The arrival of autumn means many things to many people. Fall colors, farm harvests, football contests and so forth. Around here in Winston-Salem, it means that the Dixie Classic fair will be starting up again.
With the fair, comes the rides, the huge quantity of food, the music, the lights and sounds, animals galore. But being a fair that is based on the agricultural roots of the region means that people will be bringing their best creations, whether it be a quilt, a cake, a floral arrangement or their home grown pumpkin to the fair to be judged and get a ribbon.
Of course, for me, it is my photography.
Last year, I managed to win a 5th place ribbon for my black and white photo of some Triumph motorcycles. I had higher expectations for other photos I entered but I as pleased with what I won.
So this year, I will be entering more of my collection into the amateur photography contest. Considering that I have nearly 5000 images in my portfolio, I was not sure what I could select. One problem was that out of the various categories, I tend to be overweight on some like my landscapes while having little in others like birds or sunsets.
There is also the problem of how to account for the various tastes of the judges. What are their preferences? Conservative or experimental? The bold new look or the tried and true? it is difficult to say so I will go with what I like and see what happens.
So without further ado, here are my entries in this year’s contest:
Color – Other
Color – People
Color – Flowers
Color – Animals
Color – Landscapes
B & W – People
B & W- Landscapes
B & W – Other
Adobe announced the release of its consumer photography editor tool, Photoshop Elements 8, this week. Unlike the prior release, Adobe will be releasing a parallel version for the Mac. This is good news as Mac users had to deal with a version that was a version behind and feature deficient compared to what was available for Windows users.
I have been a faithful user of this product way back when it was called Photo Deluxe, a mere toy of an application compared to what it is capable of now. With this release of Elements, I have something like the capability of Photoshop as it was a few years back which was then a very powerful application in its own right. I have used various other products for editing photographs like Pixelmator and I continually come back to this one as it is the most capable application out there.
Now my primary editing tool these days is still Lightroom as it capable of taking a RAW format photo and bring out its best details. But it is not a composition type of tool which I need from time to time like adding text, merging images, panorama photos and so forth. Those tasks are something which I do on occasion but are not really a big part of my output these days.
What I really need though are some of the editing tools like Noise Reduction and image enhancements which I need for some problematic images. For example, when I was working on some of the family images taken back in the 1960’s, I had issues with scratches and graininess that Lightroom could not do but Elements can.
That’s the limit of my everyday needs and Elements handles them just fine. The big brother application, Photoshop, offers more tools and more powerful versions of the tools found in Elements but they are more than I need and to be honest, more than I can afford.
With a new release of Lightroom supposedly to be released in the next few months, the combination of these two applications gives me a very capable workflow setup that can produce for me the best possible images from the photographs I take.
Tonight is the start of the NFL football season. Pittsburgh takes on Tennessee. This should be a pretty decent game. Got my Fantasy league set up; more on that this weekend.
Feeling a bit more autumny these days. We may actually get a decent fall color throughout the region. But no trip to the mountains this year. With the due date coming soon, just can not chance being more than 30 minutes from a hospital. Still plenty of local sites to take care of for my photography.
Speaking of photography, received my tags from the Dixie Classic Fair for the Photography show entries. I entered every category but not sure if I can fill them all in. Doing each entry costs several dollars so I will have to be selective. Of course, some categories are harder to fill for me like flowers and animals which I take few of as compared to my people and landscape shots. So this weekend I will be selecting my candidates for the contest and have people comment on them.
…. and that is all I wrote.
In the world of photography, there are many debates and opposing camps as there are models of cameras. They range in passion and breadth from the extremely minor to the fundamentals of photography. There are people who pride themselves on using only prime lenses versus zooms. There are those who are Canon fans as opposed to the Nikon fans. There are people who swear by using ballheads on their tripods while others will use only pan head and so it goes.
One of the most fundamental points of contention in photography is how should the photograph you take should be represented. For lack of a better term, I would categorized the argument as taking the shot as opposed to making the image.
At its simplest, taking the shot is represented by a photograph that is unaltered in every way from the moment that the photograph is taken. No cropping, no change in exposure levels, no changes in color. What you shot is what you get. The best kind of example of this sort of photograph is the journalist shot at a moment and then transmitted quickly to a newspaper or photo archive like Getty Images. In this sort of photography, time is of the essence so there is no time to start Photoshop and tweak the image. Experienced photographers learn to crop in camera through careful composition and getting their exposure right.
Before the advent of digital cameras, amateur photographers were pretty much stuck with whatever result they had when they took a photo. No do overs unless you were willing to take several shots at different settings in hope that at least one of them was a keeper. Hence the need for several rolls of film which when you factor in the price of processing started to become pretty expensive.
So even with the availability of software that can make a decent or bad photo much better and appealing, many photographers still adhere to the philosophy that the shot they took is the shot that they have to present.
To me that is the extreme approach.
Other photographers take a more restrained approach. They will use software to make some basic adjustments like resetting their exposure levels or crop out an intrusive object like a tree branch jutting into a sky shot. To them, that is enhancing the shot and not much different in the time of film when you could adjust the exposure level of a photograph as you develop the photograph and use rulers to block unwanted elements from the finished print.
For much of my photography, that is what I do for most of my photos. Simple changes that allows me to take a RAW image and have it posted to the web in a matter of minutes. The volume of photos I take at an event does not allow me the luxury to linger over all of my photos to get them just right.
A step above the simple adjustments approach is where you try to push the photograph into revealing more than it should. An example of this is whereby through a tool like Photoshop you select a part of an image like a sky that is totally washed out for details and then adjust the exposure levels locally to that selection to bring out the details. Similarly, you can use tools like the color tool where you can emphasis or de-emphasis certain colours in a image to create points of interest. For example, in the below shot, there are two shots of a hot air balloon. The left image is a straight shot with no edits to it other than cropping part of the image. The right image, though, has been enhanced. Hot air balloons are noteworthy for their bright colours and I wanted to emphasis those colours in the shot so I boosted the saturation and luminance levels of certain colours. Also adjusted the exposure level as well. But the change is not a major one; it is actually quite subtle. So there is a deviation from reality in that the produced image is not what everyone will recall to have seen but the image is improved a bit to be more pleasing to view and that is more important to me than adhering to some concept of not tampering with the original image.
Finally, there are the images that receive radical transformations through software processing. Replacement of colours, soft focusing, isolation of detail are the sort of things that if you remark on them negatively, you are then classified as a purist. But many of these techniques were available through the use of filters and lighting before the arrival of the digital age. Now, those techniques are available to everyone who have the software to do them, not just the professional photographers.
I have been able to create some interesting effects with software. On the series of photographs I took at the dance recital, I experimented with them to make them more artistic or perhaps to bring out some detail that stood out for me. Some are very dreamlike in their effect, more like paintings in a way.
Example of pushing a photograph to the extreme
So the question now whether these are still photographs?
It is hard to say. The original source was a photograph but has the photo been so transformed that it lacks a basis in reality. In a way the photograph just becomes the raw material for the finished product much like the clay that becomes a bowl. But it becomes a matter of degree, though. Can you still see the photograph contained within the finished product? If so, then it is still a photograph. Has other materials like paper been added to the photograph? If so, then it a collage. Does the photograph contain separate images? Then it is a composite but still a photograph. Has materials like text, shapes or borders been added to the photograph? Then it is a graphic.
In general, though, my philosophy has been that the photograph I take is just a starting point to the final image. Every photograph could always be improved in some aspect whether exposure adjustments, cropping or highlighting some colours. But to me it is still a photograph even when I take it to some extreme like I did for the dance recital shots. But whatever line there is that separates a photograph from an image or something is pretty much in the eye of the beholder.
Long night last night putting together a migration for a client website. As usual, something always comes up not caught in the original testing that needs to be taken care of but in the end, it gets fixed.
Healthcare is getting a big push this week from the Obama Administration. There is quite an array of forces for and against the proposed plan to extend healthcare coverage as well as finding ways to cut costs and pay for coverage. I do find it a bit ironic that those parties who like to crow about the best healthcare system in the world usually fail to mention that 1 in 5 Americans do not have any or minimal healthcare, that in certain metrics like longevity, the United States lags far behind countries that have healthcare plans costing a third less for total coverage for everyone. In reality, if you are well off, you can get the best health care money can buy. Everyone just has to make down and make choices that may have dire consequences down the road.
No idea what will be the ultimate plan that will take shape. It is unlikely that there will be no plan at all. Just too much going on for nothing to come out of this. Question is whether the plan is something that people will look forward to having at a cost that people can afford. In any consequence, the healthcare industry will become smaller in the future. The economy can not be sustained where 16% of the GNP is dedicated to health industries.
It has been a week now without cable television. Not much worth seeing now and what I am seeing does not look so good on standard definition as opposed to high definition. Choices we have to make sometimes to get by.
On the baby front, every thing is going good so far. Andrea was concerned about not feeling the baby move but a check on the sonogram indicates that the placenta is in front of the womb making it more difficult to feel things. Soon enough, though, the baby will be large enough that he will be felt.
Feeling some withdrawal symptoms not in not producing any photo updates. After a frenzy of photography that includes the Celtic festival, a dance recital, a vacation and a car show, I have no photos to work on right now. Guess its time to start the scanning of my photos from Europe now.
… and that is I wrote.
It has been awhile, actually a long while since I last wrote a major post for the website. Life has proven to be quite hectic in the past two months; more than enough to keep me away from writing any significant posts other than an occasional Daily Note.
So what has kept me away from maintaining an active blog? In a word, photography.
With the summer months upon us, I find a tremendous source of new photography to take. Festivals, family, vacation spots are all part of the mix. Since early May, I have done photo shoots at the Celtic Festival, Gallery Hop on Trade Street, Heavy Rebel Weekender, went to Florida for a week, viewed a dance recital and oh so much more. Of course, if I spend my time taking photos, processing them and then posting them, then there is not much free time for me to write about things. Quite a change from the winter months when my photography slacked off tremendously. Since the beginning of May, I have posted more than 600 photos through my Flickr site and thus for my blog galleries and I still have perhaps another 100 or so more to go to finish up some series like the Celtic Festival and HRW.
So if I had the chance to post some articles, I may have posted bits on these festivals, the current politics of healthcare, events in the area and around the world and some entertainment news. In short, not much more than I was posting before.
So in essence, I had to get away from the blog to gain some fresh perspective and views on things. Whenever I had a thought for a future article, I made a quick note of it, create a draft outline for the blog and then left it with the implicit promise of returning to it and actually work on it.
So I will resume my writing and will post a full site update this weekend with articles on personal life, healthcare, photography and the arts.
Sometime this summer, I will be rolling out a new website as an offshoot of this one. Since in an embryonic stage, but using some off the shelf web components and a design framework, I already half way there.
Considering the number of photos I have taken, my Daily Photo post should be taken care of for the next month or so.
As for the Daily Note, if I continue my schedule of rolling out a site update every weekend, then I should be able to do a Daily Note on Monday, Wednesday and Fridays though that is highly dependent on circumstances of the moment.
So here it is the day after Memorial Day. I could say I had a productive holiday, worked around the house, tending to business and what not but I would be lying. For the most part, I just rested the weekend. The only thing we did of consequence as a family was spend some time in Old Salem. It is always good to visit the historic part of the city. Nothing ever changes there but it is such a beautiful place just to walk the cobblestones and see the historic places. Plenty of tourists around as well. Madeleine had a grand time just being herself; she has so much energy that I can not keep up with her. Appears time for me to get back into shape.
But before getting into shape, Memorial Day holiday is time for BBQ and I did my bit. Ribs on Sunday with potato salad and baked beans; Hamburgers and corn on Monday. All very good eats. Ate so much, I probably could go without eating for a day or two.
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So what time I had left for the weekend was spent on catching up with my reading and my photography. I am still going through the photos from the Dance Recital and the Celtic Festival from earlier this month. Also had to take care of some of the photos from the Old Salem trip too. It has been taking a bit longer to do the photos as I have to been experimenting a bit on them especially on the Dance Recital. My experiments in photos will be the subject of an upcoming feature this weekend.
One thing about the photography of late is that my hard drives are ready starting to fill up. An event like a dance recital will use up my 2GB flash card in my camera. Put a string of such events together and hard drives start shrinking tremendously.
So it looks like I will be in the market for another external hard drive soon. I am stunned to see that 1 TB drives are going for $120 now a piece. It was just a year ago or so, that I paid $100 for my 250GB. Prices coming down fast and that is good. At the rate I store photos now, I will need 100 GB/year. Of course, if I start doing more with my photography, then that usage will definitely jump.
See ya later…
There is a great article in this week’s Newsweek magazine. The article showcases the work of photographers who take pictures of families who experience the loss of a baby at birth or as a stillborn child. The group of photographers across the nation is called ‘Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep‘ .
We have our own experience through them when we lost our boy Nicholas. On that tragic day, one of the on duty nurses knew about the organisation and called Idlewild Photography in Winston-Salem who are one of the local participating photography studios for the group. After the photographer and his assistant arrived, we went into a separate room where they set up. We dressed Nicholas in the sleeping gown that we brought for him in expectation in taking him home. It was a trying moment for all of us given the tragedy of it all but the photographer’s sensitivity to this moment was extraordinary as they took photos of the last time we held Nicholas in our arms. He took different shots of us with him as well as closeups of his hands and feet.
When it was all done, the nurse came into the room and took Nicholas away.
We never saw him again.
A few weeks later we received the photos on a CD along with a slideshow. It did not cost us anything for the service and the photos were all ours to do as we please.
The photos were extraordinary in capturing our grief as well as preserving our memories of Nicholas for these photos are all we have of him now.
This group has done so much for families in their time of grief. They do this out of their generosity of their heart but what they give families like ourselves treasured memories beyond compare.
The photos can be seen on Flickr as well as on this photoset.
