10-24-12 – Time on My Hands

That is FULL of win, Pope!!

NBD; Pope’s theme, Pope’s rules. And his suggestion reminds me of a little trick I picked up from a wedding photog…

I guess you and I have different ideas of what qualifies as “good,” Yugoboy. I’m certainly liking more than 1/50 of my shots. I’ve been playing around with moving lights, zooming shots, panning shots, rotating shots. The country fair was a gold mine between the arts & crafts hall and the midway. I haven’t tried writing my name yet or multiple exposures via bulb setting and lens cap, but I’ve still got a week at least.

I guess you and I have different ideas of what qualifies as “good,” Yugoboy. I’m certainly liking more than 1/50 of my shots.

By “Good” I’m thinking of shots that will give me an outside shot to place well in a Farktography contest. There’s plenty of shots that are interesting, and some that I even like, but I also know the vast vast vast majority of them have zero zilch nada chance of placing anywhere near the top in a contest where U-Man, orionid, kestrana, Mopsy, and at least a half dozen others are just consistently awesome.

A good week for me is when I get one in the top ten. On one occasion I even had the fleeting joy of checking voting at about 6:30 in the morning and being in the lead. That ended right quick, but for those precious few minutes I was quite happy.

Don’t get me wrong, the level of competition here is pushing me to look at things differently and to try to shoot and process not just for me, but for a broader audience as well. My photography has improved dramatically in ways it never would have were the competition less daunting. I’m not shooting and processing any shots I don’t like or am not happy with just because I think they’d do well, so I’m not saying that either.

One thing I’ve spent the last 2 Wednesdays doing is holding my camera in one hand and shooting out the car window on my 40+ minute commute to and from the college I work at. The results are interesting, to say the very least. And I’ll be doing it again this week as well.

Have I mentioned how much bloody fun this theme has been? I’m still looking for more stuff to do, and the nature of the beast means that for every 50 or 75 shots, you get 1 good one, but the feeling I get when that good one pops up on my monitor is the whole reason this hobby’s so fun… absolute satisfaction in a job well done.
Also… lots of happy accidents.

My ratio is about 1000:1 😛

So, the shoulder is out too I assume?

Anyways most of my photos are done on handheld on the fly anyway as I rarely shoot with a tripod or on a surface. That and I’m usually drunk.

So, I decided to see how usable of a normal image I could make within the contest rules. It is’t exactly sharp, but it’s better than I expected. Of course this is the sharpest from like 10 frames though….

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8193/8118138484_f93f623e48_o.jpg

Not bad at all!

One of mine for tonight is kind of similar in that it’s supposed to be what it is, with a filter-achieved “look” as opposed to the other 2 which are more artsy, and definitely smeared.

FWIW, I found I achieved best results for “clarity” over the 5 seconds if I held the camera down around waist level. Less stress from holding it up, I guess.

I had a couple of what I thought were decent ideas, but ran out of time to implement them to my satisfaction. One of these days, I’m going to start prepping for contests more than a couple of days before go-time (although I rarely get to dictate my schedule; it’s usually the other way around). Anyway, unless the heavens part and divine inspiration strikes, I’ll be sitting this one out. Ought to be a fun contest, though.

I did daylight shots, super high FStop (my Sigma 24-70 goes to f32) and braced the camera against my chest and held my breath. I got some really cool “impressionist” shots, all color and no detail, but you can still recognize what they are. It’s definitely different yet still appealing.