torrilin replied to your post
Sep. 3rd, 2016 09:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2cypTH1:torrilin
replied to your post “sugarspiceandcursewords
replied to your post…”
If I’m shooting easy stuff, I can be very fast. Sleeping dog? I can totally get a cute picture in a few seconds. But an awake dog playing with a good friend? I’ll be lucky to get 1 picture that works. And even then my hit rate is miles better than in film days when dad would hand me the camera to try and get photos of his model airplane stuff. You could blow through 30 exposures and get nada.
I mean… action photos. Bane of existence. You have to have all your settings just right, and then you wait for the thing to be approximately the right spot, and then you blast away until it’s gone again, and only then do you get a chance to check and oh. your settings. not actually right. fuck.
Sports are great because the motion is repetitive. I learned with derby that I was only gonna get good shots at one spot on the track so I didn’t even bother pointing my camera other places (well. after a lot of learning process and failed photos, lol). Parties and stuff, sometimes I do that, I just set myself up at a spot and wait for subjects to do something cool. The longer the lens, the more of that I have to do, because I can’t wait for something cool to happen and then try to capture it.
(a wide lens, you can kind of stand in the middle of action, and wait for someone to react. a long lens, you gotta be more of a creeper and stand back and watch, but you’ll get more flattering portraits and more striking images. wide angle is really cluttery, there’ll be overwhelming detail just because #1 everything’s in the frame and #2 everything’s in focus, it’s the nature of the beast.)
Weddings, formal stuff like that, you have an edge because people are going to do some pretty ritualized things in a predetermined spot, so you kind of know where the action will be, though your opportunities to capture it are a lot more fleeting. (This is why you scope out the location and ask where you should stand and get permission to use a flash or not, and take test shots with or without the flash, etc.)
Animals playing? Way harder. Children too. Best shot is if you know there’s a thing they’ll play with, and you can get into position and wait for them to come to it. But you may not get anything.
(Adults playing can be easier, because they’re not as short and their attention spans are usually longer, LOL, but I’ve learned– for drunks, you need a wide-angle and an open mind.)
Random just documentary-style shooting trying to document anything interesting that happens = No Matter What, You Have The Wrong Lens On Your Camera, Ha Ha, Sucks To Be You. Literally No Matter What Lens You Have On Your Camera, It Is Wrong. (You can mitigate this with an all-in-one like the 18-270 I have, but it’s not so great in low light, and while it does everything, it doesn’t do any of it well perfectly. I use it a lot, though, because at least I get *a* shot.)
Yeah, back in film days I did a whole lot more static and posed stuff, because motion was really pretty much impossible. First off film was slow as hell and there was never enough light, second off every missed shot was about fifty cents.
Now, though. You can just– go nuts. I love it. When I am in a position to love things.
But I was going through my photos from the farm and there are whole days where all I have are four or five blurry unsatisfactory shots of something, and nothing that came out. Sometimes, you just can’t.
And if you mostly take documentary-style photos, if your style is clean/transparent/minimal/Realistic enough, this is the sort of trap: people forget that you took them. They just– are images of things that happened. People take them for granted. I started watermarking derby photos because everyone saved them to their own facebook pages, and often gave no credit at all, or credit to a different photographer, because they genuinely didn’t know or care. And you can’t blame them, but– that’s not the camera, that’s my eye and my equipment and my timing and my edits. That’s not an event, that’s an image I took during the event. That’s not dispassionate Reality, that’s my interpretation. I don’t even necessarily care about my Artistic Vision or whatever, I just want people to think, as you view these images, that there’s a layer of remove from reality there.
In order for me to take that picture, there has to be something I saw, there. I made choices. Sometimes the derby photos were political in various ways, and I always pointed out that I was incapable of taking neutral photographs, because I was not a neutral observer.
replied to your post “sugarspiceandcursewords
replied to your post…”
If I’m shooting easy stuff, I can be very fast. Sleeping dog? I can totally get a cute picture in a few seconds. But an awake dog playing with a good friend? I’ll be lucky to get 1 picture that works. And even then my hit rate is miles better than in film days when dad would hand me the camera to try and get photos of his model airplane stuff. You could blow through 30 exposures and get nada.
I mean… action photos. Bane of existence. You have to have all your settings just right, and then you wait for the thing to be approximately the right spot, and then you blast away until it’s gone again, and only then do you get a chance to check and oh. your settings. not actually right. fuck.
Sports are great because the motion is repetitive. I learned with derby that I was only gonna get good shots at one spot on the track so I didn’t even bother pointing my camera other places (well. after a lot of learning process and failed photos, lol). Parties and stuff, sometimes I do that, I just set myself up at a spot and wait for subjects to do something cool. The longer the lens, the more of that I have to do, because I can’t wait for something cool to happen and then try to capture it.
(a wide lens, you can kind of stand in the middle of action, and wait for someone to react. a long lens, you gotta be more of a creeper and stand back and watch, but you’ll get more flattering portraits and more striking images. wide angle is really cluttery, there’ll be overwhelming detail just because #1 everything’s in the frame and #2 everything’s in focus, it’s the nature of the beast.)
Weddings, formal stuff like that, you have an edge because people are going to do some pretty ritualized things in a predetermined spot, so you kind of know where the action will be, though your opportunities to capture it are a lot more fleeting. (This is why you scope out the location and ask where you should stand and get permission to use a flash or not, and take test shots with or without the flash, etc.)
Animals playing? Way harder. Children too. Best shot is if you know there’s a thing they’ll play with, and you can get into position and wait for them to come to it. But you may not get anything.
(Adults playing can be easier, because they’re not as short and their attention spans are usually longer, LOL, but I’ve learned– for drunks, you need a wide-angle and an open mind.)
Random just documentary-style shooting trying to document anything interesting that happens = No Matter What, You Have The Wrong Lens On Your Camera, Ha Ha, Sucks To Be You. Literally No Matter What Lens You Have On Your Camera, It Is Wrong. (You can mitigate this with an all-in-one like the 18-270 I have, but it’s not so great in low light, and while it does everything, it doesn’t do any of it well perfectly. I use it a lot, though, because at least I get *a* shot.)
Yeah, back in film days I did a whole lot more static and posed stuff, because motion was really pretty much impossible. First off film was slow as hell and there was never enough light, second off every missed shot was about fifty cents.
Now, though. You can just– go nuts. I love it. When I am in a position to love things.
But I was going through my photos from the farm and there are whole days where all I have are four or five blurry unsatisfactory shots of something, and nothing that came out. Sometimes, you just can’t.
And if you mostly take documentary-style photos, if your style is clean/transparent/minimal/Realistic enough, this is the sort of trap: people forget that you took them. They just– are images of things that happened. People take them for granted. I started watermarking derby photos because everyone saved them to their own facebook pages, and often gave no credit at all, or credit to a different photographer, because they genuinely didn’t know or care. And you can’t blame them, but– that’s not the camera, that’s my eye and my equipment and my timing and my edits. That’s not an event, that’s an image I took during the event. That’s not dispassionate Reality, that’s my interpretation. I don’t even necessarily care about my Artistic Vision or whatever, I just want people to think, as you view these images, that there’s a layer of remove from reality there.
In order for me to take that picture, there has to be something I saw, there. I made choices. Sometimes the derby photos were political in various ways, and I always pointed out that I was incapable of taking neutral photographs, because I was not a neutral observer.
