Categories
Tag: Clouds
Categories
Waiting for Summer
Last weekend, or more like a week and a half ago now, my wife and I went up in the mountains to a Young Life camp with the high school students we work with at our church. Not uncommon for an event like this a student took a trip to the hospital, and this time I was designated to go along as the responsible adult. The hospital visit lasted all night resulting in my complete exhaustion for the rest of the weekend. Why do I mention this? These five photos are my best ones from that weekend, and for each of them I really didn’t feel like shooting, but I forced myself to. After an all night stay at a hospital, I had reverted to survival mode, all I have to do is make it through the weekend, then I can sleep. But by forcing myself to shoot when I knew that I should, I created my best pieces. I have written here several times about re-learning. This is it again, I always hear people say “I take pictures when I feel like it”. But many of my best photos come from times when I don’t feel like it.
As I am getting back into the swing of things, I am having to cover a lot of old ground. Like pushing my self to be creative, to even pick up the camera. I have lost some of the self confidence I had only a six months ago.
I get a block if I feel like I am going to shoot something that has been done before, like it won’t be real if I am not creating something completely unique. I have to remind my self that it doesn’t matter if someone else has something that looks similar, it is creating that is the point.
Sometimes start to shoot something then I stop and think, “no, that’s dumb”. I am so close, all I have to do is actuate the shutter. But I get a creative block, and I have to remind my self that it doesn’t matter what other people think.
Mostly though what I have to remind my self is to get out and shoot. I will never shoot anything good while just sitting around.
What is your intention when you take a photo?
What idea are you trying to convey, and how do you translate your thoughts into an image?
How do you take what you see with your eyes and make your camera see the same thing?
This week was a struggle for me to find any sort of photographic inspiration. Waiting until nearly the last minute, I finally forced myself out the door, falling back on “just shoot something”. It almost seems like the cyclist in the foreground is looking for a connection, maybe based on a common interest. But in reality, I am pretty sure she is just trying to figure out what I am pointing my camera at.
One thing I really like about my LX3 is the manual focusing. There is a “focus” button on top to do an auto-focus over-ride which can help make manual focusing faster. But what is even better is an on screen DoF scale. The focus range changes with aperture and focal length to make hyperfocal focusing quick and easy.
