Day 173 / 539
06-20-16
Day 170 / 536
06-19-16
Day 169 / 535
06-14-16
Day 164 / 530
06-12-16
Day 162 / 528
06-04-16
Day 156 / 520 –
I’m reading “It’s Not About The F-Stop” by Jay Maisel. It’s a photography book about the art and craft of photography, not about the technical details. There is still a ton I have to learn about photography, but I find that I like to take what I know, use it, get to a point that I’m ready for the next lesson, learn it, then use and repeat. I don’t just want to learn everything technical and then try to make perfect pictures.
But I sometimes need to be reminded that this is an art, and there is craft involved, and you can’t force a photo. You have to go looking for it, which also means you have to be open to it.
But the book is also making me look back at my old photos a bit, pulling out things I didn’t work on because it wasn’t in the 365 project. There are some things I really liked that I shot, and I either forgot about them or pushed them so far back on the burner that I didn’t think much of them.
So while I’m revisiting a few old photos, it comes from the inspiration to see what I left behind.
06-03-16
Day 155 / 519 –
We saw this place on the way to the Dayton airport. I saw it at around noon, and the light was high and the shadows were harsh. So much of what made it interesting was hidden, and I resolved to come back later in the day. Sadly, the clouds behind it, which were dramatic and perfect for my style of shooting had dispersed, and the light I was hoping for was dodging in and out of the clouds to the west.
There is probably a lesson here about doing the shot when you can, but I’m going to be patient. I have two more weeks here. Perhaps the shot will materialize. Maybe not. There will always be other shots.
Also, the keyboard on my Macbook is broken, and the “z” key is broken. So how did I type a “z”? I didn’t. I googled a word that had a “z” in it, and copied and pasted the single letter. Where there’s a will…
06-02-16
Day 154 / 518 –
This is the same barn as yesterday, just from a different side. The light hits it differently, and of course, the camera doesn’t capture an object, it captures the light that is reflected off the object. Slight changes in perspective can have a big impact.
06-01-16
Day 153 / 517 –
I find myself less and less involved in social media these days. I got burned out on it last year, and I’ve cut way back on my use. Frankly, I’m happy I did. I was spending way too much time and energy involved with it.
Social media is getting noisier and angrier, with fake accounts, spam accounts, bots, and the worst of all, the companies themselves. Facebook creates ways to keep the things the people you follow from reaching you, Instagram might start doing the same thing (curated feeds), and Twitter finds new and clever ways to interrupt your feed with things you don’t care about.
In the Good Olde Days, we had Google Reader and RSS. You subscribed to a blog (you see, a blog is / was a site where… never mind) in Google Reader, and every time it updated, it was in your feed, waiting for you to read it when you wanted. It was beautiful.
But wait, how is that different from a social media feed? Well, when my site updates, it doesn’t have to compete for your attention with a troll, or a food post, or a retweet of something you don’t care about, or the picture of someone’s beard whom you have never met and never will, or smh, or tbh, or tbt, or another ICYMI when you didn’t miss it in the first place and would never “miss” it in the first place, or having to click through to see what someone else said that you don’t care about, or clickbait, or or or….
In other words, Google Reader and RSS gave you what you wanted, when you were ready for it, without all the other crap. And then they went away. Google shut down Reader, and the world of social media took over. And it’s sucked ever since.
But RSS is still alive and well. A few companies came to the rescue. I use Feedly for my RSS feeds, and use Digg Reader as a backup. They both have mobile apps (I use Newsify on my iOS devices), and are fairly easy to use and unobtrusive. With Feedly, just put the URL of the site you want to follow into the Personalize section and you are good to go.
But here is the ninja thing I do on my desktop browser. I have a pinned tab for my Feedly feed, so it is always available as the first tab, ready to go (I also have the local weather on Wunderground and the NHL scoreboard pinned, but that’s just me). It takes more effort to go to Facebook or Twitter than it does to look at my Feedly tab and see content that I want to see, rather than what the other sites think I want to see.
So I encourage you to set up your own RSS reading site. It is the first place I go online, because it puts the things I want and find interesting in front of me. And it does it on my schedule.
Special thanks to Seth Godin. His post today inspired this. He says it better than I do, so please go read him. I do, every day.
05-29-16
Day 150 / 514