The time for this year’s photo walk has arrived! If you are local to Belton, including Temple, Killeen, or Salado, this is your closest opportunity to join the Worldwide Photo Walk. We will be a nicely mixed group of local amateur photographers, high schoolers who heard in their photography class, readers of Scott Kelby’s books, local camera club members, and some totally unknown to me who just appeared on the sign up list. The list has actually grown by several more walkers just this morning. If you want to sign up and join us tomorrow morning, go to the Belton photo walk page. Hope to see you there.
naophoros Posts
I just love the photo walk idea: getting together with other lovers of photography, going out, and having fun doing what we love doing. It is not talking about photography; it is doing photography. It is not really meant to learn, yet we usually learn something just by watching others and thinking about a different approach to a particular shot. It is not passive, but directly active. Last year, our Temple, Belton, Killeen, Salado area photo walk was in Temple. This year, we are going to switch things up a bit and try out a new downtown, Belton. Last year was a bit difficult to organize, because initially, our location was rejected because we were too close to other walks, in Austin and (I think) Waco. They finally gave in, but we had lost a lot of time that could have been used getting the word out to interested photographers.…
“I am constantly running into the problem of not having enough light,” my friend moaned in an e-mail. Join the club, dude. He asked a slew of questions related to what gear I use, or would suggest, to try to help combat that age old problem (ok…”age old” as far as photography is concerned anyway) of not enough light.
What are you using these days? I know you are very much anti-flash, which I basically agree with. But I am constantly running into the problem of not enough light. Are you mostly shooting with a 50mm f/1.8? Or are you jacking up your ISO? Or are you using a tripod? Which reminds me, my tripod recently broke, any recommendations on one (that is not in the crazy range, under $200)? Ok, so I am asking lots of questions, sorry. But one more, post production, what are you using? Lightroom? Photoshop? iPhoto?
Your battery will inevitably die at the very worst time, right? Today is my son’s 4th birthday. I did not realize till we arrived at the shopping center for his choice of pizza and ice cream cake that the battery was dead. And no, I did not tell my wife at first. Things always seem to work out, so I figured I would just not touch the camera and wait till just before I wanted to (hopefully) resurrect it for a few shots, and see what happened.
Now, I try to play it safe with my camera batteries. Having two batteries is a must for me, and with my shooting style and load, I have never even gone through one battery in one day of heavy shooting, so I figure two is twice as much as I have ever needed. The bigger problem is knowing which day my battery is finally going to die. That day was today.
Yesterday, I was thinking out loud. With a bit more time to think as I talked with folks in the social-mediasphere, I see there are actually two issues here, both worthy of much discussion. One is the audience: the photos they take, the lines they cross. Two, and more at the core of the problem, the hired photographer’s approach to photographing the wedding. Here, we will discuss only the hired photographer.
What is the problem? Photographers following the couple down the aisle. Walking right up to the couple during the ceremony, not only blocking everybody’s view, but going where only the two being married and the one doing the marrying should go. Walking back and forth behind the couple, providing a distracting backdrop for the whole ceremony.
Now, having seen such behavior, new couples preparing for their weddings are afraid of the photographer, especially those who want that special day to be special…and actually about them instead of the photographer. The minister may say something, but often it is ignored, much like the teacher nobody respects yelling commands as the children run wild. What is at the root of this problem?
I attended a wedding this past Saturday, and I had a couple thoughts. Now, keep in mind, this wedding was in Thailand, so this is not completely applicable to all weddings…as if it could be even if it were in the United States, because weddings are all so wildly different these days.
My thoughts were not just about wedding photography, as in the professional hired to photograph the event, but also all the photography which takes place in a wedding. Really, I took a couple snapshots which could say quite a bit in and of themselves.
How about a wallpaper for your computer desktop background? I switch my own regularly, just to keep things interesting, and since this one was actually one of my own photos, I thought I would share it with all of you. In honor of our summer visit here in my wife’s native Thailand—have to let the kids see the grandparents, you know—I am sporting the Thai flag and a beautiful tree in bloom this time of year. Enjoy.
We are back to that recurring question: what camera should I buy? I am often asked, but having recently put some work into finding the best options for a coworker who was buying a first camera setup for her son, I thought it might be helpful to share what I found and suggested. I worked quite hard to stay within a $500 budget, though some of the options below rely on used gear, and availability certainly can change quickly.
My chief aim was to avoid the kit lens which comes with all of the entry level digital SLRs. Not that they are rubbish, necessarily, but you will constantly be fighting their limited aperture, your photos will have the same feel as everybody else’s, and more than likely you will be more satisfied with a cheap, fixed-length lens with wider aperture. So, here we go…
Schoepf’s Barbeque here in Belton, Texas blesses my home with a double dose of love. Not only does that wonderful aromatic fume drift by my house when the winds are favorable, but most weekends, I have the pleasure of falling to sleep to the thumping of the distant bass drum, some indistinct bass guitar, and cheering crowds at the end of every song. I guess that would be annoying to some, but I enjoy it.
This is a little take-away from a wedding I helped shoot recently. The focus of wedding photography, fittingly, is the bride and groom, but there is so much more going on: relationships, history, feuds, and innumerable others stories in progress. As soon as I ran across this photo back at home when reviewing the whole set, I loved it.