A Novice Photographer's Journey
Continuing with the theme of photography near home during the Wuhan Virus Pandemic, here is a recent photo. This was shot less than a mile from my home and the goal was a type of minimalism that attempted to communicate emptiness. Did I accomplish that or was it a fail?
The COVID19 Pandemic is keeping most of us from going out to continue our photography hobby. This means we need to find some other activities or get creative with photography outside of our tried and true routines. As I was watching a television show, and there are very few worth watching, a clip was run showing how deserted New York and other major cities looked. It was a very surreal scene, but it did give me an idea.
I proceeded to open my Adobe Lightroom catalog to find some cityscape photos I had done in the past along with some photos with trees and a few with clouds. These photos were then composited with Adobe Photoshop to create my version of a Fading City. Hopefully, our urban areas will come back to their former vibrancy but there is guarantee of that! We may all get used to an unexpected difference in urban life after COVID19.
Hopefully, you are finding some creative outlets for practicing your photographic hobby. Please come back to visit www.cestlavie4me.com to see what shelter-in-place photography project I attempt next time. Stay healthy and keep shooting!
In keeping with the theme of finding photographic subjects in or near your home as we shelter-in-place during the COVID-19 pandemic, I managed to take a few photos in my neighborhood this past week. The so-called Pink Moon occurred this past Tuesday night. Unfortunately, it was a cloudy night in my area, so I had no photo opportunity for the Pink Moon. On the other hand, I did have a beautiful, colorful sunset that evening. Here are three photos from my neighborhood that I am classifying as Suburbanscapes.
Pastel Sky
Shelter in Place
Heavenly Glow
I enjoyed taking these photos so much that I have decided to try to photograph more Suburbanscapes near me in the future.
Wednesday was a clear night, so I took multiple photos of the nearly full moon. Below is a composite photo of the scene I saw that evening.
Suburban Moon
Hopefully, you are also finding interesting photo opportunities in or around your home and neighborhood during this strange time in our lives. Stay healthy and come back to visit www.Cestlavie4me.com.
Years ago, I read “On Walden Pond” by Henry David Thoreau. I vaguely remember it as being an interesting book at the beginning, but it started to lose my interest as the pages wore on. Perhaps I was too young to really appreciate the wisdom contained in those pages! Today with the Wuhan Virus or Novel Corona Virus or COVID-19, whatever you choose to name it, I am starting to gain new insights into simplicity! Sheltering-in-place and social distancing have been forcing me to take life a little slower, to appreciate what I have and where I am at this stage of life. It is even affecting my photography hobby.
Recently, I blogged about photographing everyday scenes around your environment or trying some new photography techniques with whatever may be at hand. A couple of days ago, I was sitting on my deck and enjoying the sunshine and peacefulness of my surroundings. A big bumble bee flew over the deck railing and came right in front of me and seemed to be staring into my face! Just as suddenly it flew away. The thought occurred that perhaps it would return, and I might be able to photograph it.
I went back into the house, opened my camera bag and pulled out my camera. Returning to the deck, my chair and my jazz music, I patiently awaited the return of my subject. Finally, it returned or perhaps it was a different bee. Afterall, they all look the same. Since most of you reading this blog are hobbyist photographers you know how difficult this shot would be and how many wasted shots it takes to get close to a decent photo of a bee in flight. It was a challenge. But I did have one good shot.
“Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Looking at this photo and the thinking about nature somehow reminded me about “On Walden Pond”. The simplicity of a single bee in flight was a comforting thought in these difficult times and a signal that this difficulty will soon pass as surely as the bee quickly flying away. Perhaps one of the good things coming from this pandemic will be our reaching for more simplicity in our formerly busy and hectic lives. It might also lead us to appreciate more fully the people in our lives and what we have!
Please come back to visit www.cestlavie4me.com in the near future.
The other day, I drove to my granddaughter’s high school theatre performance. Usually, when I go to this type of event, I take my camera. This day was no exception. Since I would be taking a few photographs after the performance, I did not bring anything other than the camera and its holster. As it happened, that evening a thunderstorm was forecasted to occur during the play. After parking my car, I looked at the sky and could see some threatening clouds beginning to appear. I got creative and placed my camera on the holster as a support base, set the aperture at f18 and the ISO at 100. This gave me a somewhat long exposure, but not nearly a slow enough one. I took a few photos and proceeded to go to the play.
The next day, I imported the photos into Adobe Lightroom and viewed them. Unfortunately, none were very good, which was not a surprise. I decided to have a little fun with post-processing attempting to process one of the photos with only 10 adjustments or less. The software I used was Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop and DxO’s Silver Efex Pro 2. My goal was not to make all the versions look the same but to see what type of variety I would get with only a few adjustments. Here are the resulting photos processed with 10 or less adjustments to the original RAW file.
The first photo is the original file with only the camera calibration adjusted.
The next photo is a color version done in Adobe Lightroom and with 10 adjustments.
I then decided to convert the photo to Black & White versions with Lightroom, Photoshop and Silver Efex Pro 2. The photo below is the Lightroom conversion in less than 10 adjustments.
The adjusted color version was exported to Photoshop and in 10 adjustments I obtained the photo shown below.
The last version is the adjusted color version edited in Silver Efex Pro 2 with less than 10 adjustments.
None of these versions would win any awards but it was an interesting exercise in post-processing. Please come back and visit www.cestlavie4me.com to see where my photographic journey takes me next time.
If you view any YouTube Videos about photography, you occasionally hear the term “working a photo” or taking many photos of the same subject. This is something that I have been trying to do recently as a method to hopefully improve as a photographer. A few days ago, I spent an evening in Washington, D.C. photographing the Washington Monument.
First, I decided to do my photography in the evening to employ the lighting from prior to sunset and through the blue hour. I checked the Photographer’s Ephemeris App for the sunset time and location. The plan was to have the monument backlit and hopefully a colorful sky behind it. This worked out well in helping me position where to set up my camera and tripod. Whether or not there would be a colorful sky was up to Mother Nature!
I was shooting from around 7:00pm until 9:15pm. I stayed in the same location the entire time to have nothing change but the lighting in the sky. The photos below were all processed differently, some in Adobe Lightroom, some in Adobe Photoshop and some in both. Only one photo was cropped. The evening was enjoyable both from a photography perspective and from a people watching perspective. The world is full of interesting characters and some tourists are at the top of the list! I hope you enjoy viewing these photos and perhaps you will go out and try something similar yourself.
Please come back to visit www.cestlavie4me.com to see where I go with my photography in the future.
Antietam Creek was the sight of a major battle during the War of the Rebellion (Civil War). It is also called the Battle of Sharpstown (Maryland). This battle occurred when the Confederate forces under General Robert E. Lee invaded Maryland which was not part of the Confederacy. The opposing army of Union forces was under the command of General George McClellan. Some experts consider the outcome a stalemate; however, the Union forces claimed it was their victory since it forced General Lee’s army out of northern territory. Please check this link for more details.
https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/battle-of-antietam
This post is not about the battle. It so happens that my family held a summer picnic this past Saturday at Devil’s Backbone County Park on Antietam Creek near the site of the battlefield.
I chose not to bring my DSLR camera since this was not a photography outing, but I did have my smartphone with me. The photos that I am sharing in this post were taken with my phone and some editing was done with Adobe Lightroom after I returned home. Although the photos are nice, you can easily see that they do not compare to the quality that would be produced with a good DSLR.
Taking photos is an enjoyable hobby with either a smartphone or my DSLR for me. I thought that some of you might enjoy seeing these photos. My smartphone is a Motorola Moto Z3 Play and is certainly not a high-end model, but the camera takes acceptable quality photos for viewing on a blog, Facebook, Instagram etc.
Antietam Creek and Dam
Antietam Creek Dam
Bridge over Antietam Creek
Mossy Tree
Meandering Creek
Ant’s View
Please come back to www.cestlavie4me.com to see where my photography takes me in the future. Keep shooting even if it is with your smartphone! You might enjoy the results.
It seems that we had a very long winter this past year. Perhaps because I am not a winter fan it just seemed long. In any case, as I walked around my neighborhood, I see the trees budding out, flowers beginning to bloom, and the birds and squirrels are all over the trees in my yard. It must be springtime!
The other day I happened to notice a beautiful tree in my neighborhood, and I decided to come back and photograph it. The location itself is not very picturesque, because, as I mentioned it is in a residential neighborhood with houses, cars and kids toys all over the place. This gave me the idea to take advantage of the opportunity and try to learn something about using Channels in Photoshop to create masks. This technique has proven to be very difficult for me to master. After looking at multiple YouTube videos I thought that was a chance to use channels when editing the photograph of this tree. As you can see in the photograph below the sky is devoid of color and there are many distractions behind and in front of the tree.
Upon completing making the selection for a mask in Photoshop, I could see that I had not done a very good job! So, I decided rather than to delete it what I would use the Paint feature in Photoshop to somewhat attempt to hide the poor editing. I also used the Picture Frame feature to see if that helped the image.
Another issue was the substitute sky photo that I was using to composite into this photo was not very good for this image. The perspective does not fit the image as you can clearly see. So now I have another project which is to make a folder full of different sky shots to use in similar situations in the future. I’m sure some of the readers of this blog have had to do this also.
This blog was started to allow me to track the progress of my journey as a photographer and not as a how-to blog by any stretch of imagination. First, I don’t have the skill to teach anybody anything about photography and second, I don’t think that it would be much fun for me to do so. In keeping with tracking my photographic skills progress below you’ll find the fully edited photo. You can judge for yourself what grade you might give it. Again, it was an opportunity for me to play with Photoshop and learn about using channels. I fully expect that I will be back viewing videos on YouTube to continue my education using this technique.
Please come back to visit www.cestlavie4me.com to see where my photographic journey takes me next. I will give you a hint my wife and I are traveling overseas in the next couple of weeks, so I expect there will be several photos that I will share with you when we return. Now go out and shoot something and please use your camera!
February is Black History Month here in the United States. So, for this post I wanted to highlight two of them for you. These men currently have exhibits at the Smithsonian National Gallery of Art here in Washington, D.C. There are other black men and women who have made a mark in photography; however, I have decided to focus on these two for my own personal reasons.
The first and most well known is Gordon Parks. His exhibit is titled “Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early work 1940-1950.” This exhibit features 120 photographs from his early years and covers many topics such as Black Life in Urban America, photos from his experiences working for the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information among other areas of interest.
Gordon Parks was born in Fort Scott, Kansas in 1912 and was a self-taught artist. He not only photographed black subjects; but he was a pioneer in that as a black photographer he photographed white people in many different settings from coal mines to refineries and he was a featured fashion photographer. His work included being a photographer for Life magazine when it was arguably the most widely read magazine in America. Mr. Parks also played a prominent role in film with movies such as: Rounder, Shaft, The Learning Tree and other projects. You can read more about Mr. Parks at this Wikipedia site, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Parks.
With so many pictures to chose from I decided to post the photo below. Personally, the contrast of the white couple viewing a photograph of a black couple was intriguing! What are your reactions?
The other black photographer is less well known. He is Dawoud Bey and his exhibit at the National Gallery of Art is entitled: “Dawoud Bey: The Birmingham Project.” This photographic exhibit was particularly poignant for me and all Black Americans of my age along with many Americans of other races. On Sunday, September 16, 1963, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama was bombed by four members of the Klu Klux Klan, a white supremacy group that dates to the period of Reconstruction after the War of the Rebellion (Civil War) here in America. 4 young Black girls were murdered, and 22 other people were injured by this racist attack! You can read more about the Birmingham Bombing here https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/10-key-facts-16th-street-baptist-church-bombings-article-1.2361565.
Not widely known is the fact that after the bombing a large crowd of white people in Birmingham began to celebrate the bombing and some took to rioting. Several young white men came upon two young black boys who were delivering newspapers. One of the men took out a gun and shot and killed the younger boy! It happened to be they were brothers. Mr. Bey decided to include a young black boy and an older black man in this exhibit to honor this young victim of a senseless and racist attack.
Mr. Bey decided to portray these young people as they may have looked had they not died in the bombing. He selected several young people about the age of the youths who had died and then found several people about 70 years old to portray how they may have looked as adults. He then posted them in similar positions and photographed his subjects in black & white. I decided to post this photograph for its haunting aspect. It almost appears that the people in the photograph are looking at the viewers and this made me shiver. I was the same age in 1963 as these children when they died, and I remember the bombing as if it just happened!
Please come back to visit www.cestlavie4me.com to see where my photographic journey takes me.
C'est la vie 