Talking [Photos] Shop

Forgive me while I indulge further in thinking aloud about photography techno babble. (If this ain't your thing, won't you skip all the techno babble and have a look at my vacation photos? Barcelona here and everywhere else here. "Keepers" on Flickr.)

Last year we were fortunate enough also to take a long vacation; I brought my camera along and took photos enthusiastically only to be sorely disappointed by the output upon returning home (I had left an incorrect setting on the camera for the whole trip that ruined nearly all of the photos). A year later, we return from a similarly long vacation with much happier result, photographically.

We rode camels, you guys. Somehow this photo hadn't made it into any of the previous posts?

I took some 2,086 photos during our trip. As the kids say, they weren't all winners, naturally. It took me the better part of two weeks to process them all and conduct the tiring process of whittling down and separating the "keepers" from the chaff. Sharon has watched askance at times at my trigger- (or shutter-) happy method, but I prefer to take as many of what I think are my "best efforts" and then weed through them afterward (I am not so fortunate as she and others blessed with true raw talent at recognizing and framing up a good shot); I like to think my practices are at least nominally evolved over the maligned "pray and spray" method, though. Ideally I'll continue to hone my eyes for creativity and composition-recognition so that I won't have to wade through so many pictures. But until then...

I was also curious to see how I used my kit. I brought basically my entire kit with me on the trip: D40, 3 lenses, and a tripod. (We had been warned by multiple sources about Barcelona's reputation for being among the worst and most prolific for pickpockets; having my entire photography great with me in this environment was a bit nerve wracking). I flipped through my archive in Lightroom to see the distribution of lens usage for the trip:

10-20mm f/4-5.6	61.7%
35mm f/1.8	30.4%
50-150mm f/2.8	7.8%

This wasn't so surprising: I had actually expected the numbers for the wide angle to be even higher due to the ample opportunity for landscape photography offered by our Atlantic and Mediterranean locales. But in the case of markets and indoor situations and evening shots, I still reached for the fast prime. It appears my love affair with the wide angle does have this as distinct line of demarcation to it.

I didn't end up using the tripod very much. I used it for some long-exposure shots at Placa Reial, and I used the detachable tripod leg that converts to a monopod once or twice for the zoom lens, but that was it. I'm still glad I picked up the tripod, but I will need to figure out how best to use it and whether it's worth lugging around on long trips.

I mentioned that I took 2,086 photos on this trip. My Flickr album of "keepers" has 32 photos in it, bringing me to a "keeper" rate of about 1.5% The Google+ albums with all "keepers" and "other photos I'm willing to present to the public in some fashion or another" has 147 photos in it, bring me to a "public" (or as I prefer to call it, stupidly, "deep tracks") rate of about 7%. I expect to become even more discriminating with my preferences and my shooting practices, though presumably I eventually would take fewer photos than I do now each time out, so that makes any projection as to how it affects these "rates" I just made up fairly moot.

I'm very pleased with the photos I was able to take. They aren't all the best-composed I've ever done: I'm still learning. They aren't all the sharpest photos I've ever taken; I'm still determining how much of it is the fault of the camera (surely, a non-zero share of the blame) or the operator (surely, the lion's share of the blame). But I'm learning ever more each time out, and I'm genuinely enjoying the hell out of it.