I was looking at the publicity and stills for a high school friend’s newly published book and thought about my archives on Portland and Oregon and some of the stunning wine country photography I had captured while vacationing in the Pacific Northwest. I had a lot of recipes because the produce and green philosophy was excellent in Oregon. Normally my mind would go to a website, but I realized the value of books in a world where they are vanishing.
In tennis it’s considered a good thing to play with someone better than you, because it increases your focus and challenges you to bring up the skill level of your game. If you think you don’t benefit from reviewing the output of other photographer’s, I’d advise you to bring that lens around 180 degress. Not only do you see the finished result in its highly polished final form, but you can instantly see congruent images in your own portfolio in your mind’s eye that might trasnition to similar, more marketable image files.
Location shooting where I live (Burbank, California) is at a premium. Many places nearby like local businesses and public venues can be used for shooting scenes, but that unknown location is also great to discover. Many obvious choices can work against new productions because they are too expensive or difficult to obtain on short notice. Images of available or accessible locations for various interior and extior scenes are a microstock market all its own.
As with many walkabout photo grabs, I worked first get real clarity and shots of my subject material. In the editing session I noticed that the resolution was so high on a lot of my museum shots they were almost too difficult to examine for uniform tones and deep and near/far crispness. But cropping the sides of the shot generated a lot more visual drama inside the frame. The “forced” intersection of the vertices of the vaulted “flying buttresses” to the near wall created a perspective repetition of the arched “tunnel”. Certainly the word “cathedral” came to mind many times. But the image files allowed me to convey the excitement the grandeur of the structure created in me.
One of my assignments this month is to capture efficient yard tips for a landscaping website. These image files must demonstrate an idea about keeping back yards or front yard flowers and gardens efficient. But the challenge from straight photographic image captures is the composition requirements.