Went to the eye doctor today. Had been feeling like I needed a new prescription especially on the close vision. Well, I most certainly do need new glasses. My near vision has moved the visual equivalent of a full f/stop but my distance vision has only deteriorated slightly. So I am trying to slide by with new reading glasses.
Funny thing. I had shot many pictures on the 1st which I had already looked at and rated for focus, exposure, framing and so on. Looked through them again with the new glasses. Now sometimes I want tight focus and sometimes I want soft but Uh oh! It seems that I have been rejecting shots that I believed they were not crisply in focus that actually had perfectly tight focus. Conversely some shots I thought were nice tight focus are actually soft. I wonder if discovering 20/20 vision again will change the work I produce?
I spent all day today in the Lightroom. I took a photo cruise with B&H around Manhattan back in October. They teamed up with A&I Photobooks on a promotion that lets you create a 40 page photo book of the day very inexpensively. I took over 700 hundred pictures that day. Today I spent the day cutting.
First cut brought me to 250. Second cut to 140. Those I did some minimal work on (primarily white balance and exposure) and then cut down to 75. Those I worked more extensively. I am now down to 59 and will make my final cut in the morning.
I worked one picture more than the rest and below we have it in theme and variations. I am interested to hear your thoughts. Which one do you like?
I was downtown visiting a friend at her photo shoot for The Food Network Magazine. As many of you know, food shooting is difficult and very precise work. It is very difficult to make good food look good on camera. People work extremely hard and with great precision to bring you all those pretty pictures you see in the magazines. It is a very controlled environment.
When I left I walked out onto Broadway…a less controlled environment.
Decided to take a second pass at Ailsa’s Travel theme of soft (other entries may be seen here). This is not my usual style but I like it.
Shot at 6:45 AM on October 21, 2011.
Tech Talk Time:
Lens 300mm
ISO 200
1/15 of a second
I worked on it a bit in Lightroom. The main changes were dropping the exposure a stop and a half, soften the contrast and de-saturating. A few other small tweaks but that is about it.
New York was quieter than normal most of the day as it was Yom Kippur and many of our neighbors throughout the city were in the synagogue for services or at home fasting. As the day moved towards sunset I took a walk down to the river and saw many people in groups with prayer books while others sat in contemplative quiet.
Of course, not everyone at the river was contemplating the conclusion of The High Holy Days…
Texture: That is Ailsa travel theme this week. This is one at which I may very well take several passes. (Can’t be ending a sentence with a proposition, can I grammar mavens?).
When I think texture, I immediately think of the river. I could do a whole month of posts (or a book), just charting its textural changes from source to mouth but two will do for the day. In honor of the theme, I worked on these two photographs more than I normally do.
B&H Event Space has a monthly(ish) group meeting called the Infinity Group. It is open to any and all photographers (as far as I can tell). The idea is that a month out you get a shooting “assignment”, shoot and/or edit to fulfill the task and then bring in up to three images on the theme and share thought and ideas. I decided to see what it was about and went last night. The assignment was:
“Infinists are asked to submit up to three images that define the animal in you. These may be images of animals you closely identify with, or photoshopped almagrams of self portraits and beasts. In typical Infinist fashion, we will conduct a slide show of all submitted images then return to the images where you can explain and comment on the photographs.”
Some people photoshopped themselves on to or into the faces of animals, others showed animals they love or identify with, one person tweaked the assignment to show “the beast within.” I came to this very late and tore through the archives tracking down old shots that I thought fit the bill…
We borrowed David and Jenna’s car to pick Abigail up from Putney. The Graciemobile simply isn’t large enough for the three of us and all a teenagers stuff. This is across the street from the garage.
The picture below is from the first day I tested the idea of Quotidian Hudson and if I would actually be able to do what I wanted.
