after one of those weeks.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma-which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your own heart and intuition.
Steve Jobs
It’s a challenge when one lives, eats, and breathes the image. Where every flash of natural light draws the eye and the mind continually frames and crops what is put before it.
I struggled with geometry in school yet the numbers of the sacred triangle for exposure flow easily through my mind balancing iso to aperture to shutter speed.
As with any artwork I think that the best work comes when you have a connection to the subject matter but I don’t feel that is a requirement for producing excellent work.
Like any instrument if you know how it works and you use it every day, you can make it do whatever you need it to do.
I learned a lot of my technical skills during many years of photographing kiln formed glass for entry into exhibits. Shooting glass is very challenging. Too much glare destroys the image but you do need some well placed highlights to show that it is glass. Remove them all and it looks like plastic. Add to that those unwanted reflections popping up when you least want them and you could have a very unusable image!
There was no room for fanciful imagery or interpretation in this, it had to show the piece in the best light possible, with as much detail as possible; after all, if the piece was accepted on the basis of this photograph and arrived for the show looking different from the image it stood a good chance of being returned. I’m grateful to have had that learning experience, it was also when I learned the full value of shooting in raw.
I welcome the opportunities to shoot things that I wouldn’t necessarily gravitate to. It keeps my skills sharp and I almost always come away from one of these adventures with new information.
I also appreciate those photographers who shoot in the arenas that I don’t who are open to having a discussion about them without getting all furtive and protective. That to me is the hallmark of a confident professional.
It’s been an interesting week…
it's (almost always) about the water... 
You leave me intrigued; I hope (or rather I gather) the discussion/s were fruitful and interesting 🙂
Thanks Jenny! There’s good to be found in every experience as long as you keep yourself open to a direction that you hadn’t expected…you know that old saying if one door closes another one opens?