Shoegazer

Shoegazer, originally uploaded by dbwalker.

Yes ... I take a lot of pictures of my feet. I've got about 19 pretty good shots... Perhaps a PDF book is in the works.

Just words

Just words, originally uploaded by dbwalker.

Sometimes words have no meaning.

I was listening to a Radiolab episode (WNYC Podcast) that was talking about the world wide popularity of traditional country music. Turns out that the aborigines in Australia's outback have an unquenchable thirst for chortling yodeling country music.

The reasons proffered by the podcast were interesting. As it turns out, the "cry break", the yodel-esq twang that is a signature of country music singing, is a universal sound that strikes a chord in many people, regardless of the meaning of the words in the song.

This sound, said the podcast, evokes a longing for home, a nostalgia for times gone by, a universal plaintiff wail that crosses the lines of language.

You don't need to know the words to know what the song is about.

Flickr: Project oriented photography group

Project oriented photography group on Flickr

I enjoyed participating in SoFoBoMo so much, that I want to extend it, or at least practice more project based photography. I'm willing to bet there are a few more SoFoBoMo'ers that may want to do so as well.

To that end I have created a Flickr group for it.

Group Description:

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This is a group dedicated to the photographic series. I have found that a series of photographs that belong together are not only dificult to produce, but far more rewarding than striving to produce a single photo that might say ... make explore, or be included in a greatest hits photo compilation.

If you prefer the long playing form of photography, please join and post your projects to the pool. (See posting rules).

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Lets see whats in your project!

Project oriented photography group on Flickr

All my colors

All my colors, originally uploaded by dbwalker.

Still life @ 30,000 feet or .... What to do with things you get on an airplane on the tray table in front of you.

From left to right back to front:
A water bottle
Emergency procedures pamphlet
A half full water glass
With a red straw in it

Taken with a G9, manual focus blurred, with camera motion...

SoFoBoMo wrapup: Processing the files

(Photo: "Cant make up my mind" - from a trip to Austin TX last week)

In my last SoFoBoMo entry I discussed shooting, and a little processing. In this one I'll discuss how I processed the files in a more in-depth manner.

After doing all the shooting, rating, sorting and deleting many shots I ended up with over 100 shots to process. I wanted to process all of the RAW files in Adobe Camera Raw, move into Photoshop and do the black and white conversion there. I quickly figured out that it would simply take too long to finish that way. (Largely because I waited till the last 2 days of the fuzzy month to do the processing, lesson for next year ... set a date certain for end of shooting and schedule at least a week for post)

I ended up using Aperture for most processing and black and white conversion. And, in hindsight, it may have been better to do it that way. I could look at all of the files at once, smaller groups of files, two up etc. It gave me the ability to make judgments as to how well the shots fit together in terms of content, composition and processing.




Consistency was the name of the game. Had I done this processing in ACR and Photoshop, I'm sure I would have had to do a lot more re-edits to get the to look consistent. Using Aperture it changed the process from editing a single image and moving to the next to editing them as a group. Zooming in and out on groups of them and looking at them as thumbnails helped to smooth out the rough edges a lot.

I made the decision to go for a film grain and toned look early in this process. Unfortunatly Aperture does not have a grain (noise) generator, and the toning simply leaves a lot to be desired. With 108 images to process and only a few free hours over the last 2 days of my fuzzy month I had to take the easy way out.

I ended up using Alien Skin Exposure. I selected a TRI-X 400 preset and worked with the grain and tone controls to get a look I enjoyed. I then exported the files from Aperture as TIFF and created a Photoshop action to help apply the plugin to the files and save them as new files.

Then I took these files, and imported them back into Aperture for final sequencing and layout ... yes ... layout.

Next: Creating a PDF book with Aperture.

Thursday Walk 5-15

Thursday Walk 5-15
Originally uploaded by dbwalker

A 30 second walkabout.
Original music ....
Mmmmmm fun.

SoFoBoMo wrapup: Shooting Rodin

(Photo: From a promo shoot for one of the bands I'm in)

Shooting other peoples art is tricky. Some might say that when you photograph another persons art you should endeavor to only document the piece, and not try to expand on it or try and claim your photograph as art. Some would say the exact opposite. I am leaning towards the latter.

That is to say, I did not approach the sculpture garden to just inventory and document the works there. I wanted to capture it's effect on me, it's often visceral and wrenching effect. So I put all of the tools I could to work towards that end, camera position, composition, light, focal length, aperture, bokeh etc.


The Martyr, Rodin

Light became a bit of a problem, in that there was way too much hard light most of the time. I had set aside lunchtime to work on this project so the middle of the day was when I had to shoot. I was lucky in that there were some (rare) overcast days while I was there.

Over the course of shooting I tripped the shutter a total of about 1000 times on 6 trips of between 1 and 2 hours each. It's a 15 min round trip to the garden from work, so a few long lunches were involved.

All of the photos were imported into Aperture for initial editing and ranking. However, my fuzzy month was made even more fuzzy because of that crazy bad flu going around. Being in bed ate up a lot of shooting and editing time. As a result I spent my up-time shooting, and down time in bed. This left most of the sorting and editing to the end which, in hind sight, was a mistake.

Looking at the book now (with a weeks perspective on it), I should have cut it down to about 1/2 the size. But, without the limitations of SoFoBoMo I bet I would still be out shooting.

Next: Creating the book itself