In all the travelling, I have neglected to post several old galleries. One of those is the Liuzhou Street Life gallery. Feel free to browse through those and leave your comments, whether they be technical, artsy, or otherwise.
Category: photosophy
The last couple times I have shot weddings, I have made sure to visit the location before hand, and both times it has been close to useless for me. I thought through the lighting situation, hot spots that I wanted to keep out of my backgrounds, and what length of lenses would work in what places.
Both times, the situation changed so much from my exploration day to the wedding day, the information was close to useless, or at least, it was nothing I could not have done in a few minutes on the day of the wedding. In one case, the church was very dark with few lights on when I checked it out, then on the wedding day, I found out the entire back wall was windows, previously curtained, which they threw open in addition to a multitude of overhead lights they turned on. Should I keep checking out the locations beforehand?
I am sitting at home, dead tired from an all-day wedding shoot. Really, I should be going to bed, but for some reason, I just felt the urge to talk through it a little here. I have a lot running through my head, as I do after any important shoot…and here is some of it.
Second shooters are a great thing…fifth and sixth are a curse! My primary job was to shoot the “engagement ceremony” in the morning (it’s a Thai thing…I still find it funny that you do an engagement ceremony the morning of the wedding). The wedding ceremony later in the afternoon was the domain of a “professional photographer”. I will explain why that is in quotes.
Ever since I landed in the United States in mid-September with my wife and little bambino, I have struggled to find my beloved street life shots. I think it is an American culture thing.
American lives are so isolated. We grab our coffee for breakfast, get in the car to go to work, sit at a desk all day, and return to our car to go home, and watch our favorite TV series before going to bed. How many minutes of fresh air do we actually take in a day? Really, we ought to think about that: how many non air conditioned minutes of air do we breathe on average?
For someone who enjoys photographing people, the American lifestyle sure makes that hard. I am always in my car moving from one place to the next just like everybody else, because even riding a bike, much less walking, in Texas is more like a commitment to professional sports than just simplifying life! I have to grasp those few moments in a day when both I and the next guy are both using up our non air conditioned time to take my shots.
When we do a shoot for somebody, should we give them all the photos or do we only give them the nice ones? How do we know what photos to pick? Is it more about a technically perfect photo or what the customer wants?
After a few days of topics directly related to wedding photography, this one is a nice transition. It very much applies to wedding photography, but is a helpful topic in general.
When we show our selection of photos to the customer, they will almost inevitably ask, “Where’s the rest?”. They want to see them all. Whether it is a wedding or a soccer game, the photos the customer would pick are not necessarily the photos we would pick.
I think weddings are one of the ultimate photographic challenges. Not only is it one of the most important days of the couple’s life, but also, there is only one chance at shooting those great shots.
I have heard enough friends complain about their wedding photos that I hesitate before saying yes when asked to shoot a wedding. I am more than willing to say that I am far from a wedding photography professional. I love it, and from a purely selfish point of view, I love the challenge it gives me as a photographer. What I (and all of us) have to keep in mind is that we are gambling with somebody else’s “perfect day”, not our own. So, proceed with caution.
I just posted a new gallery, “What the Street Says”. It was an experiment with vignetting. As I looked a the photographs of others, I had noticed more and more photos I really liked which used vignetting, so I wanted to try it out a little myself.
Vignetting (pronounced ‘vin-yet’) is basically a fall off of light on the edges of the photo. Some folks use it to add an antique look to the photo. Some say it draws the eye of the viewer to the center, a tool to highlight your subject. And some just think it is cool. I guess I best fit into the last category, because I do not have a reason, per se, to use vignetting. I just like the way it looks. It adds another dimension to the photos.
I had someone ask me how to choose the right angle from which they should take their photo. Well, that was not exactly a question out of the blue. We were talking about angles, trying new angles, and using new angles as a means to adding a new dimension of interest to our images.
Absolutely, we should try different angles, but there is no answer to the question of which angle is best. There are pointers, to be sure, but I even hesitate to mention those, for fear that we will find the key to making our photographs look just like everybody elses or possibly never attempt to excercise our creativity in the first place. Forbid!
