pictured: some noob.
anyways we go do some stuff at some person's house and then we drive to steveston, richmond. wow, i just totally ripped that captioning thing off of Cracked. anyways, digressing. so we go to steveston cause it appeared to be relatively sunny there (spoiler: it wasn't) compared to vancouver. (digression: hah, i just fucked with time with that clusterfuck of tenses in these two sentences. suck on that, every english teacher ever) along the way we heard a squeaky sound coming from the car and thought it was about to explode right from beneath our genitals and leave us alive but castrated, so we stopped to see what it was. turns out the window was open a sliver, making the wind moan in pleasure or something. that's how i imagine wind would moan, anyways.
me mimicking the wind moaning. this is my usual driving/O face.
and then when we arrived, we found out that it was infact not sunny, but really goddamn depressing. there was about 5% of the sky which was orgasmically sunset-y, but the rest of the 95% was rather soulcrushing with a slight chance of blueballs-inducing. well that joke totally didn't work out. anyways, this was meant to be an impromptu photowalk, and walk and photoed we did. from that pov, it was kind of a split thing for me - i had a few moments of pure inspiration where i knew what i was going for and, to my nerdgasmic joy, achieved (or so i'd like to think). and then a few which kinda fell flat. and also the ones which i just took because they're somebody's dad's grave or something?
somebody's dad's grave from some unheard-of anime, or something. inuyasha, i think it's called.
also, rabbit (glory)holes. hah, the only people who'll get that one are the really dirty ones.
one of those barely/semi-inspired ones. i think i have an assignment for sculptures but forgot what we're sposed to do. on another note, did you know that in some cultures, this is a symbol for gullibility?
i actually kinda sorta like this one, but the framing is just kinda awkward, and i can't find a crop of it that i like, so this is in the semishitty section.
and finally, the ones i'm pretty damn proud of:
this one in particular is in no small part inspired by Slipknot's latest album's cover art
this one's a bit marred by the blown highlights and slight misframing. but these, to some extent, don't really matter. the more i look at acclaimed/famous/universally hailed photos, the more i realize that as long as you got it right, it doesn't matter if there's flare, or if it's out of focus, or if the shadows/highlights are blown, as long as it doesn't detract from the image. sometimes it even adds to it.
all of these were taken with the DA15 (coincidence? who knows. but the more i use this lens, the more i love it/want to go out with it). something you might notice about these is they've all been pretty heavily PPed, which leads into that whole omg-PPing-is-wrong-should-do-it-like-in-film-where-you-just-get-it-right-in-camera. and to that, i have a few responses/opinions:
- first and foremost, PPing is not new in the digital age. it's certainly a lot easier/quicker with all sorts of programs available now, but it's been done all throughout photographic history - in the darkroom. people tend to forget about it because, before the advent of digital photography, they just sent it off to the nearest london drugs for those guys to do for them. that's the equivalent of shooting in JPEG today. now, i was never that great in the darkroom, but even so, i'd used it before to do all this (and all of these are sometimes looked down upon in the digital age as being wrong or unethical or unskillful)
- save shots from over/under exposure
- add effects (ie multiple exposure), tweak the shot or reframe/crop
- do crazy shite (solarization. the HDR of film)
- doing it to further the message or emotion or indescribable factor that you want your photo to evoke is okay. in that sense, the picture, the negative, whatever, is like your stencil, and PP is like your crayon (or w/e you wanna colour/fill in with). you see what you want from a scene, and maybe out of camera it's not exactly how you want it - maybe exactly how you want it, the exact lighting conditions or contrast or whatever are physically impossible/never going to happen - but through PP, you realize what you see, which may or may not match up what's physically in front of you at the time of the shutter opening. now, for shots where you go back and realize only after the fact that the shot could be made into something magnificent, that's a bit more iffy, but i don't think there're any problems with that too.
- doing it to "fix" a photo is iffyish, but sort of okay. if it's a backup measure incase something goes terribly wrong (let's say the sun peeks out and you take a shot meant to expose for cloud cover lighting, or osmething), then that's okay. if you plan to take poorly exposed photos and lean solely on PP to fix it for you and make up for it, i'm kind of against that. that said, there's a difference between that and, say, underexposing to preserve highlights so as to give more latitude in editing, or the opposite.
- if your PPing is the only thing which makes your photo looks good, and the other stuff (composition, depth of field, all that kinda shite) is rather meh, then it's a no for me. in that i mean if, for example, you have a rather bland sky or a boring, uneventful sunset, and you tweak the colors so that it seems like there's an ungodly thunderstorm coming your way or it's the end of the world, then...no. unless it's to do the first point, in which case it's debatable. however, there's a difference between doing that and "restoring" a picture - see, RAWs are, by nature, going to be less contrasty/saturated that in real life, and than a JPEG of default settings. this is because JPEGs are by default pumped up in color and contrast to make them have a better "pop" - so lazy people who don't want to bother with lightroom or whatever are happy with their shots. RAWs on the other hand, take a rather comparatively bland photo, so as to give the photographer maximum room to edit - be it colors, contrast, exposure, etc. therefore, it'll be less contrasty, less saturated, etc., than the original scene, and it's up to the photog to "restore" it to how it was when they saw it. ofc, if they're "remembering" a pedestrian cloud as a thunderhead, then...........yeah...
LOLHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHHHAHyeahw/e.
or a masculinity joke at myself. guess which car i drove here. hint, it's the beige one.
oh yeah, and as an extension on the PP thing - i feel like i'm getting pretty good results from my PP. i'm starting to figure out how to not overdo things, while simultaneously getting the balls to do more than barely anything. apparently the " \ " key in lightroom does a before/after for you, which helps. and doing multiple versions of fuckin' everything, also helps, as long as you don't choke that bitch called hard drive space. like, for the shots above, i had a few different versions. one of them had four - bland, final, blue/emo cast, B/W:
blogspot won't let me post that in a nice little 2x2 square like i'd like to, so i won't bother posting the other versions of the other shots. i feel like i have a pretty good repertoire of various effects/atmospheres/whatever, but one thing i wanna get good at is making better black and white conversions, or a good/better eye for what would convert nicely. the ironic thing is that i've been taking black and white film photography for the past 3 years. but i mean, these're all pretty shitty imo:
ok this one's just a bad shot in general, but still.
anyways, to close that off, thanks to the aforementioned noob for calling me up and getting me to go out and shoot; it was a good day, cloudy or not. the increased boob presence/sex jokes were great ;D LOLOL
but no thanks for not converting to b&w sexily ):
awkward-this-is-supposed-to-be-over-but-isn't-side-note: so i posted those shots that i was proud of onto PentaxForums, a forum that i embarassingly frequent ( i really need to think of a new username), and it seems people like it. people've posted some nice comments on my photos before, but this one really touched me:
"I want to thank you for these pictures. I absolutely love this kind of weather, as where I lived up until last year experienced it for about a third of the days out of the year (due to the proximity to the lake, I suppose). Somehow the bleakness and wind and cold, something in the subdued light, makes me feel a special sort of being alive, something apart from all the pointless concerns of modern life. I moved this past summer, to somewhere farther inland, and I've been missing these days. So thank you for sharing. "
cause i mean, at the end of the day, it's really fuck aperture, fuck shutter speed, fuck which lens you use or what brand of camera you have; it all boils down to the photo, and the response people get from it. so to see someone respond to a photo of mine like that is really, really amazing to me. and also:
"Very moving shots, you captured the scenes very nicely. Made my Winter Depression ten times worse.....which is bad for me, but good for your photo ability.
while not strictly along the lines of what i just mentioned in terms of response to a photo, this doesn't hurt either:
"Nice work!
First and last are my favorites - don't make me choose :-)
Edit - cheez, you're not helping out my camera saving plan with that DA-15 :-)"
of course, there was also some troll (or something) who posted saying that the above comments "encouraged less that beautiful photography" and that basically my shots were horrible and could maybe be saved by severe cropping and exposure correction. now, cropping for framing, maybe, i can see that happening. severe cropping, i'm not sure what he has in mind. exposure correction though, is where i call bullshit. i wasn't taking this shot to try and evoke a sense of bright, happy joy. and, in other threads that he's criticized, it seems like he also kind of misses the point of a lot of things. i guess a perfectly centered histogram in a studio setting is the only thing that satisfies him. on a funny note, the shots he's uploaded to his gallery are rather shitty. so between that and his rather questionable opinions, both in my thread and others, i kinda..don't give a shit about him. even if they were valid points, i still feel really proud that my photos affected people, even in that small little way.
well didn't that just boost my e-peen nicely. makes up for the ballcrushing i've been enduring in reversi lately ):
