Syl Arena was recently the guest poster on Scott Kelby’s blog and wrote an amazing article that everyone who pretends or intends to be a photographer needs to read. He promises that this is the first of a series to appear on his own blog every Wednesday. If they are as compelling as the first dozen it will be a real treat. If I were to choose just one to quote here I would (and did) pick this one:

7. Learning to create photographs that “look” like your world should be only a milestone – not the destination.
Embrace the fact that cameras see differently than humans. Accept that, even today, state-of-the-art tools and technology fall short of reproducing the entire gamut of human vision. The reality is that photography cannot perfectly record or portray the world as we experience it. Yet, this is typically the goal of most neophyte photographers. They measure the “goodness” of their photos by how closely the images match what the shooter experienced. If this is you, with time and practice, you’ll come to understand that your photos will seldom (if ever) match your reality. When that awareness comes, celebrate! You’ve finally reached the true starting line on your journey as a photographer. What lies ahead is the exploration of how you can create photographs that express rather than represent.

Read It!

The nice light didn’t last too long this morning before the clouds moved in, but the conditions got right for some motiony blur stuff, which I thought might look kind of cool with snow. These aren’t the best I’ve ever done but we don’t have a good selection of nice straight tree trunks along my section of the greenway.

I like how the snow erases all the background clutter, so you just get the tree trunks, a little green and some brown.

Hey, the weather people got one right! I would have bet money otherwise, but just to be safe I brought my work laptop home on Friday “just in case.” So today I ended up having one of those whatever-they-call-those-days-when-people-stay-home-from-work-when-the-kids-are-out-of-school days. Sick day? Sure as heck isn’t going to count as a vacation day! Since I don’t usually take sick days we’ll call it that!

Anyway, I wandered around this morning trying to see what I could get and whether I might get something to get in the paper and make me famous again. Well, I got some nice stuff, but while I was downloading the images our power went out, I went off and did something else, and by the time I got back to it and processed some images the paper had decided they had gotten enough photos and disabled their upload link. Oh well, a few more for the stock files!

This image was made during some fleeting golden light shortly after sunrise this morning along the Torrence Creek Greenway, about 100 yards from my house.

This was supposed to be a productive weekend, but things didn’t turn out exactly as planned. In a number of ways. Looks like I may have a lot more time on my hands in a couple of weeks. We’ll see.

This image is one of a number of impressionistic images from our trip to the beach. Hard to believe it was just a week ago!

For now, suffice it to say that this image sums up the state of my head these days. Lots of content, just a little fuzzy.

Here is another quick photo from Monday morning’s sunrise. I shot a few panoramas of this scene as it developed but haven’t had time to process them. I “only” shot 800 images this weekend! A few of them should turn out to be jewels but I’m going to need some time to process them over the next few weeks.

One bit of exciting news – I submitted an article to Camera in the Wild, the newsletter of the Carolinas’ Nature Photographers Association, and it got published in the March issue! Now this is sort of like getting your 3rd grade artwork posted on Mom’s refrigerator, but published is published, right? It’s not the New York Times, but it’s the best I’ve done so far! I’d share the link but it is member’s only. The article was originally posted here, so you can still read it if you haven’t already.

Published is published, right? Now I can say I’m a writer and a photographer!

Kathy & I are spending the long President’s Day weekend in Hilton Head, SC, our favorite destination to get away for a few days and chill. Sometimes I use our trips here to have a vacation from photography, but I haven’t been doing a lot of shooting so far this year and I decided I needed to work on upping my giggage quotient.

We got here late Thursday, well after sunset, but the forecast for Friday was excellent with conditions deteriorating late Friday into Saturday. I decided to get up for sunrise, which is at a fairly civil time this time of year, and while I was a little later getting to work than I might have liked there was plenty of gorgeous color. I took a bunch of shots and will try to post a few over the next several days.

Things started to cloud up as the afternoon progressed, and I was afraid we might lose our sunset opportunity for the day. There was some pretty nice color in the sky but nothing spectacular. As often happens however, well after sunset things got a little interesting, away from the sun and over the water. For about 5 minutes things turned a brilliant red and I managed to get a few shots.

I’ll call this one Nature’s Valentine!

I spent this past weekend at a workshop with John Shaw, famous landscape and nature photographer. Learned a lot of good things, heard a lot of things I already knew, and found a few things I don’t necessarily agree with. Now John’s a pretty opinionated dude, not afraid to say so and what he says is right. As far as he’s concerned. All in all it was worth the time and money, especially in the middle of February when there’s not a whole lot else going on.

One of the most inspired conversations of the weekend was around Shaw’s espousal of the principal of “Expose to the Right” or ETTR. I feel pretty confident in saying that I understand the theory behind ETTR – half of your information is in the 5th box, the preview on your LCD will look overexposed, move the histogram as far right as possible without blowing highlights, move it back during processing etc, etc, etc. I get that. But here’s the thing: Many if not most of the attendees at this workshop were completely clueless about this, as evidenced by the questions and background whispers. I don’t think it’s a good idea for most people to run around constantly overexposing their pictures because “I was at a John Shaw workshop and this is what he said we should do.” NO! How about subject or situational appropriateness?

During this lengthy discussion someone asked the rhetorical question, “what if I’m taking a photo of my Black Lab in a coal mine?” Shaw’s response – “EXPOSE TO THE RIGHT!” “How about if…”EXPOSE TO THE RIGHT!” Like there were no other options. What I wanted to ask and didn’t was, “If, in order to expose to the right I have to increase exposure by 3 stops, and assuming I know what I want my aperture to be, I have to increase exposure either by using a longer shutter speed or higher ISO. What if the dog is panting hard and will be blurry at a longer shutter speed, or what if we’re in the woods, there is just a little bit of breeze and the leaves are moving? What if lengthening the shutter speed or raising the ISO by three stops takes it beyond the optimal low-noise threshold for my camera? Is it better to have the information I want, properly exposed and sharp, or should I accept a blurry subject with noise because someone said that I need to EXPOSE TO THE RIGHT? And what if I don’t want to spend the time it takes to process all my images back to the proper exposure?

Most people have a hard enough time understanding exposure as it is. Many of them have advanced beyond shooting JPEGs which is great, but to then introduce this principal of purposely overexposing their pictures is an unnecessary complication for a lot of people. The problem as I see it is that most of the people who are knowledgeable enough to use and understand ETTR are probably experienced enough to know that it is not a One Size Fits All proposition. Those who aren’t should be happy with the gains they achieve by shooting at the higher bit rate and larger color space of RAW files and leave the color theory to the scientists.