In Search of Clear Focus

There haven’t been any posts here for over a month now.  As usual, I would like to think it has something to do with my incredibly interesting work on other projects or fantastic social life, but neither could be further from the truth.  That’s not to say that I haven’t done anything productive in the last month, but mostly it’s items like helping my wife paint our bedroom or sawing up an uprooted tree in our yard.  Hardly Earth-shattering or month-long events that would prevent me from writing.

In the mean time, I got a new iPod Touch (which I should write about at some point), which got me listening and watching a few podcasts on my bus to/from work.   The two podcasts are photography related.  One is a video podcast with critiques of user-submitted photos to The Radiant Vista and the other an audio podcast from The Digital Photography Show.  Both have piqued my interest in advancing my own photography (as have a trip to the Udvar-Hazy Air &  Space museum and thoughts of possible gifts for my upcoming birthday).

All this has me thinking about why I haven’t been too good at keeping up with my photography in the past (and this blog, for that matter).  I have good runs here and there, but there’s been an overall lack of commitment to producing final images.  It really comes down to a character flaw of mine, which is a paralysis that comes from not wanting to make a mistake.  I have failed to start editing photos before because I haven’t really figured out my preferred workflow for copying, archiving, editing, and finalizing images.  Why start something when I might figure out later that I should have done it another way?  I also have dozens of images that I started to edit, but have never been finished, largely because I don’t know what I plan to do with them.  Should I size them for prints?  If so, at what aspect ratio?  What will I do with them after they are printed?  Should I save them for the web? At what resolution? Too big and they useful for people to steal.  Too small and what’s the point?  Even worse, what if someone sees a flaw in my work?

This is all ridiculous.  I know it; I just have a hard time getting past it.  For each of my concerns, there is an easy answer.  Resizing images is a quick process, someone stealing my images isn’t a real loss right now (they don’t provide any income to me), and my work certainly has room for improvement and always will. In fact, critiques are one of the best ways to improve…

My wife will probably laugh at me when she reads this, because she has to deal with my crazy all the time.  Hopefully my mounting frustration with myself over inactivity in photography and blogging—my two big personal interests—will force me to reprioritize my free time.  How much crappy TV do I really need to watch?

Last night, I processed two more photos from the Bethesda PhotoWalk.  They’re up on Flickr, but I wanted to link them here, as well.

I took the shot in an alley next to this stage in Bethesda. I liked the simplicity of the poster against the texture of the wall. I pushed the colors a little in the poster and stripped a strong yellow tint from the wall, in order to almost make it almost monochrome. I worked for a bit on burning in the bright highlights on the right, but didn’t get them down as far as I wanted. I probably need to reprocess the raw image, reducing the exposure, then merge the two together, but I need to really up my Photoshop skills for that.

This sprinkler bell was down a set of stairs and I loved the old look to it, highlighted by the fading paint along the top ridge. Here, I used one set of curves to add contrast to the bell and another set to do the same for the wall. The exposures of each were so different, I ended up getting more experience with layer masks that I had anticipated.  I had to burn the upper left corner quite a bit, as sunlight was creating a real hot spot up there. I’m not sure if I left the bottom right of the image too dark, but I like this shot quite a bit.

This past Saturday, I went on my first photowalk with a group of folks I found on PhotoWalking.org and Flickr.  The organizer (Mark) also pulled in folks from the Gaithersburg Camera Club and the National Zoo Photo Club.  Plans for the walk can be found here and here. The “official” wrap-up of the walk can be found here.

This was a great experience for me and I can’t wait to participate in more of these. My collection of photos can be found over on Flickr.  It’s a small set today, but should grow over the week.

I learned as much from just watching the other photographers as I did from talking to them.  I learned even more from the resulting photos that have been posted.  Biggest lesson: I tend to get neither very close or very far from the subjects in my pictures.  I need to look for ways to get up close and involved or really step back and take in the bigger picture.

Anyway, getting to the walk was a bit of a pain.  I had to decide between driving all the way or driving to the metro and taking two trains to get there.  Driving is easier, more direct, but you have to deal with parking.  Parking in Bethesada is sometimes scarce and almost entirely metered.  My lack of quarters and disdain for searching lot after lot for parking spaces lead me to opt for the metro.

I left home a few minutes late, but everything was working out nicely.  When I tranfered to my final train, I was in perfect time to walk up the metro steps exactly at 2:00 PM.  Unfortunately, metro had other plans.  One stop from my destination, the train I was on went out of service, due to track maintenance ahead.

Needless to say, I wasn’t too pleased with this occurrence.  I had checked the metro website earlier in the day and saw no mention of single-tracking between those stations or potential delays, even though I searched the exact route I was taking.  Either way, I was left with a choice of waiting for the next train, 15 minutes back, or walking the 1-1.5 miles between stations.

I headed above ground and started to hoof it - in the wrong direction. Thankfully, I realized my error halfway across the first street, spun around and started to power my way to the meet up.  The walk was very straightforward, following a single major road. Unfortunately, it was also slightly uphill the whole way.  No major inclines, but no real level ground either.  My calves are still reminding me of that today. One more sign that I’m getting old.

After my brisk walk (which warmed me up nicely in the surprisingly temperate weather), I got to the meeting place.  I was about 20 minutes late and had spent half the walk trying to decide what to do if the group was gone when I got there.  Did I bail and just go home, photowalk on my own, or try and remember the route and catch up?  I never really made a decision, though I think I was leaning towards wussing out and heading home.

I found a couple of people still milling around the meeting area snapping a few last shots.  I took a moment to get my camera out and get set-up before awkwardly introducing myself to the couple of guys there.  They were both very nice and more importantly, knew which direction the main group had set off.  We took off after them and soon caught up.  I did get one (I think) good shot off before we started walking:

I didn’t talk much at first, as I’m not the most outgoing guy to begin with.  Missing the start of the walk and more importantly all the introductions didn’t help my cause either.  Eventaully, I did start chatting with another photographer, Scott, who was nice enough to lend me one of his lenses to try out.  It was a 70-300mm monster, which for surpassed any zoom lens in my limited arsenal.  I haven’t finshed processing the best shots I took with it, but, man, was it fun - and a nice ice breaker into talking with others.

It also got me a little more jazzed about the event in general.  Up to that point, I felt a little like an outsider, but after some conversation, I started taking more pictures and trying a few different things.  Was came a across a row of brilliantly colored shops, and that lead to one of my favorite photos of the day:

As we moved along, I spent some time walking and talking to three other guys, discussing technical preferences and general photography.  I spent the last half of the walk chatting with some combination of these three and Mark, the organizer.  It was a great experience and one that I hope to enjoy again over the next few months.  Go check out my photos from the day, leave comments, and check back often as the set will grow.

Well, I removed my dilapidated photo blog yesterday and moved my old entries over to Zooomr. You can find more information on the Photo-a-Week page. I decided to try out Zooomr because they have no files size limits (I can archive full res images there!) and a lot of tagging options, including people, geo-tagging, and general labels. And it’s all free. But it’s still in beta. Oh well. No thing’s perfect.

This move has inspired my to shoot more. Here’s my image for today, from the early morning painting session in our family room:

Yet another story of harassment of a local photographer is picked up by the Raw Fisher blog over at the Washington Post. This time, the unlucky photog took pictures of an unmarked office building, only to find that it housed DARPA, which apparently found the behavior ’suspicious’. Can’t wait to see the reaction by the DC Photo Rights group or on Free Our Streets.

Want the first-hand account?  Go read the photographer’s own words.

Have to mention this, because my wife has been on me about posting more images… There are one or two more in this series that I’m hoping to get put up soon. For now, please to enjoy:

Kids in the Mist

Click above to see the large version and leave a comment.

There’s an interesting and insightful little anecdote on the Post’s Raw Fisher blog discussing the rights of photographers in Silver Spring, MD.  This is obviously close to my heart, as I enjoy taking photographs in the area.  I, too, have been stopped by a security guard before and asked to stop shooting because of private property restrictions.  My case was not in Silver Spring and indeed the security guard was incorrect in his assertion to me.  While a similar situation may have been in effect, I was told that I was specifically not allowed to photograph the buildings, not that the location I was shooting from was private property, as with the linked story.

This is likely to be an increasingly difficult line to discern and will probably be litigated extensively in the future.  As local governments look to developers to help fund the upkeep of their developments, more and more spaces will fall into this semi-public gray area.  It’s not that public funds weren’t used in development, so to claim that a certain sidewalk is private property is disingenuous.  However, the developer does have some rights be the very nature of their continued maintenance of the area.  Somehow, rights have to be balanced, though stopping amateur photographers seems to be overkill.

Two cool things from the Washington Post’s Sunday Source this week.  In an unusual twist, I actually read them in the dead tree version before I saw them on-line.

First up was an article about blogging about your neighborhood.  There’s a very brief intro, then interviews with four area bloggers that focus on their neighborhoods and related local issues.  THere are also tips on how to successfully blog locally.  Of course, this got me thinking about Eastern Loudoun County and Potomac Falls, specifically.  Then I realized that I know so little about what is going on locally, I would have no chance to pull this off.  That and I’m completely lacking time and energy for such an undertaking.  My ADHD hardly cares about that, though.

Secondly, there was the mention of a photo contest that looked intriguing.  The Scenes of Summer contest is simple enough: take a picture on the start of the summer season (June 21) and send it in with a little information.  Top prize is a published photo and a $100 gift card.  Right now, I’m telling myself I need to get in on that action.  On the 21st, I’m sure I’ll be too lazy or busy, but I can dream for now, right?

The weeks just don’t matter anymore as I’ve clearly blown the photo a week challenge. Anyway, this new posting is born out of playing with a conversion tool under Linux and my extreme feeling of frustration at work. It may not be a great photograph, but to me, it conveys the emotion I was going for…

Wow, am I late!  This should have been up by January 28.  I still have to get two more images up by the end of Sunday to be back on track.  I have one in the can, though, so it’s really only one more image that I need to capture.  I’ll post Week 5, probably around Thursday/Friday.  Check out my photo-a-week page.