the headspace of the World and into the headspace of the Idea and the Little Black Box with the Hole in it.

I plan to use this past weekend as impetus to research or create my own warmup/mediatation that I can use to focus and center before I start shooting.

I'll share what I find here.  In the meantime, what do you do to focus in and clear your mind of the day's clutter before you sit down/stand up/set out to create something?

Thankfully, my camera bag includes a couple of removable zippered bags that seem to be purpose made to serve as a ditty bag for the allen key, rear lens caps, and all the other little piecesparts that seem to end up floating in the bottom of my bag.

One thing that I've noticed about pro photographers I've watched and worked with is that they tend to have a pretty good organizational system for their gear dialed in.  Things get put back in the same place the same way every time, making it easier to find the one thing they need the first time every time.

Pros are on the clock both for their current client and for the remainder of their day.  Time spent pawing around on a junk bag is time (and energy) spent away from making pictures.

So while I'm no pro, I would do well to take a lesson from them and tighten up in the organization department.  

So that's what today had in store.  Will be posting the photos from the railroad track wander shortly.

Beginning to get the hang of my new camera. Very happy with the way this image turned out.

24mm - f/10 @ 90 sec.; minimal post-processing including a little cropping, gAntico's GA - B&W infrared 01 filter and a smidge of high-pass filter in Fauxtochop.