thechrisproject photography

I talked a lot about Flickr in my DeVotchKa post a few weeks ago, but my thoughts about it have developed some since then. I still really like Flickr, but I’m not as enamored with it as I was before. I think Flickr really deserves some credit for getting me really interested in photography again. Getting positive feedback from strangers and seeing your ‘viewed’ and ‘favorited’ numbers go up is a big confidence booster. But, as with most metrics, those numbers can be gamed. It’s easy to fall into that trap, especially with the analytical programmer part of my brain. There are a lot of groups that are geared towards getting more views, comments, and favorites. Look at all these 1-2-3 groups. The idea is that you post 1, you comment on 2, and you view 3 pictures in the pool. This blatant gaming of the system just seems ridiculous to me. Yes, I understand the desire, but doesn’t it feel like cheating to the participants?

The other thing that I initially thought was cool was critique groups. I’m still learning a lot and getting critiques from others seems important. I take a fair number of live music photographs, so I joined a group wherein you post pictures and rate other pictures in the pool. Then your pictures get rated. After doing this once, I realized how odd it is. First of all, who are these people rating your photographs? If you’re in school and a teacher is rating your photographs, you will at least know them well enough to know whether or not you respect their opinion. With people rating you on Flickr, you don’t know hardly anything about them. You can see some of their pictures, but that’s about it. Secondly, I don’t care what most people think about my photographs. I’m reminded of this post on The Online Photographer. In it, he takes famous pictures and posts mock critiques of them. A good quote from the comments:

That said, I agree with one of the posters who concluded that if you value your photographic tastes and skills, you shouldn’t post your photographs for a critique on an on-line forum. After all, great pictures sometimes come from totally unknown photographers (and great photographers sometimes are ashamed to show some of their works).

It’s a large service, though, large enough to accomodate all types. It’s just that the types that are good at gaming numbers are going to be more popular. Well, that and pictures of girls. Those always get a lot of hits.

Utata: unsubscribed

I don’t remember how I initially stumbled upon Utata. I believe it was on Flickr. I found this group that seemed to have really amazing pictures. They had their own webpage and seemed to have a very active community. Their information page says this:

Utata is a collective of photographers, writers, and like-minded people who share a compelling interest in the arts. We began (and continue to exist) as a salon-style gathering of photographers who came together on flickr. As a group we are continuously evolving; Utata is more of a process than a final product.

Wow! It sounded great to me. The have a picture of the day type of thing, and I subscribed to it, eager to see the best of this group of good photographers. They pick a picture from their pool (which has already stringent guidelines: can’t be in more than 5 other pools, you can’t add more than one picture at a time to the pool, etc), and then display it along with some text inspired by the picture. The photographs were always great. But I couldn’t stand the text that went along with it. For instance, here’s one from a few days go. The picture is absolutely gorgeous. The writing makes me want to gag.

Water and sky barely separated by an opaline horizon. Sustained scalloped ripples of a boat’s wake barely disturbing the calm waters. Quiet, delicious hiss of the hull slipping across the cerulean surface of the sea. Soft, feathered wind. Solitude.

To sail and never arrive. To sail without destination. To sail and be complete in the act of sailing. If heaven exists, it must be free of tides. If there is a paradise, it must caress us in blue water. If one can attain nirvana, it must feel like this.

Here we are. There we were. What lies ahead, lies ahead. But we are here now. We are here now.

The guy that wrote this, Greg Fallis, always writes like this. He’s got a stream on Flickr, and I really like his pictures but his flowery over the top poetic writing just bugs the heck out of me. Perhaps it’s because he’s a mystery writer and an ex PI that all of his work comes off as noir. The writing isn’t really about the picture at all, it’s a fancy that is inspired by the picture. It’s entirely possible that I’m just a philistine who doesn’t appreciate it, or that I’ve just been looking at the writing all wrong. I tried to tolerate it for the sake of the pictures for a while, but I just couldn’t do it anymore. I was sad for a while, but then I remembered that I could just subscribe to all the new Utata pics on Flickr quite easily. I did that for a few days, but that feed is just too active for me. I can’t keep up with 200 pictures every day. There’s just no time. So I unsubscribed again. Perhaps, someday, I will go back. What it boils down to is that right now, Utata just isn’t my cup of tea.

Blog post: learning, time, etc

Learning photography is something that I’ve found to be relatively analogous to learning to make music. The fact that I’ve taken a largely digital approach to both is a contributing factor, surely, but the similarities are astounding. There’s a need to learn how to use various equipment and software. There are plug-ins to the software that one most evaluate and decide to use or not. Then there’s the body of work that everyone else has done with which to compare oneself.

I would say that I’ve been more successful at photography so far. I’m basing this largely on my own perception of the things I’ve done. I’ve also been much better at maintaining a steady stream of output with photography.

Here are two recent photographs that are playing with the same theme:

I took the above picture as we were leaving this bar. I struggled a lot with whether to do it in color or not. The black and white version looked really great, but I feel like the color adds a little more to it. I like the simplicity of the color, and it highlights the sign in the reflection a lot better.

A few weeks ago it got really foggy one night. I grabbed my tripod and headed to an intersection near the lake to shoot. I took a bunch of shots and then I noticed that the mist was collecting all over my lens and camera. I grabbed this as that one last shot before I wiped everything off and went home. The distortion caused by the water turned out really cool.

So, back to me blathering. My realization lately is that the best way for me to get better at something is to just try, and try a lot. I know you’re supposed to learn that in second grade, and I did, but I just memorized it. I didn’t really learn it.

I’ve been reading the blog of a tattoo shop apprentice. He has a good post on the state of his learning. I like how he steps back to examine where he is. That’s something I’ve been trying to do. Here are some things off the top of my head:

1. My composition skills need work. I didn’t start seriously investigating composition until recently when I realized how important it is and how much I need to think about it. Thinking about it and trying things out seems to be helping a lot.
2. I’m getting better at sorting through loads of pictures. I made a quick portfolio of Roller Derby pictures yesterday. I sorted through around 1000 photos and picked out 24. It wasn’t super quick, but I did it and processed all the pictures in one afternoon.
3. I’ve absorbed a number of post-processing techniques, but I’d like to learn more.
4. I’d like to shot more varied situations. I need to learn to be comfortable shooting strangers on the street, or at public events. I took some sports pictures the other day and may be doing some wedding photography this summer.

One of the ever present concerns with learning is time. I’d like to learn every technique and plug-in I find, but that would take too much time. I have to filter the things I decide to learn. I’m getting better at it.

I took this the same night as the train picture. I’m tellin’ you, everything looked cool that night. I should’ve just stayed up all night and kept shooting. I have a few more from that night that are, in my opinion, way better than the two already posted.

In other news, my new group on Flickr has been going well. 19 users and 36 pictures so far. It’s a humble beginning. I started this group on a little bit of a whim. When a group is thematically related (”Absolute Evil”, “Post-Modern Shopping”, “Rainbows”) or geographically themed, I think it’s easier for people to get into it. A technology related group is a little different. I’m a member of the Canon 400D group, but I don’t really visit it all that often. I’m hoping that this group will have some draw since CS3 is still in beta and people will be interested in it.

I finally made some 13×19″ prints with my B9180. I’ve been making prints for people and charging them nominal prices for them, to hopefully recoup some of my cost for the printer/paper (incidentally, HP is selling the printer for $100 cheaper than I bought it a few months ago). My costs are relatively high. A 4×6 piece of photo paper is about 12 cents for me, but the ink for that picture cost almost 3 times as much. The pictures I made for my coworker were 11×14″, but the closest paper size was 13×19″, which runs for $2 a piece. I think the ink works out to about the same cost. I charged him $5 each for them. Hopefully I’ll be able to sell prints of my own pictures someday and help to finance my photography addiction a little more.

There’s a good post over on The Online Photographer today about post-post processing. It highlights some things about doing post work and printing that I’ve been wondering about. After staring at a screen that is emitting light for hours working on a picture, the change to seeing it in print, reflecting light rather than emitting it, is often quite odd. Couple that with the fact that I don’t have a really bright light source in my house, especially not near my computer, and I have some lackluster experiences with prints. John Lehet says it better than I:

The print is of course a different thing than the glowing monitor. It has to live or die with its own reflective properties. We have to let go of the glowing pixels and move into the real world. Those of us who do this know that a glowing monitor and a reflecting print rarely hit us in the same way, and it’s rather an odd thing. Partly we have to use our intuition on-screen to think about the pixels as a future print. I find I often have to go back to the on-screen version and change it—so it’s less optimal on screen and better as a print. The difference between monitor and print is another post. My point here is that to start to make these decisions the old-style light might be more than a little helpful.

I’m gonna get me a bright light or two. And put some shelves around my desk. And learn to play piano.