Everyone loves a hug – Photo of the Day #40

January 21st, 2010 • photography
Tags: cute, d90, hugs, kitty, nikon, nikon d90, photo of the day, photography, project 365, project365

I love this candid shot of Kitty sleeping with one of our mice cuddled up next to his head. The fact that it looks like it’s hugging him is so adorable.

I just got a camera, I’m already a pro

January 21st, 2010 • chatter
Tags: photography, satire

I came across this hilarious Salt Lake City Craigslist ad yesterday. It’s a greatly written satire about the influx of new cameras into the hands of inexperienced people who now think they’re pros simply because their pictures look great on the camera’s tiny LCD. This is what happens when most people get handed a DSLR for Christmas. There’s been a flood of posts from new camera owners on Reddit since Christmas asking all sorts of questions, some good, others very bad (or annoying). I don’t fault many of them for these questions however, many of them do expect to be Ansel Adams in a week.

I like this fake ad because, while I’m sure the poster actually got a lot of contact, they’re tired of seeing their niche in SLC flooded with people who think they know what they’re doing but are damned convinced they do. I’m fairly certain their inbox was inundated with requests to shoot because the ad was for a cheap photographer, from people who didn’t see that they were feeding into the problem the poster is having. It’s a good mix of satire and seething barbs at “hacks” who almost overnight make the jump from open box to shooting for money.

Sure, I know what you’re thinking: “he just got a camera a few months ago and is now lampooning new shooters.” You’re entirely correct, except I got my own personal DSLR a few months ago. I’ve been shooting with my girlfriend’s since I purchased it for her and I started shooting 10 years ago, off an on. However, I know that my skills as compared to many top shooters today, are extremely lacking and I’m willing to admit that and am cognizant of it. My enjoyment of this post on Craigslist comes from the fact that I’ve been around people like this in the last few years at various photo shoots we’ve been on and it’s absolutely hilarious to see them work. Or at least try to.

Let’s all talk about nothing – Photo of the Day #39

January 20th, 2010 • photography
Tags: d90, nikon, nikon d90, photo of the day, photography, project 365, project365, starbucks

These ladies were a great cadre of conversation tonight at our friendly Starbucks. They yapped almost endlessly the whole time we were there.

This is a lot more grainy than I wanted it to be as I was not paying attention to the fact that my lens was wide open at f/1.8 and introducing so much noise. I was more worried about why my remote wasn’t firing. Nikon, I like your wireless remote but PLEASE make these things work 360 degrees around the camera. having to be in front of it is absolutely stupid.

A mighty fine fire – Photo of the Day #38

January 20th, 2010 • photography
Tags: d90, lighter, nikon, nikon d90, photo of the day, photography, project 365, project365

Took this on a whim in my bathroom with the lights off. The flame’s obviously not that big but I achieved a voluptuous flame by setting the camera to a 5 sec exposure and lightly blew on it from the left. I like the way it came out.

Sensationalism and how NPR completely missed the point

January 19th, 2010 • chatter
Tags: journalism, npr, photography, sensationalism

As you all know, Port-au-Prince got hit by an earthquake last week. It was devastating and heavily destroyed the city. The Western media has spent the last 7 days showing non-stop images of the area and reported on it ceaselessly. Why? Mostly because Americans believe there isn’t anything else going on in the world and they — the media — know we love sensationalist pieces. I’ve been so put off by this I haven’t bothered actually keeping up with any developments about what’s going on. It’s not that I don’t care the people on the ground, it’s that I don’t care about what’s being reported because, aside from this earthquake, what’s coming out of Haiti is the same story for the last twenty or thirty years.

However, there’s a new kid in town: gigabytes, and probably terabytes, of images relating to the disaster plastered all over the news, news sites, Twitter, Facebook, and who knows where else. I’ve looked at what’s been posted at Boston.com out of curiosity. Mind you, not morbid curiosity, but sheer curiosity of what’s going to be posted. I wanted to be greeted with images of people being helped but instead all I got where above-ground mass graves, people being crushed, and people in the hospital. This is what I’ve got a problem with. Everyone in the world knows this has happened, we all know people have been injured and have died, but we also know that there’s been a huge surge of UN and rescue forces dropped into Port-au-Prince to help. Where are the images of those people, helping to clear away the rubble, devastation, and piles of bodies? Nowhere to be found it seems.

Then I read the following article from NPR about disaster photography helping to dull our sensitivity to such issues. The author questions when photos of a disaster go from informative to sensationalist. That’s easy to figure out: when every photograph is of devastation and nothing else. There are scant photographs of the doctors, search and rescue techs, military personnel, and even Haitians helping out. It’s all dead bodies and crumbled buildings. This is when reporting is nothing more than sensationalism. Garsd then goes to question how this occurred and while I agree that six Saw movies have helped to dull our collective senses, the blame lies squarely at the media for not only showing minute after minute of this but actively promoting and pushing it into our faces.

This “new” genre of “gore pornography” has been around for decades now. Horror movies latched onto this back in the days of grindhouse and the Internet certainly was awash in it in the 90s. It’s nothing new, it’s just new to the media. The NPR article fully misses the point that we as humans didn’t naturally become desensitized to images of decomposing bodies, we had media outlets shove them down our throats. While scanning Reddit the other day, I had the displeasure of seeing a picture of a small child being tossed, literally, onto a growing pile of bodies. For the first time in years, I was actually disgusted by this. Not because of the image itself, but because someone was there to take an entirely unnecessary photograph and by the gutless media outlet that published it.

Jasmine Garsd and NPR miss the point of why this happens and don’t bother to look in the mirror. She also offers up the quaint tidbit that she “people who have told me they never donated money to a cause before”, therefore letting all the readers know she is acquainted with some pretty selfish individuals. Thank you for letting everyone else know your friends are just a little bit “better” than the rest of us.

Fuzzy in blue – Photo of the Day #37

January 18th, 2010 • chatter
Tags: nikon, nikon d90, photo of the day, photography, project 365, project365, signs, wowies

My beautiful girlfriend Jess from tonight’s visit to Wowies. I can’t remember if we were talking about eating too much or Australian Chippendales.

A lull in the conversation – Photo of the Day #36

January 17th, 2010 • photography
Tags: d90, nikon, nikon d90, photo of the day, photography, project 365, project365, starbucks

I took this at the Starbucks in Mizner Park tonight and it was a random shot to get. I like the candidness of the photo but not the fact that the table is in the forefront! Couldn’t do much about that since the woman noticed that I was taking pictures of them and got kind of mad at me.

Tonight is the night I also noticed that I’ve developed my first hot pixel in my D90. It’s barely noticeable in the above photo but was a very prominent red dot in many of my other pictures from tonight, which really irks me. I understand it can happen frequently at high ISOs. However, I’ve noticed it from 200 to 1600, at very different ISOs and shutter speeds. It never reared its head until today and I will keep a close eye on it from now on. I read that this is very common problem with the D90, we’ve never had this problem with our weathered Casio EXILIM EXZ750.

Quick, make me a drink – Photo of the Day #35

January 17th, 2010 • photography
Tags: d90, irishmen, nikon, nikon d90, photo of the day, photography, project 365, project365

Quick candid shot of my friend Kelly behind the bar at the Irishmen, making up a new drink that she said tasted “good”. Then, about 6 hours later, I ask her if it was actually good and she said it was horrible. It was a mix of Grey Goose, Patron coffee-flavored tequila, and some Chambord. It sounded absolutely terrible from the get go.

This is the Project 365 photo for 16 January 2010.

Step away from the lights – Photo of the Day #34

January 17th, 2010 • photography
Tags: boca raton, d90, nikon, nikon d90, photo of the day, photography, project 365, project365

This was a lucky shot I got on the way to the bar Friday night. These are the extremely out of focus lights on top of a Boca police cruiser. I had meant to get the lights in focus but didn’t remember that I had left my lens on manual focus. This is probably way better than what I would have gotten any way.

This is the Project 365 picture for 15 January 2010, just posting it late.

Take a ride, take a picture – Photo of the Day #33

January 14th, 2010 • photography
Tags: d90, motorcycle, nikin d90, nikon, photo of the day, photography, project 365, project365

I took this earlier today while riding down the road on my motorcycle. It wasn’t easy to do and, according to my girlfriend, certainly not safe. I agree with one of those. It was fun taking these pictures but definitely not the easiest thing to do. Trying to take pictures with your left-hand using a right-handed camera, pretty weird to do.

This is now my 4,000th upload to my Flickr account . And to believe it all started with some pictures here and there then a deluge of Hurricane Wilma pictures and I really haven’t slowed down much since then.