Well a couple of weeks ago, myself and a friend shot this video, we covered 2 roller derby bouts and rattled off some 24,000+ frames between us and I managed to find the small jpg buffer limit on a 1D2n. Editing these has been a real nightmare, I have a lot more respect for the patience of Keith Loutit and his wonderful work over on Vimeo.
Enjoy! 
If you are on a PC and a Photoshop user, this handy cheat sheet for shortcuts will help a great deal. The full cheat sheet can be downloaded from Smashing Magazine, for free.
Go on, stretch yourself. The 365 photo a day is a rite of passage that at some point we all attempt, and often people will fail at maintaining it. However, that’s not a failure of the project it will have taught you a lot (ok maybe not if you stop on day2) and opened your eyes to those elusive grab shots and the difficulty of producing a sustained output. I know it has for me.
FWAPhoto is a photo a day project with a difference, it is not one submitter but many, and so has a constant rich vein of photographic talent to draw from. You can even submit your own work to the project. It’s definitely a site worth browsing with a fresh hot cup of Java and some time to kill.
Not quite a 365, but a few of us set up a 31 day photo challenge that we’ve talked about before. It’s coming to a close soon and has been fun to participate in and see what everyone has produced. Seeing how a group event differs from the very personal 365 exploration has been interesting and informatinve. I know a few, including Matt, are hoping to make it a 365 experience.. let’s hope they can. For me, I’m thinking about it again.. maybe this time I will finish the task.
Earlier I wrote about how we interact with emotions in photographs, and how the darker emotions invite more connections and narrative, well here’s a video that is part of Nikon’s Your Day in 140 seconds or less competition in which people submitted 140 second videos taken with their DSLRs.
I really like this video: Today
It has a nice warm feel, and the transitions of facial expression makes you think and is also capabable of giving you a dose of the warm and fuzzies, if you let it. I think it is the transition of emotions and the question of “what made them smile?” that really helps you connect with this, along with the very well selected soundtrack. Watching with and withoutaudio, shows how important the right choice of audio is for pieces like this. The new DSLR cameras with their video capability are going to open up opportunities in portraiture, the moving portrait can be very engaging. Hmmm anyone got a 5D2 they want to loan me? 
Well we’re having a proper winter, like those I remember from being a kid, and it seems that we’re not the only ones either.
Here are a couple of good links for you: cold snap across the globe, from The Frame by the Sacramento Bee and the Harbin Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival, via the Big Picture at the Boston Globe, which also has this Snowy Scenes compilation.
Enjoy the white stuff.
Well are you? As I sat here on a cold winter’s day, watching the snow fall outside, I got to thinking, always a dangerous thing to do. I was thinking about technical aspirations and what we are sometimes missing. All too often the drive for technique and mastering a set of skills can have a negative effect on your photographs. How so? Well, obsessing about technique and the perfect f-stop to use for a given lens can start to limit us into a formula, one that gets applied rigorously to all our shots. Whilst they might have technical perfection, and beauty, they become a monotony of the same shots. We stop thinking about what’s in front of us and more about technique, and so the connection with the subject (and so in turn with the viewer) wilts and fades into the background. This is aptly demonstrated on the photo forums that populate the internet. A concentration on technique, rather than narrative and content, dominates. Even those that you would think would know better fail to appreciate content and narrative (or see its importance), instead they seem to think in terms of technique only.
This is the problem I have with one of the masters of photography, Ansel Adams. Whilst there is no doubting his expertise and technical prowess, I feel that such things actually hinder his images. In my early days of discovering photography, I held his work in high esteem; the skill was something to aspire to, however, as I learnt more my interest in his photographs waned. Why did this happen? Well, I began to see a sterility in his work, Adams’s assertion that: “We can have craft without art, but we cannot have art without craft” was a double edged sword. His rigorous application of his craft actually becomes a barrier to interacting with the photographs he produced. When viewing his images all you can hear is his voice and expression. The technique overpowers and sublimates the narrative in the image; you end up looking at the technique, not the subject. To me, this makes his work like propaganda, there is no debate/dialogue with his work, you either agree with it or you don’t. I’m not saying that something has to be flawed to have a narrative, it can help yes, but the content of the image should be the main point of focus (sorry) not the technique you use. As I’m forever telling clients at work when they are asking us to create a ‘successful website’, “Content is king”. Without it, you can have the most well designed, thought out site, but if there’s nothing there for the user to engage with, well you might as well not bother. When you can marry technique and content you get some wonderful work such as that of Jack Spencer.
This engagement with the viewer is something that TV companies have recognised, the draw that reality TV shows have. Despite the lack of polish and to some extent content, there is a narrative there that draws in the viewer, inviting the viewer to be part of the story itself.
This engagement with the viewer got me to thinking about portraits. Taking for example the Taylor-Wessing portrait prize (was Schweppes portrait prize), every year a common theme amongst the shots chosen, is bored looking teenagers staring off into the middle distance. There are rarely any genuinely happy looking portraits. Why is this? Well I think it does come down to engagement and narrative. A neutral or pained expression seems to draw in the viewer, it throws up questions and scenarios. Whereas a happy expression seems to act like a block to that, we don’t question them as much. For some reason the darker emotions speak to us more strongly, we empathise and feel compassion for those that appear to be troubled or in extreme circumstances, yet seem to dismiss those that are happier. Lets bring back happiness into portraiture, but do it so that people engage more; it’s not easy but something that would in itself be rewarding.
Can you do that?
Well, a couple of weeeknds ago i went to a Roller Derby Match, the Rainy City Roller Girls vs Leeds Roller Dolls, for their War of the Roses bout…
To make things awkward for myself, I was shooting on film, and mostly the 45mm Tilt and Shift, so Manual Focus on a reasonably fast paced event. Had a great time and good to have a play with film again, some Kodak Tri-X 400 and Ilford Delta 3200 (super grainy!).
Well I’ve posted about Monkeys in photographs, so how about an ape behind the camera?
Nonja is an orangutan at Vienna Zoo, that has been given a specially modified camera. It dispenses a raisin every time she presses the shutter and then uploads that picture automatically. Hmm I sometimes think some people need a camera that delivers an electric shock to make them think about what they’re taking and is it worth the pain? (me included sometimes).
Nonja has a Facebook page too, there’s some interesting shots there and worth a browse through, and a fair few that have a composition device that i really like namely:breaking the frame.
From PetaPixel.