photography
-
On Taking Pictures DC Meetup
I spent most of today in DC, at a meetup with the hosts of the On Taking Pictures podcast, as well as a good-sized group of listeners. We started out at the Smithsonian American Art Museum to see the Irving Penn exhibit, and then broke out to walk around the area shooting for a while, and finished off the day with food, drink, and conversation at Hill Country BBQ. The Penn exhibit was phenomenal, if a little overwhelming, feature 146 intense images. The range of his work was much broader than I realized, and I was particularly interested in some of his street photography from the
-
Too Late For Fall Color? Catoctin Furnace, Thurmont, Maryland
I’ve been in a slump and a funk for quite some time because, other than my recent trip to New York for PhotoPlus Expo, I haven’t made a photograph in months. I’ve barely even taken a picture! So it was decided that, no matter that I played a gig last night and didn’t get home until after three, I would be getting up early to go make some photographs. I decided, too, that the direction headed would be west, to the area around Thurmont, Maryland, and one of my subject choices would be pretty uncharacteristic for me: fall color, assuming there
-
Where Does Photography Happen?
“Thomas Leuthard,” by and copyright © Davide Petilli I was reading an article on a site called Streetpxl this morning about candid street portraiture (Streetpxl is a site dedicated to street photography). The first article led to another, an interview with Swiss street photographer Thomas Leuthard. Leuthard’s closing comment was perhaps the most important in the whole piece, as far as I’m concerned: Street photography happens on the street and not online. If you want to improve, you have to shut down your computer, take your camera and go out to shoot. You have to practice it for 10,000 hours
-
At The Zoo…
They tell me it’s all happening at the zoo,I do believe it, I do believe it’s true… On Sunday, we went to join an iPhone meetup group for a photo walk at the National Zoo in Washington. While I did shoot with the iPhone, I also shot a lot with the Fujifilm X-E1. Here are my iPhone shots: There are a lot of times I find using the iPhone camera(s) to be really frustrating. It’s great for shooting when you can get in
-
Common Ground Roots Music Festival 2014
Our weekend was spent at the Common Ground Roots Music Festival listening to lots of great music and visiting with some of the people Donna met during her Common Ground classes a couple weeks ago. It was a great weekend. For me, the musical highlights were Professor Louie & the Crowmatix, New Riders of the Purple Sage and Réveillons!, but all the performances were outstanding. We missed seeing Guy Davis, who we saw at the Northeast Blues Festival in Rockport, ME, a few years back. Of course, I did take a few snapshots…
-
The End Of November…
A few shots from today’s visit to Chincoteague National Seashore and Chincoteague, VA. Images shot with a Fujifilm X10 or Sony Alpha SLT-A35. All processing in Photoshop Lightroom 5.2. I went back-and-forth between the Sony and Fuji cameras today. I kept finding the Sony to be frustrating — almost to the point of distraction. In the end, I used a couple more pictures from the Sony, more because of compositions than anything else.
-
1935 Time Capsule
In yesterday’s mail, I received a book that I ordered on eBay, a copy of William Mortensen’s Pictorial Lighting. The book was published in 1935. My copy is from the 3rd printing (July of 1936) of that first edition. As I was reading through the introduction, I was struck by a particular theme: Simplification. Even in 1935, it seems, we had gear junkies! To wit: About twenty years ago electricity invaded the studios and photographers proceeded to go quite light mad. Studios everywhere blossomed out with lights of every imaginable size
