Gangsta

Gangsta
Originally uploaded by DrkMage

Public Self vs Private Self. ...

We all do it. This is my nephews public self it's not how I see him at all. I look at him and I see a ready smile and a big full laugh.This is his public self.

I believe that portraits have to show that public self and that self we want to be seen as. I still see the smile in his eyes.. he's a great kid.

Flash!!!!! It's Photography.

I take a lot of available light shots. I hate the way the flash makes my photos look. It's like taking a bucket of white paint and splashing it all over the Mona Lisa or something. It's just ugly to bath everything in white light and create a unnatural bluish tint. I prefer the soft shadows and the natural look of available light. Give me a wide aperture and available light to shoot my shot. Give me an f/1.8 50 mm over any F/3.6 - F/5.6 zoom lens any day. I'll get nice DOF and the right look. Nothing like a portrait with the face in focus and the fall off behind the ears. I love that look.

The truth is I never really knew how to use a flash on the camera. I started taking photos like everyone else. A little point and shot 35 mm that my grand mom got for me. Use the flash inside she'd tell me. Use the flash it's night. And I always got . . . Well you know what I always got. Those vacation shots a lot of people have. Those family snap shots of Aunt June or who ever. Yuck!!!

So I'm looking at Adorama at the Pentax K20D. I'm going though the Pentax flash on the site and they explain it, all of it. I learned a lot. Why all my photos looked unnatural. I learned when to use the flash even in Sunlight. it was great.

What I learned is that light has 3 qualities. Of course I learned this over time. Some times my photos look warmer (photography word) due to the light. You call that color quality. Some times you use a single light source (AKA Lamp) to create shadows and drama in an image. The definition of direction. Light has a 3rd quality called intensity simply put how bright it is. I have 2 real problems in my past flash photos. Simply the range of the flash is about 3 feet for optima and 15 feet to be out of range. My problem is I put things to close or to far. I need to take my photos at about 3-4 feet if my prime source of light is my flash. I also need to use auto white balance when I'm going to flash. it doesn't take on a blue look of being cool.

I need to remember that due to the direction straight at my target there will be no shadows in my picture. I need to make sure that the other the other sources of light compliment this. This is called fill flash you do this on a sunny day when the sun is at your target's back. You use this to remove unwanted shadows and dark areas.

I'm going to go and take some cool photos now that I learned this and look up the range on my Canon.

Cold War anyone?

Photography is a place with a lot of rules that only seem to apply when you want them to or when they seem to work. Let's look at the rule of thirds. When do you apply it? Well when it works. When do you apply narrow depths of field? When you want to. There seems to be one rule that seems to apply constantly. That rule is the camera cold war.

We've all seen the Camera cold war and some of us even fight it. That's what happens when a Nikon user sees a guy happily shooting his Canon or vice versa.People judge the lenses you choose to use. The tripod isn't microfiber or it's made by the wrong people.

This is really the worst part of photography. I like to take the photos. I like to show them to my friends and my fans.I just hate comparing my equipment to someone else's. There is always more expensive and better stuff. The photo is the only thing that matters.

Since the photo is all that really matters anyway. I've seen good photos taken with the cardboard box disposibles.I've seen excellent pictures taken with point and shoots. it's not really the camera it's the photographer.