11-19-08 – The Inept Farktographer

crazily, there’s really not a lot of noise in the image.

I suppose once you saturate the sensor, noise doesn’t matter 🙂

Finding photos for this week’s contest was very entertaining and raised a couple of questions I hadn’t expected. First of all I quickly decided to make this a rummage through archives, since going out to intentionally take inept photos didn’t makes sense in my case. I can see how trying out new ideas, new equipment, new settings, etc… without thinking them through could work. But I have enough awful results from years of learning through mistakes that I could just edit from countless choices.

Even then, deciding what makes a “good” bad photo was a challenge. There are so many ways an image can go wrong from bad composition, bad lighting/setting, accidents at just the wrong moment, bad choices for settings/lens, equipment/film malfunctions, etc… I wasn’t sure which route to take so I threw up (pun?) a wide range of miserable photos in a gallery and asked friends to laugh and point. Those replies have been lots of fun, so this contest is already a big win for me.

Have a look at 59 shades of fail if you need a chuckle and post your own “almost but not quite bad enough” selections here if you had too many to pick from too.

Finding photos for this week’s contest was very entertaining and raised a couple of questions I hadn’t expected. First of all I quickly decided to make this a rummage through archives, since going out to intentionally take inept photos didn’t makes sense in my case. I can see how trying out new ideas, new equipment, new settings, etc… without thinking them through could work. But I have enough awful results from years of learning through mistakes that I could just edit from countless choices.

Even then, deciding what makes a “good” bad photo was a challenge. There are so many ways an image can go wrong from bad composition, bad lighting/setting, accidents at just the wrong moment, bad choices for settings/lens, equipment/film malfunctions, etc… I wasn’t sure which route to take so I threw up (pun?) a wide range of miserable photos in a gallery and asked friends to laugh and point. Those replies have been lots of fun, so this contest is already a big win for me.

Have a look at 59 shades of fail if you need a chuckle and post your own “almost but not quite bad enough” selections here if you had too many to pick from too.

Choc-Ful-A, thanks for the inspiration. I’ve been doing a bit of rummaging myself.

There is definitely a fine line between crappy with character and just pain ol’ crappy. I think I’ve settled on a few that make me chuckle (or at least say WTF).

Looking forward to a truly bizarre contest this week.

mine are mostly kicked the tripod during long exposure in the dark shots.

except for one, which got screwed up as the frozen muskeg I was on started sinking into the non-frozen muck below, causing star trails to do some weird things.

I should just link to all of my fark party pictures.

I’ve got my freinds voting on my “top six” rejects right now. Once the state of VA makes up it’s mind, we may have a winner.

This is already one of my all time favorite farktography threads. Keep ’em comin’ people!

Also, if corsec67 ever gets sick or anything and needs a stand in photographer, I volunteer.

Only if I can borrow your kids.

(If you are referring to my first entry, Meetup.com has a pretty good photography section, which is where I get to shoot with most of the models I work with. Now I just need to work on the “get paid to work with models” part.)