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Photography Highlights and News, August 2012

The monthly pile o’ links for your reading and photographic enjoyment…

You Say You Want a Revolution: I’m not going to beg, but I will strongly suggest that you read photographer Jim Austin’s Slow Photo Rebellion (SPR), a post-cum-manifesto that he’s published on his website. Some years ago, I read — and thoroughly loved — Carl Honore’s In Praise of Slowness, which I’ve tried (with varying degrees of success) to apply to my life and especially to my photography. Austin manages to nail where the slow ethic and photography intersect in a way that I’ve been trying to do to one degree or another since this blog launched, and I’m glad that he has. Read the piece, but don’t just read it. Take it to heart, and try, at least, to incorporate it into your practice.

Mark Your Calendar: From the 11th to the 13th of August, the Perseid Meteor Shower will be at its height. The peak of the meteor shower will be on Saturday the 11th, but the waning full moon means that you may actually have a better view (depending also on your area’s cloud cover and degree of light pollution) on the nights following. For more information, see this article in the Brevard Times, and also this piece from earthsky.org. If your concerns are more earthbound, the original Dynamic Duo (Adam West and Burt Ward) will be appearing at the New York Comic Con, which runs from the 11th to the 14th of October (don’t say we didn’t warn you). More information is here on examiner.com.

Yes, I Have Read And Agree To… Wait, What Again?: Check out Terms of Service; Didn’t Read for a breakdown on several websites’ terms of service, with each site rated depending on how good/awful the terms are. It’s a crowdsourced project, so your input helps.

Postcards and Memories: Photographers and lovers of ephemera will find plenty to like in Charles Simic’s ode to The Lost Art of Postcard Writing in the New York Review of Books blog. If you’ve ever lamented the passing of these masterpieces of epigrammatic brevity — or if you just like a well-written essay, for Pete’s sake — head on over.

And More Again, such as the TED Blog’s piece on photographer Giles Duley and how he found the inspiration to keep going after a life-changing injury, Poynter on AP photojournalist Greg Bull getting a once-in-a-lifetime shot of Olympic gymnast and gold medalist Gabby Douglas, and a chance encounter experienced by Joel Runyon, An Unexpected Ass Kicking that’s a good reminder to get out there and just keep doing what you do…

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Play To Your Strengths? Maybe Not.

I had a conversation with one of those life coaches a few years back that’s mostly slipped my mind, save for one thing she told me that’s always stuck with me: “Your biggest strength, or any strength if you overuse it, becomes a weakness.” Pause a second and let that sink in.

I thought about it, and realized that I’m a very analytical person by nature. You need something analyzed? I’m your guy. I’m great at gaming out a scenario — every last what-if, every contingency — ’til analysis becomes paralysis. Over time, I’ve learned to recognize when I’m doing it, and to remind myself to cut it out.

I bring this up for a reason. It isn’t just our personal or character strengths that can inadvertently trip us up. When you try something creative, it’s really easy to find your strengths and ride them ’til the wheels fall off. Photographers aren’t immune to this, so it’s probably a good idea for us to step back, take a look at our work, and figure out what it is we do really well so we don’t do too much of it.

For starters, it’s not just subject matter that starts to get repetitive. It’s also the ways in which we shoot what we shoot. If you’re an architectural shooter, you start to look for the same shapes and patterns, or relying on the same kind of lighting; if you’re a portraitist, it might mean relying on a set of poses that you know could flatter Quasimodo; if you do weddings, it can mean sticking to the same lighting setups and situations that’ve always worked for you.

To be clear, there’s a reason that people rely on formulas. Sometimes — especially when time is tight, or the results are critical — any artist has to know they’ve got things in the old kit bag that they can pull out at will, and that will almost certainly be effective. Once those things are done, they’ll use the time left for a bit of experimentation. So there’s a time and a place for formula, for going from strength to strength and playing it safe. Sometimes, we just need the safety net.

But let’s be just as clear on something else. Sometimes we need to forget the net. We can’t, obviously, just forget or unlearn all that we know (and it wouldn’t be a good idea even if we could). But we can, and sometimes must, at least set it off to one side for a bit. Yes, it’s a challenging, and sometimes even uncomfortable, way of working. However, the skills and ways of seeing that you pick up when you try something new — even if it’s not your usual subject matter or way of doing things — aren’t just about your new subject or the skills that go with it. Those things spill over even into your “usual,” giving you greater options and new ways of doing the same old stuff in a way that it doesn’t have to be the same old same old.

What would you like to do to shake up your photography? What would you like to strengthen, and what kinds of situations or subjects might help get you there?

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Understanding Memory Cards

So you’ve got your camera, and now you’ve got to figure out where all those photos are going to be stored. There are tons of options for organizing and storing photos once they’re taken, but we’ll get to those another time. For today, let’s take a minute (or five) to go over the myriad options available for memory for your camera. Sandisk, Lexar, Promaster, Kingston, and literally dozens of other companies make memory cards, and to further confuse the issue, there are several types of cards (SD, SDHC, SDXC) and classes of cards (Class 2 through Class 10). Most cameras currently use SD or XD cards, although a handful of holdouts still rely on Compact Flash cards, sometimes alone but other times in tandem with SD. Since SD is used in far more cameras, I’m going to leave CF to someone else; there’s a great explanation of CF cards here: http://www.compactflash.org/faqs/faq.htm In the meantime, let’s see if we can make heads or tails of the SD situation.

Let’s start with the types of cards. SD (technically SDSC, where the SC means Standard Capacity) simply stands for Secure Digital. The “Secure” part comes from the fact that it’s non-volatile memory (it doesn’t have to be powered up to store something). SDHC is SD High Capacity (4MB to 16MB), and SDXC is SD eXtended Capacity (32MB to 2TB). You might be tempted to buy a 2TB card or two (it would, after all, be the last time for a long time that you’d need to put a new card in your camera). Before you do that, bear in mind that things can, and do, go wrong with SD cards. Having something go wrong with a 2TB card means losing an awful lot of your work in one fell swoop, so it can sometimes be advisable to buy several smaller cards and switch them out frequently; if something goes wrong during a shoot, you’ll still have something left.

Having looked at the types of cards, let’s take up speed versus class. Loosely speaking, the card’s speed rating is its top speed, and is a concern mostly when it comes to burst shooting. Just the same as your car may be capable of 120 miles per hour, however, you’re not going to drive it that way all the time. Just the same as your car has a cruising speed, the card’s class is the sustained write speed for which it’s rated. So a class 4 card should be able to write 4MB/second for sustained periods of time (this is especially relevant in video recording, where the write speed has to be sustained for minutes at a time, versus short bursts).

Speed ratings and class can be a bit deceiving. As with anything else, your setup is only as strong as its weakest link. So let’s say you’re using a Class 10 SDHC card, which is capable of writing 10MB/second. Pretty fast. However, your camera may only have a write speed of 4MB/second. No matter how fast the card is, the camera has other things in mind. Conversely, if your camera’s native write speed is 10MB/second and you use a Class 2 card (2MB /second), it’s going to be slow going even though the camera’s fast; in essence, the card can’t keep up.

And of course, there’s an added wrinkle, which is your camera’s buffer. Let’s say your camera is capable of 7 frames per second, and has a 56MB buffer. If you’re shooting low-quality JPG images that might come in at 1MB each, you can hold that button down ’til the cows come home and you won’t have to worry about your camera freezing up on you (what you’re doing to your shutter is something else altogether). If, on the other hand, you’re shooting high-quality JPGs (which, for the sake of the example, let’s say are 5MB each), it’s only going to take you about a second and a half to fill your buffer. Your camera’s going to slow down while the buffer’s full, and will only allow shots again once the buffer has room for them. If you’re shooting RAW, the buffer will fill faster still because of the larger file sizes. In this case, the camera’s acting sluggish not because your card’s too small, too slow, or a piece of junk, but because you got a bit overzealous with the burst shooting, so this is something that’s probably best saved for times when it’s vital. If, like me, you tend to double up on shots (I do this if I’m shooting unsupported at slow shutter speeds, just because I’m more likely to get one that’s in focus), just be sure to keep your bursts small and evenly spaced.

In any case, read the fine print. In this case, that means two sets of fine print. First, know your camera. If it’s rated for Class 6, get a Class 6 card; a lower class will cause bottlenecks, and the camera won’t write any faster if it’s using a Class 10.* Second, know your cards. Don’t cheap out on a card that’s classed lower, and try to avoid off-label brands. Third, use brands recommended by the camera’s manufacturer, as they typically recommend higher-quality cards that won’t fail you at an inopportune time. Failed cards mean lost photos, and even if you can use a data recovery program, that’s no guarantee you’ll get all of your photos back, or that the files won’t be corrupted. Finally, regardless of the card you’re using, make sure that the first thing you do is to format it when you first use it with your camera so that the camera “recognizes” the card and puts it to its best use.

Any questions, or anything I’ve left out? Feel free to comment!

*Let me add a caveat: if you’re getting some kind of discount for buying cards in volume and you have more than one camera, then by all means, buy with the higher-specced camera in mind so you can safely use the same card in both (just make sure you’re using the correct format for the cards). There’s nothing wrong with buying nothing but Class 10 if you simply have to have the best and fastest of everything, but your camera may not need the added speed.

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Rule 47: Adapt

Less than a week into 10,000/365, I’ve come to realize something that I think was always somewhere in the back of my mind, but which is becoming more and more a part of my photographic practice. For one thing, I tend to shoot without any ideas in mind, or any particular agenda. Setting myself a series of small projects as part of a much larger project has been helpful to keep me shooting, and to see opportunities in places I didn’t before.

There’s another side to that, one that can end up becoming a downside if you’re not careful. You think your shoot through; you have an idea of what you’d like to get, and how you’d like it to look. All well and good, because all you have to do now is proceed to make the photos that you set out to make, right?

Uh, no.

Don’t get me wrong, sometimes it will work that way. You will have planned well enough, and covered your bases well enough, that no matter what the day throws your way, you will be ready for it. But those days will, in the main, be the exception, unless your expectations or planning are such that you really don’t care what you get, so long as you get something.*

Let me give you an example. I thought out what I wanted to do for the third day’s assignment (the view from your window). I knew where my shot would be, the lens that I would need to get the shot I envisioned, and even what times of day would put my subject in the best light. I was, in other words, ready.

And then the subject wasn’t there. Rather than declaring the day ruined and packing the camera, I had a plan “B”, where I’d also decided on the kind of shot I wanted, the framing, the shutter speed, the lens… And then that didn’t quite work out, either. The idea was to use the shapes of my street’s brick crosswalks as a strong compositional element, and to have the lights of turning cars trace abstract forms over the crosswalk, neatly bisecting the segment I’d chosen.

Only that didn’t work, either, since no matter how I exposed, I couldn’t get the crosswalk to show properly while also catching the lights the way I wanted them. Time for Plan C, which involved the same elements from Plan B, but with a different compositional focus; this time I’d play entirely with the car lights, and make those the center of attention.

The photos that I made as a result weren’t anything like I’d envisioned, but they got made nonetheless. It’s easy to be frustrated when you plan something and it doesn’t go according to plan; we know what we want from our photos, and also what we expect from ourselves. However, I’d caution against letting the frustration be the end of it; let it, instead, be a starting point. Just as we talked last week about experimentation, a good part of photography involves being able to adapt. Sometimes that means changing your camera settings in a different light, seeing your subject in a new light, or realizing that what you had in mind isn’t working, so it’s time to get something new in mind.

*Not, as I’ve mentioned before, that there’s anything wrong with that.

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User Survey

I’m doing something a little different today. We’re a month into our second year here at The First 10,000, and I’m going to ask for your help. I’d like to make sure that what I’m posting here is helpful and relevant to you (whoever you may be). I thought about putting up a survey with a handful of check boxes, but the problem with that is that I may not think to ask what you’re looking to answer. So let me know, either via the comment section below or via the Contact page:

Have you found the blog readable and easy to understand?

Are there topics that you’d like to see covered more often?

For that matter, is there anything you feel I might be covering too much at the expense of something you’d find more useful?

Any general comments or suggestions?

And, finally, the bottom line question: my purpose is to help you become the kind of photographer you’d like to be. How can I help you get there?

Thanks for the help!

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Review: The Photography Book, Edited by Ian Jeffrey (Phaidon)

The Photo Book, Edited by Ian Jeffrey

Since we’ve got a handful of new readers, and some of you giving our 365 Photo Project a whirl, I wanted to kill two birds with one stone today by reviewing The Photography Book, which is put out by Phaidon (the same folks whose other titles include The Art Book and The 20th Century Art Book).

Bird number one, as it were, is the book itself. Like the other two aforementioned titles, The Photography Book is arranged with its subjects in alphabetical order. This makes it easy to find a particular photographer (so it’s a cinch finding Philippe Halsman, provided you haven’t forgotten his last name), but it makes it something of a challenge to establish any kind of context. Nearly the entire history of photography is represented here, much of it by photographers whose work is on the obscure side, and that’s a good thing. Devoid of chronology, and with only bare-bones commentary, it’s up to the reader to go out and do his or her own research in order to find out more along those lines.

The book comes in two formats, one of which is… well, you know, book-sized (yes, I know, if it’s a book, it’s the size of a book by default… don’t get technical with me), and the other of which would fit neatly into a camera bag, purse, or large-ish pocket.

I’m still eyeing that other bird, by the way, which is this: whether you’re photographing just for fun, for the sake of a project (howdy, project people), for work, or just because all the cool kids are doing it, you’ll soon find (if you haven’t figured out already) that inspiration ebbs and flows… and when it ebbs, it’s often at an inopportune time. So The Photography Book is helpful not just from the standpoint of developing your visual “voice” and visual literacy, but also because it can be a shot of inspiration at the times yours is on the wane.

Support The First 10,000 by purchasing The Photography Book, The Art Book or The 20th Century Art Book (or anything else you’d like) through Amazon (affiliate links)

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Lucky Shot?

Meter Matey

Every once in a while, I’ll go over a day’s worth of shots (or will be looking over someone’s shoulder while they’re browsing theirs), and one or the other of us will comment that a shot was “lucky.” I got to thinking about this. What role does luck play in all of it, if any?

I hesitate to chalk it up to skill, after all. I mean, if you’re Joe McNally or Moose Peterson or whomever, then yeah, you’ve got oodles of skill and experience behind you. I’m none of those individuals, however, so I don’t have quite the same reservoir of skill and/or experience to draw from. So some shots clearly are luck, because they’re the convergence of just the right time, place, and subject, and you, or me, or even Joe McNally being there (I’m sure even he gets the occasional lucky shot).

So if it’s not luck, and it’s not skill, what is it exactly? Woody Allen once said* that half of life is showing up. Arthur Fellig (a.k.a. Weegee) said** something similar: “f/8 and be there.” So. Be there, and have your camera. The rest, at least in theory, will take care of itself. All the luck in the world isn’t worth a hill of beans if you don’t have your camera, though, so make sure you have it.***

Since I like to give examples, have a look at my neighborhood Jack Sparrow. I’ve seen this guy at least half a dozen times in the last year, and each one of those times, I haven’t had my camera. Can’t blame him. He was there, after all, dressed to the nines and being his photogenic self. I was there, too. But my camera’s not his responsibility, so missing the shot those other several times I can’t blame on anybody but me.

Any of those other times could’ve been a lucky shot, but wasn’t. It’s the preparedness — having your camera, knowing how to use it, and being ready to use it — that separates the lucky shots from the fish stories, the missed stuff and all that we wish we could’ve gotten but didn’t. There’s some truth in the adage that we make our own luck, but if we don’t have what we need to capitalize on it, it goes to waste.

*At least I’m pretty sure it was Woody Allen. I think from now on, I may just attribute everything to Abraham Lincoln, just on general principle. Sooner or later, I’m bound to hit on something he actually said.

**Yes, I’m sure this time.

***Why don’t we attribute this one to Yogi Berra while we’re at it? The “hill of beans” bit at least sounds in character.