Friday, November 15, 2013

Goals for Tomorrow

I am going back to Ren Fest tomorrow so I am posting this to the blog because the more I repeat it maybe, just maybe, I will remember it. This is something that I have said to myself a hundred times that I should be doing and still have only one recollection of every having done it. At Discovery Green I was shooting with two friends at the water jets. The children were at either end of the pool area but I found a good composition near the middle. I composed the shot and made a comment that I had decided on the photograph now all I had to was was to wait for a kid to move into the frame. They laughed. I got two extremely nice photographs but it took me awhile.

This is a technique that I really need to put to use tomorrow. Because, if you are interested in capturing the essence of the costumed performers you will want to avoid the 21st century time machine travelers--and I definitely want to avoid them, you will need to work very hard at backgrounds. There are a lot of interesting structures to be used but shooting in the middle of the crowds is not one of them.

From Craft and Vision's fifth volume of Photography magazine and Piet van den Eynde's article on editing with Lightroom (yes, don't tell anyone but I own Lightroom. It has been sitting on my book shelf for around a month. Someday I will install it.) Piet makes this comment about a workshop that he recently attended:

"I was on a workshop with Matt Brandon and he gave the workshop participants an assignment of "do not chase the image, but let the image come to you." The idea was to find a nice background, decide on composition and then just sit tight for half an hour and wait for an interesting foreground element to literally walk into the frame. It's a technique I can truly recommend. Especially when traveling, we photographers tend to rush into too much. We snap from one interesting sight to another, without exploring locations to the fullest because the next Unesco heritage site is already on our shot list." 

So, Woodard, tomorrow pick a spot and wait for the photographs to come to you. Much easier said than done for impatient people like me. My plan is to shoot 100 headshots tomorrow so if I know me I will be chasing them all over the place. That is another ploy. I hope that by putting it in writing for all the world to see will encourage me to pursue that goal.

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