Are you interested in free stuff like me? See, I love to give my services away to folks who just need photography, and not shooting under somebody else’s pay means I can shoot whatever I want. It really is a great way to do photography; I can strive to be professional, but am not creatively cramped by an employer’s constraints. The downside, though, is I never have money to buy new equipment. So, I unashamedly look for free stuff. Contests? You bet…I am all over So, I found out Cameratown was having a 5th anniversary celebration and has some great giveaways. The Pentax camera would be nice, but I like my camera more, to be honest. I could really use some of those camera bags, though. So, not only am I entering for some prizes myself, but letting you all know so you can do so. Free: best price in…
Author: Cooper Strange
I just answered this question from a friend of mine, and figured it might be helpful to more of you out there. She writes:
I am looking at getting a nice digital camera. I am looking at the Nikon D40 and the Nikon D60. I really like the price of the D40, but I want something that is going to be good and that I will enjoy for a while. I am not necessarily sold on Nikon, it just what I know. So, any thoughts on my purchase would be greatly appreciated.
You are looking at the D40 and D60, but are not even brand particular. What should you buy? Here is my simple answer: if the question is which of those two, I would go for the D40, any day (or maybe a Pentax…they have great, cheap cameras). I have shot the D40 myself and love it for just shooting around. You will probably never use all the features of the D40, so paying more for more features in the newer D60 really would not make much sense, unless there was one feature in particular which was important to you which only the D60 had. And as for the megapixel size, it does not really matter that much. The D40’s six megapixels are more than enough for your needs…my camera is only 6MP!
There is my simple answer. Maybe that answers your question. If you want to know more, here is my slightly longer answer.
Is a picture really worth a thousand words? Should photos speak for themselves or does the photographer need to guide the interpretation? Should we combine photos with words? Should we even have captions?
Yes. Wait…no. Man, I don’t know.
There are many answers to each of those questions. A photo may be worth a thousand words, but depending on the content of the photograph and the audience viewing it, just which words could be hard to determine. The photographer needs to determine what the message is and communicate that. If words are needed, use them. If not, don’t.
Well, I talked briefly about controlling the shape of your aperture in order create cool shapes in the out of focus regions of your photos. I had experimented some with it, and thought I had the perfect situation to use it. It was the 4th of July and I had a start shaped aperture in my bag. So I gave it a run…a very short run. Here is what happened
I have a little confession to make. I cannot even count the number of times I have, in the depths of my thoughts, tried to justify calling myself a professional. It really seems the digital age of photography has confused the minds of many as to who is professional and who is amateur and what the word ‘professional’ even means.
The topic came to mind the other day when I saw a contest with different categories for professional and amateur, where of course, they had to define the difference. The rules said that professional photographer are “people whose main activity is photography and who, consequently, have already sold, published and exhibited their work”. The amateurs are everybody else.
Sometimes, a totally random event will draw us outside our preconceptions and help us see photography in a new light. I would never have thought of photos and captions in the context of adoption or how that application of photography could be anything special, but for a foreign adoption of a child who is already grown and speaks a different language, knows a different culture, and within the space of a few minutes is being launched into a new family, a simple photo album can be a treasure.
At first glace, this seems totally unrelated to photography, I know, but keep the title in mind. It has everything to do with photos and captions, and not only that, but applying our medium to the world around us in order to build others up instead of shooting just for some techy self-pleasure.
My brother and sister-in-law just adopted a nine-year-old girl from China. Before they left, my sister-in-law had the idea of using this cool little photo album they had been given to help their nine-year-old daughter acclimate to the her family. Each page in the photo album could record a ten second message to explain the photo. Then, when you just happen to have a brother that lives and works in China (enter ChinaCoop), that album can be narrated in Chinese.
Simply put, all I did was narrate captions (in Chinese) to a photo album.
I took a slightly different approach to this wedding, in my ever evolving approach to photography gigs. With each wedding, I have been trying to add services to what I can provide for a wedding shoot. This time, the big thing I did was to provide the photography online so that guests of the wedding—well, of course, for the couple themselves too—could view the wedding photos without needing to wait weeks just to see an album in person with the couple.
That is why the photos, though taken way back in February, are just now hitting the gallery. I had them online for the guests, and waited to give them more than enough time to browse through those, before I took them down and created the gallery. Just between you and me: it was taking up a good bit of space for the website, and I had to take them down sometime. 🙂
