f/8 and be there

The old adage "f/8 and be there" is a great one, reminding us the most important ingredient of a good photograph is actually taking it, and letting go of all of the technical considerations. A case in point is this image.

I took this during the big snowstorms of 2010 and think it is a pretty successful image. From a technical perspective, it has a lot of problems. First and foremost, it is a pretty heavy crop of the original image, below.


As you can see, the deer by itself is only a small portion of the original, weighing in at only 586x878 pixels. That's only half a megapixel!

Another problem is that I made the shot hand-held from the inside of my house, through a double-paned window. Talk about a crappy lens!

There are a lot of things I would like to change about this image. It could have been a lot bigger with a 30 megapixel camera. It could have been sharper if I had used a tripod and a better lens. I didn't have any of these, but I managed to capture an image I like enough to print and hang on my wall!

A view from Saturn

This has really been the year for snow. In a single snowfall, we got chest-high drifts; quite a big deal for the mid-Atlantic region of the US! I really love the textures created by the low angle of the sun on freshly fallen snow. If you look at the full size version, you can really see the texture. This reminds me of the rings of Saturn, hence the name of this article. Enjoy!

Snow Drift, originally uploaded by GeekNeck.

Back in the saddle again

OK, so its been forever since the last entry. I could give you lots of excuses why, but who cares. The important thing is that I have completely changed my photographic platform. I'm now using Lightroom 2 on Mac OS X and loving it!

I'm not much on New Year's resolutions, but I have resolved to be more active in finishing images. I would love to be able to put out an image a day, but that would be sheer insanity. A much more reasonable goal is to post one quality image a month. Not only will I post the image here, but I will also print and display that image. So, stay tuned to see if I can stick with it!

Kitty Tunnel

Kitty Tunnel, originally uploaded by GeekNeck.

I have this image on my wall at home as a gelatin-silver print from the old film days. I just realized that I haven't posted it anywhere, and remembered that I had scanned the negative a number of years ago.

Pulling that old scan out reminded me that I had a huge archive of scanned negatives I had basically forgotten about. I'm really looking forward to going back through those and making digital copies.

Seeing this has also reminded me how much I prefer digital imaging to analog. I used to load my own bulk film into canisters, develop the film, and make prints with an enlarger in a closet or bathroom. While I shot a lot of film, I didn't have a whole lot to show for it, except a bunch of negatives. Making prints with chemicals and an enlarger is a huge time sink. Not that digital isn't, but the difference is that analog processing required huge blocks of time, whereas digital lets me work at my own pace. Once chemicals are mixed and poured, they go bad, so I would essentially devote a whole weekend to print making. How often do we have the luxury of spending an entire weekend doing something?

IR Waterfall

110-1031_IMG, originally uploaded by GeekNeck.

This image has been quite popular on Flickr, so I thought this might be a good one to christen the blog. It was taken at Scott's Run Park in McLean, Virginia. I took it quite a while ago, back when my Canon G1 was new.

It had been raining quite a bit the week before, and I wanted to get a really delicate shot of the water. I didn't have enough ND filter to really slow it down, and I was experimenting with Infrared, so I figured I could kill two birds with one stone.

Flickr

I've set up a link between my Flickr site and the blog. Hopefully it will be easy to talk about photos posted there.

Welcome!

Welcome to my Photography blog, a place where I'll be talking about my photography. Enjoy!