Rick’s Rants and Raves

I’ve been meaning to write this post since about Christmas time, but illness and busy schedules have prevented me from completing it.

It has been just over a year since Anne and I received the Nikon D60 from Anne’s mom for Christmas. I had always been interested in photography, but that gift really sparked a huge creative burst for me. In the time since that gift, I’ve taken around 7000 pictures, published around 800 to Flickr, and written 26 blog posts. My photography blog category is now bigger than my computer blog category. So this post is a summary of my experience and progression through the year.

• 12/25/08, received the Nikon D60, kit lens and small camera bag. I already had an old external Vivitar 2800 flash and a nice camera bag from our film days, but it would be months before I even figured out how to trigger that flash on the camera.
• Most of the early pictures I took with the camera were “documentary” in nature–shooting people to document the fun they were having at the time. I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about composition, but I did occasionally try to find interesting angles.
• In late January, I created my first light box out of some white cardboard, tissue paper, and a discarded milk crate. I lit the box using utility lights, then shot my son’s pinewood derby car.
  
• My second experiment with intentional off-camera lighting came with the Black Rose. This is where I started to learn how to manipulate relative light levels (back ground versus subject) to achieve a desired effect. The rose was not in a box–it was in my dining room lit by a flashlight.
• In March, I took a trip to San Francisco for work training, and of course took the camera. My original photographic goal was a sunrise panorama from the top of Mount Tamalpais. I got up to the top of the mountain at 6AM one morning when the light was just starting to crest the horizon. It was an absolutely gorgeous scene in 270 degrees. I set the camera to a wide angle and made the shots that I intended to later stitch together. However, I’d left the camera on auto and as a result, it adjusted the exposure as I went from the bright side of the horizon to the dark. When I attempted to stitch it all together, even after extensive attempts at correction, the result had obvious bands where the individual pictures changed exposure. So I came away from the trip with a few decent shots, but not what I had hoped for.
• In April, at a family Easter dinner, a lot of folks requested that I take family group shots. Looking back at them now, they are pretty, well, meh. They are adequate for impromptu shots, but I’ve had better efforts since then.
• Also in April, we took a trip to the zoo with 4 cameras. In my original note about the trip, I said I wanted to do some mosaics of the topics that we all shot. I never did that. Until now.
  
  Some time I’ll need to do a more thorough job of going through that set.
• June was a busy month, with summer vacation and all. Together, Anne and I made over 1200 shots. One of the events was a target rich environment: a family reunion & memorial. I learned a great deal about patience at that event, as in lack of patience is a serious weakness of mine. Fortunately, I still made a fair number of decent and fun shots.
  
• The next important piece of camera gear came in mid-June: a Sigma 70-300mm lens. The very next day, Anne and I went to Hocking Hills to exercise ourselves, our cameras, and the new lens. That lens stayed on the camera for the majority of the next couple of months.
• At the end of June and into early July, we went to Vermont for a week. It was such a great week for so many reasons. We made a ton of pictures. One of the things I attempted to focus on was capturing family portraits. We got 1 2 3 4 5 6.
• I had been following Digital Photography School blog posts and assignments for a while (I joined the forum in December 2008), but first submitted a photo for one of their assignment challenges at the end of July.
• At the end of July, Anne and I went to the Dublin Irish Festival, and I really tried to focus on shooting the performers. For me it was as much about photography as it was about the music and the other details of the festival. I think it was at this event that I really started to make the transition into manual mode shooting. The auto exposure setting just wasn’t capturing the performers quite like I wanted, so I changed to aperture priority. My success at this event gave me the courage to start trying more manual shooting.
  
• In the middle of August, we took another week-long vacation, this time with some friends to their family cottage in Ontario. This was another exercise in expanding my patience, photographically. Sunsets in the area were beautiful. The wildlife was mostly tame, and the kids had a lot of fun playing together. It was during this week that I really started to want to dabble in off-camera flash. I had seen some shots that would have been helped had there been a bit more light in just one part of the scene, but I didn’t currently have a way to achieve that.
  
• Emboldened by my (perceived) success at shooting the Dublin Irish Festival, I was very much looking forward to shooting Albanach at the Piqua Heritage Festival in early September. Unfortunately, this was a bit difficult because everyone in the audience was sitting down. This meant I could get about three shots while standing up before I was worried I was in someone’s way for too long.
• September continued to present photographic opportunities with a trip to the Ohio Renaissance Festival including some more shots at Albannach. The challenge for me on this trip was that I’d been a couple of times before, and was finding the usual targets to be uninspiring. So I tried to dig a little deeper, without too much success.
  
• I did a portrait session with family at my grandparents’ anniversary dinner. This was fun, and I learned a lot looking at the pictures afterward.
• I continued to follow Digital Photography School, and decided to submit a self portrait for their “Contrast” assignment. This was done in my basement with a dark blue blanket as a back ground, and a utility light coming from the side. This was the first self-portrait I’d done since, I think, the summer of 2007. I don’t remember when I purchased the wireless remote for the camera, but it was critical for this kind of shot, making it very easy to alter my pose and shoot the shot rather than having to pose myself within the 10 second delay timer.
• In the beginning of October, I finally “bit the bullet” and invested in some off-camera lighting equipment. I bought a nice all-manual flash, a wireless trigger set, a light stand and an umbrella. This was one of the best investments in camera gear yet, aside from the DSLR in the first place. This has allowed me to really push my photography skills to another level.
• With my own lighting gear, and some borrowed from a friend, I prepared to do portraits for my daughter’s volleyball team. I learned at the actual shoot that many tween girls just aren’t comfortable in front of the camera. And despite concerns on my part that we’d never do a team shot, we actually pulled one off a couple of months later.
• I continued to experiment with the off-camera flash in various ways, including a more goofy self-portrait. At the request of Mother Grove, Anne and I shot a performance as a team. The basic technique involved Anne as the light stand, pointing the flash at one of the performers, while I stood somewhere else to make the shot. I was really pleased with the results, but also learned a good bit technically about the process.
• A few days after the Mother Grove performance, I shot a Mescalito rehearsal in preparation to shoot one of their performances. It was tough shooting in a cramped basement, without my voice-activated light stand, but I made a few decent shots. More than anything, I was attempting to learn some of their dynamics so that I would be better prepared to capture some of their “moments”. The performance went well, especially with Anne helping as voice-activated light stand.
• A week later, we shot another Mother Grove performance. We had pretty decent success, but I encountered the same problem I’d had shooting the Ohio Renaissance Festival: if it is a topic I’ve shot before, it is harder for me to be inspired to find those creative angles or subjects. For the first hour of their performance, I brooded about not getting a portrait of the band, but then made some more decent shots.
  
• With all this success at shooting musician performances, I’ve felt like I wanted to “take it up a level”. I’ve been trying two avenues: a) getting an all access pass to the Dublin Irish Festival, and b) free-lancing for the Other Paper.  In preparation for both (hoping they might feed into each other), I set up a portfolio web site with only my best performance shots. Nothing has come of either effort at this point. Those efforts are on-going (though they took a bit of a break during the holidays).
• Two of my photos have received some external (not friends or family) recognition recently. First, a photo I submitted to a DPS Assignment for Technology won an honorable mention, and lots of praise from readers of that site. The second is a request from OhioFireFighters.com to put an old picture on their website. I’ve granted permission, but it hasn’t gone up yet. The other more personal “recognition” my work has received is that a number of folks have made my shots their profile pics on Facebook. This, of course is the ultimate compliment coming from my 12-year-old: “That is SO going on my profile!“
• Finally, I asked for help from friends and family in choosing my best photograph of the year. The best part of that was that the response was so varied, and really spoke to folks personal tastes.
• The other major change in my photography came when I switched the camera to shoot in RAW mode. This helped a great deal in post-processing, adjusting white balance and exposure.

We’ve had some additional fun as a family, shooting a train exhibit recently that I’ll write more about soon. That one deserves its own post.