Hey Everyone! I hope you had a great week.  This week I want to talk to you about Street Photography and what it means to me. Now I shoot many kinks of photography but mainly Landscape/Travel. But I do love Street photography. Especially in a locale that I haven't been before. I love walking the streets and seeing what I can capture.  There are many forms of street photography.  I think there is portraiture , architect, casual, fine art, and many more. It can be a shoot from the hip to get the shot or right in your face to get the shot.  There are many different styles and ways of doing street Bartender waiting for Customer Boston photography.  The equipment used can be just an iPhone to one body and one lens.  It doesn't matter what type of camera equipment you use its the capture that is important. I have been reading a book. Yes a book!  The book is titled "Street Photography Assignments 75 reasons to hit the streets and learn" by Valerie Jardin.  It gives you assignments to do to grow your Street photography skills. The author only uses one lens and body for all of her work and her work is amazing!  So I have been trying to use some of the techniques that I've found in her book. To me Street photography is about exploring and documenting.  When I was growing up I remember looking at News Papers and Magazines with Man Waiting for T Boston Black and White photo's in them and you could see the story in the photographs no mater what the subject was.  If it was a riot or if it was poverty or a sporting event.  To me that is what street photography is like. I'm not out to get a story or watch a sporting event I'm there to document and capture beauty and action and how life was in the moment and time I pushed the shutter button.  I am not the in your face kind of shooter when doing street photography I'm more of casual and lets just see what I can see and using the techniques that I'm learning maybe start to tell the story like those photo's I used to see.  Here are just a few of the techniques I try to use.

- Reflections .  I love me a refection.  I love to find a puddle of water in front of a cool scene and use it to my advantage. Or a window  or even a mirror of a parked car or building.   DD Girl Reflections seem to open up the scene and zoom into the subject all at the same time.  This may be my favorite technique and I'm always looking for one.

-Selective Focusing and Framing.  I love to use a frame when I can find one.  A window , a fence anything that can be used to Isolate the subject and bring it out in a creative way. I have used the arm rest of park benches to do this .  Almost anything you can use you  just have to be creative.

-Silhouettes and Sunburst. Shooting into the sun or bright light to give the silhouette of the subject is a very cool shot.  Making a sunburst at the same time is even cooler. To make the sunburst you have to use a small aperture and catch the sun on the corner of something and you will create the sunburst.  Very Cool.

Struggling Biker Boston -Catching Day Walkers.  I love this technique you find an interesting back drop for you subject to walk through and just wait for people to come your in one place getting great shots.  Good to do while you're resting or taking a break.

-Shadows. Looking for shadows in a big city and make great photos.  You can have people coming from the dark shadow into the light you can have people waling in the light between shadows.

-Using different angles.  Looking up at a subject gives it a bigger than life appearance. Also looking down gives it a smaller appearance. Using all Points of view will give you more interesting photographs. Stairs and Shadows Boston

These are just a few of the techniques that are in the book I mentioned above and as you can see these are basically advice or tips that can be used with all types of photography.  If you haven't done much street photography pick a town or small city to explore. Look at the downtown area it will be the most interesting.  Go with a friend and just explore see what you can see.  There is lots of stuff out there!  If you're like me Street photography will be a fun way to explore different city's.  This month I'll be traveling to Boston with some friends to do just that explore and have a good time with my camera.  So until Next week get out and shoot!

Hi Everyone! Hope you had a great week! This week I want to talk about the modern Photographer and how the role of Photographer has changed. Not too long ago if you wanted Pretty Pictures you called a Photographer to come and take them. You were assured that these photographs were well exposed and looked like the people or places you wanted represented. Pretty Pictures. If you lived in a small town like I did as a teenager (back in the 70's ) with the population of only 5000 there were only a few people that had SLR cameras and knew how to take Pretty Pictures with them.  So photography wise you were a Big Fish in a small town. And it was that way for decades before and after when I was a teenager. But then digital came about.  Smart Point and Shoot cameras and then smart phones, iPads, camera's everywhere in your computer even in your car when you back up. And they can all take Pretty Pictures and even video.  Everyone reading this has a smart phone in their possession that can take Pretty Pictures and do what it took hours of work to do for a Photographer in my day in seconds.  A perfectly exposed Light House Stairs photograph can be taken by anyone by pulling a smart phone out of their back pocket and "Click" boom there it is. Smart phones have come to the point where they can be used for professional work. For quick snapshots for the local paper, to real-estate Photography. The smart phone and point and shoots have changed the meaning of Photographer as we used to know it. So why do we as Photographer's keep buying big fancy camera's and lenses? We can take "Pretty Pictures" with our cell phones? Because there is more to Photography than just taking Pretty Pictures!

Goldsboro Fire House One reason is the joy of the experience of taking a photograph. If you take a long road trip its not really just the destination its the journey. To me photography is like that. I love the process of photography. Making a composition then deciding what aperture to put the camera at. What about shutter speed on moving subjects. Do I need a tripod for a longer exposure? I love this process even more than the final result. Its all the stops you make along the way (the journey) of taking the photograph. The act of not letting the algorithm of a smart phone decide for me what all of the settings should be and what the photograph should look like.

Another reason is taking photographs that aren't Pretty Pictures. Using your camera to take abstract art or light that you can't even see like infra The MetroCommuters waiting for the Metro in Washington DC. red photography. Super long exposures of scenes that remove all of the people because they were walking by. Blurry photographs to show an emotion of a scene. These are all things that you can't do with your smart phone.

As you can see Photography is more than the end result. It is much more than how many likes you can get. Its more than the pretty sunset or sunrise or that beautiful waterfall. Its about experiencing the people and the places you go and how you got there or met them. Photography to me is a way to get out into the world and experience new things. Bringing a camera has gotten me out of the house and let me see things through a new Dice window. It has been a my Passport to the world.  It has led me to new friends and experiences that a smart phone would never do. It has changed me from a "living to work" mentality to "working to shoot or working to live" way of life. Photography, especially in recent years has shown me new places and things that I would have never got to do or see through my lens if I didn't have the fancy camera. 

Oops, I've gotten on a tangent again and started talking about me again. I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you just want Pretty Pictures use your smart phone.  You will get a perfectly exposed photograph. But if you want to live the life of a Photographer don't take Pretty Pictures and get yourself one of those fancy camera's and start the journey of a lifetime of photography. Photography is one of the hobbies that you can do your whole life.  They can wheel you Wine glass Splash outside while your at the rest home while you're clutching your camera and you can look up and take photos of the clouds. Being a Photographer is a life long journey.  So until next week get outside and shoot!
 

  DCIM\101GOPRO Hey Everyone! Hope you had a great week! This week I want to talk about Mistakes we all have made in photography. Now I'm not talking about when your learning the exposure triangle but after your a pretty good photographer but still beginning.  Some of these mistakes have thrown me for a loop for hours of me trying to find out what in the world is going on.  Trying to blame on my camera when it was just me and something I have done or  not done. Hopefully after reading this if you do the dumb thing that I've done you'll recognize it quicker than I did. So here we go with the list of 5 mistakes.

1. Everything is blurry when I look through the camera. Have you ever been shooting and while your looking through the camera every thing looks a bit blurry but when you preview on the back of the camera or use Live View everything looks ok? Well this happens to me quite a bit and its easy to fix.  What has happened is that you have bumped your diopter adjustment on your camera.  It's the little wheel that is just beside the eyepiece of your viewfinder. It is used to make corrections for folks that use glasses if they aren't using them. It only effects the view finder of your camera. Simply look through the viewfinder and look at the settings on the screen if they are blurry simply move this dial until they are sharp and now everything will be sharp when you look through the view finder.

2.  I press the shutter but nothing happens. This happened to me when I first got a new camera.  I went to a festival and was going to shoot all of the interesting things happening there with my new camera.  When I first went into the festival and took that first shot and nothing happened. I turned on and off the camera to see if that would fix it but nothing.  I tried and tried and nothing. What had happened is I had accidentally pushed the button or dial in my case and put the shutter to a 30 second time delay. So when I pushed the shutter nothing happened.  It took me quite a while sitting on a bleacher at the festival trying to figure out the menu of my new camera to figure out what had happened.

3. I take the shot and it seems brighter or darker than usual. This one has happened to me and it actually has a few causes that will make your camera do this.

- The first one is that you accidentally hit the ISO button and put your ISO way too high causing the sensor to be way too sensitive to light than it needs to be and the photo or photo's turn out too bright. Yep I've done it shooting along at 400 ISO and all of the sudden I'm at 25000. I had hit the button on the back of the camera, I had to reassign that button because I did it so much. 

- The second reason is that I had accidentally put my camera in manual bracket mode.  In this mode your camera at each touch of the shutter makes one dark one light and one just right exposure. Usually when I shoot in bracket mode I have it on continuously make the brackets with one touch of the button. But in Manual it does one at a time.  I have shot like this for hours before I figured out what was happening. I eventually  looked at the back of my screen and made it where I could view a lot of the photo's at one time and I saw the pattern . One Dark, One just right, and one Bright.  Thats when I had figured out what I had done. Luckily it was only set to half a stop of light so I could recover my photo's in post.

-The third one is that I accidentally hit the exposure compensation one way or the other .  I usually figure this one out pretty much because I tend to use the exposure compensation quite a bit but it can happen.

4. Dead Battery or SD card full.  I have seen people do this quite a bit. Especially in the DSLR days when batteries lasted quite a while. You show up at the site and bam battery dead. Whats even worse is if you have a back up battery and haven't charged it you're really dead in the water. The best way to avoid this or a full SD card is preparation before you go to the shoot . Always make sure your batteries are charged and you have a fresh card in your camera. And always carry extra's with you.

5. Spots on your images. When you get home after a longs day shoot you're excited to get your images loaded onto your computer to view.  When you get there you notice that there are spots or a spot on your photo's.  Especially when  your stopped down to F11 or greater.  The sky has spots all in it. You need to clean your sensor! You have dust on it!  Keeping your equipment clean is something we must all do to keep our images clean. It is a simple as wiping down your equipment .  If your sensor is dirty you can clean it but if your too scared too ,take it to someone that you trust to do it like a camera shop.  With mirrorless cameras dust and dirt are more a problem than with old DSLR cameras because the sensor is right there when you change lenses.

So there you go 5 mistakes that we make while shooting.  They can all be avoided if we take the time to learn our camera's and keep them serviced  well. So until next week keep shooting and get outside!