It is often said that one does not need to travel far to get good photos, there are many a few feet from your door if you just look for them. Sometimes, they can be a few feet inside your door. Then black and white/grayscsle image of the lamp, window blind slats, and black background screen on a stand is a few feet from my bed. It has been there a while, but I didn’t “see” it there and visualize it as in this picture until I woke up the other morning and there it was! One thing I enjoy about photography is how it encourages he to look deeper into object around me and grab a nice image from the mundane.
This is a very entertaining video that is spot on as far as what I would miss most if I gave up my DSLR and why. I am more about final images than gear and what will ensure I get what I want in that regard, without the hassle, and at an affordable price. What he misses about his DSLR here is not just an inconvenience for me, but can be a show stopper in getting the best images, when I want them, when I see them, without fail, under all conditions. The battery power hog that Mirrorless cameras are was off-putting to me when they were first released and still are now. When my camera battery died after a longer than expected and unplanned day of walking around on my one and only trip to Key West in 2003, I almost missed once-in-a-lifetime shots of the sunset at Mallory Square. It was over, the battery was gone after my very last shot. (I know the lecture and remedy that is returned when I tell that story, but it can, and does happen to the best of us). Still, that was a “never again” moment for me, but I have gotten close a few times in spite of my best-laid plans. The screen clutter on Mirrorless cameras can get messy and hard to work around under certain conditions. The list goes on. That said, Mirrorless Cameras are the future and the advantages are numerous and well known. I am not a Luddite and am a Pragmatist, which means I go with “what works” in most everything. When it comes to photography, “what works” is having a great and lasting image to talk about in the end.
The summer sound of the Cicada is here! I took this picture a step from my front door of the holes they make when the nymphs, who have been deep underground for years, burrow their way to the surface, shed their exoskeleton, take to the trees and fill the air with sound. #naturepic.twitter.com/4UV07d18lm
Four years ago, while on a walk around the lake with my camera one afternoon, I began to hear the sound of seagulls making a tremendous racket and then saw quite a number of them in the sky, darting around in all directions above the shore. They were very active and making quite a squall. As I got closer, I noticed a young couple feeding them near the shoreline. I saw this as an opportunity to get some Seagull in action shots so moved closer. It was absolute pandemonium at this point and almost impossible to plan a shot. The couple had left some bread on the shore and I began trying to toss some of it up in the air to draw the Seagulls closer with bread in one hand while holding my camera with the other, then quickly juggling it all to try “grab” a shot. This whole planned process was not working so I just set my camera to a shutter speed that would freeze the fastest movement and action, while not opening the aperture so much that I would lose my depth of field. Fortunately, it was a bright sunny day so the ISO stayed low and I basically joined the mayhem and shot at will. When I downloaded the pictures that day, what I saw was pretty sad, and felt like a total loss. I didn’t go back to look at them, until recently. The attached picture looked hopeless from an exposure standpoint and the image of the seagull was small and in the corner of the frame. Fortunately, I was shooting with a full-frame Nikon D750 DSLR so there was a lot of room to crop and still hold the image together. In the end, I pulled the JPG image of the one attaches scene, and made adjustments to it only in Lightroom. To get this image at 1/4000 of a second (didn’t realize I set it that high) and f10 with an ISO of 100 pleased me! Of course, this has compelled me to go back and look at the rest of the Seagull shots from that day to see what else I might find to work with!
I use my Samsung Android Smartphone camera, small mirrorless Leica Dlux 7, and Nikon D5300 and D750 DSLR cameras all the time. They all serve different purposes for me and each has its pros/cons. This article clearly points out clearly a DLSR does best and I couldn’t agree more.
For me, the final image is what counts. In the end, it is what matters most. The details on how it was created come after that.
This is a picture I took of the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge Arch in Dallas Texas one Sunday morning in October 2018. Due to a period of heavy rain, the Trinity River was at flood stage, cresting at over 40 feet. I went there with the objective of getting shots of the high water level and flood waters in the levee. In the end, the nice cloudy background in the shots provided some unexpected aesthetic subject matter as an added bonus.
Once you start looking at all that is around you at any given point in space and time, as a photographer, you begin to see endless photographic subject matter possibilities in almost everything. Some of my favorite creative photos were taken on days when I felt there was “nothing to shoot” until I started looking deeper.
