Get in Tight

A Single Tulip (III) v.2, originally uploaded by kamikaze productions.

I’m not sure about the percentages, but I’m pretty sure a lot of people who take pictures (notice I didn’t say photographers) like to fit everything into a shot. Photographers would probably opt to find a pleasant and pleasing composition when greeted with an immense scene, but people who take pictures tend to zoom out or back up. Well here is a message to picture takers and photographers alike – GET IN TIGHT!

I haven’t had a lot of time, due to my moving to NY, so I went back in my Photostream a bit to come up with an idea to blog. I stumbled across this photo and it hit me. People should know that frames and compositions are EVERYWHERE. Taking pictures of giant landscapes or of an entire building or an entire group of people is cool and all…but a photo becomes artistic, unique, and different when you get in close and find what really strikes you the most. With the picture above I did just that. I had the girl and the flower in one big shot, and it did nothing for my mind. It was a good picture but not a great picture. So I got in closer, found a frame that spoke to me and voila! A tighter crop produced a more vocal piece, and that is what it is about.

Here’s a piece of learning advice and a good way to practice – take pictures of a lot of small objects one at a time. If you are sitting at your desk bored, pull out your camera and take shots of your mouse from several angles, your monitor, keyboard, etc…and then see what looks good. If you have a super fast lens, like say – 50mm f/1.4 or something in that maximum aperture range, use it. Try out different bokehs in order to create the perfect amount of blur. Practicing on things around the house will get your eye trained to be anticipatory and ready for opportunities when you see them in the street or on your next photo shoot. So good luck and good shooting!

Always Back Up (Redundancy is your Friend)

The other day, I was trying to format an external hard drive for my girlfriend. However, instead of deleting the partition on her drive, I deleted it on my drive – the drive I keep all my photography (RAW files and edits) on!!! This couldn’t of hurt the soul more. I was on the verge of tears, but the hope was that one layer of zeros wouldn’t prevent a software recovery.

The first recovery program yielded results – it found the files but could not save them for some reason. The second recovery program saved everything in record time! So I immediately backed up my work to an external and re-inserted the photos back into the original drive.

The moral of the story is that it is easy to get lazy with backing up your data, photos, videos, etc…but never forget how crucial it is. We trust computers too much, and sometimes we trust ourselves too much, but anything can happen. I’m pretty good with computers and I made a fairly simple mistake. So learn from me, if you don’t back up at least your most important stuff daily, try ever week, maybe on a Sunday. On my Mac I use time machine, which is incredibly easy. On my desktop pc, I just drag and drop all my new files over to the external hdd. It is easy, and it provides at least some assurance, and that can mean the world to you when it comes down to your passions being flushed out of existence!