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!