2013 Project 52 Review

[In which I talk a ton about myself. You've been warned.]

I completed my 2013 Project 52 on December 30, when I snapped the last photo entitled, "Man on Steel." Or maybe I completed it when I posted the photo to the blog on January 1. Either way, by that date I had taken and shared my 52nd photo and 45th accompanying blog post describing the photo and thought process. Doing this project has resulted in something of a personal time capsule for 2013, which is both unique and memorable for me. I'm truly surprised and also quite proud to have completed the Project, as it had bested me when I attempted it a few years ago.

I've now had a month since the last selected photo and blog post for reflection on the Project as a whole and the photos as individual images, which has produced a number of observations (self evaluations) and a few ideas for what to pursue going forward.

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2013 Project 52, Week 24: Playing Wedding Photog

Week 24: June 11-17

I've been holding out on Week 24 for some time now, because the photos I shot that week (ay, and the ones that I would care to share) were taken at my cousin Kathy's beautiful wedding in beautiful San Francisco. Kathy and her husband David, who'd asked me to take photos at their wedding, had been on a few-weeks-delayed and long honeymoon, and I wanted her to have the chance to post the pictures to Facebook or whatever else before I go plastering them across the Interwebs myself.

I'm really grateful to Kathy and David for giving me this opportunity. I hope they're happy with the photos I was able to deliver to them. I may not have a future in wedding photography ahead of me (not in the works, anyway), but I'm glad I got the chance to see what it was like and hopefully help capture some memories for my family along the way.

35mm (DX) : ISO 800 : f/2.8 : 1/80s
David and Kathy

Some reflections on this experience (consider yourself warned: wordy photography mumbo jumbo ahead), after the jump. Congratulations in the meantime, Kathy and David! May your marriage be filled with happy moments like this!

The Helsinki Bus Station Theory

I feel like I have heard the story linked here floating around the Internet for the past few years, but this is the earliest mention I can find on The Goog. It offers an interesting explanation for people's guiding philosophy on personal development.

The short version: if you keep taking a bus out from the station only to return to the station, no matter how many different directions you go, you'll still wind up back at the bus station. If you take the bus out only a few stops each time, you'll be going on routes shared by other buses, too. If you want to get where you're going, or if you want to get somewhere interesting, eventually you'll need to hop on a bus and STAY on the bus til it breaks from the pack and takes you far from the station to more interesting locales.

I've seen photography blogs pick this up as an analogy for finding your own style and determining what kind of photography you do, a decision with far reaching effects on gear, travel and activities, and how you spend your time, to name a few big things. And eventually I plan to apply this and pick the right niche for myself, be it landscape or sports or something else. Right now, I think it's still too early while I'm still learning basics, or something.

Another broader application of this idea has parallels into my life in other ways, I'll have to admit. My personality (Sharon can readily attest) and philosophy (stated or unconscious) is to think long and hard and consider every possible outcome and contingency before making a decision; this may be useful for certain life decisions (and even then it has its limitations and shortcomings), but when universally applied and reaches something like, "Where do we go to dinner?" it becomes a handicap (an extreme and somewhat silly example, but... well, it happens).

But it also mirrors some of my personal development that I attribute to being an offshoot of my upbringing as a "well-rounded" high school, the ideal college-bait, wherein the participation in a large range of activities cultivated in me the ability to become the classic jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none; I'm skirting the larger college admissions issues of the day here, to say this: wouldn't it make you a more interesting person to have left the station and have experienced the outer reaches? If all you know is the area around the station, then what of the city have you really experienced? What can you then relate to others about your experience of the city that isn't overrun by or entirely common to others? Or "touristy-but-not-necessarily-authentic"?

These are thoughts I wish I'd had earlier in my life. Today I feel like I'm either riding back to the station or staring up at the route map in the station, plotting my next moves.

2013 Project 52, Week 15 - What Works

Week 15: April 9-15

I'd been sidelined the past week for a weeklong meeting in Baltimore, but I was able to go with Sharon to see and shoot around the Orchid Show at the New York Botanical Gardens last Saturday. We had intended to go last year to see their vertical orchid gardens at last year's Orchid Show but ultimately did not get around to it; so on what seemed like the first nice weekend day of the year, we struck out for the Bronx.

I'll cut to the chase: it was fast apparent that photos at botanical gardens just aren't my thing. We would actually like to go back for another visit, and maybe when we do I will give it another go, because it seems like it might be a good way to practice developing some composition or recognition of composition... but still life and flowers (as lovely as they were) just don't do it for me. I came away with a few shots of flowers that I thought were both probably technically proficient and also entirely boring. Not to beat a dead horse, but surprise-surprise! my favorite image turned out to be one that included a more human element.

This is one of the first photos I took that day at the first site we encountered: the Manolo Valdes Monumental Sculpture. If you click through to this link, you'll be able to see just how interesting and eye-catching it really is. This particular moment caught my eye, though, of a kid playing in the reflective pool while ignoring the impressive sculpture in front of him. I worry I might miss out on beautiful images of the flowers, sculptures, or other sights around me while either practicing this craft or anxiously over-thinking what I'm doing or something- but I could do well to at least be like this kid and try to enjoy the heck out of myself.

35mm (DX) : ISO 200 : f/4 1/1250s

2013 Project 52 entries:

Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 | Week 5 | Week 6 | Week 7 | 

Week 8 | Week 9 |  Weeks 10-13 | Week 14 | 

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...

2013 Project 52, Week 5 - Family time, plus a lot of thinking about photography

Week 5: January 29 - February 3

35mm (DX)  :  ISO 1600 :  f/4  :  1/4000s

(In my last post, I lamented how "there's always one setting I forget to check" when shooting. So, my one comment about this lovely photo of my wife and my mom that I snapped: Guess which setting I forgot to check this time around? I had to pull out the camera in sort of a hurry and entirely neglected to check the ISO settings. Luckily, it's so bright that you mostly don't notice the resulting grain.)

[Note: I will make some non-photography blog posts eventually, too, of course. But these days, one post a week featuring a topic on which I can write fairly freely is doing pretty good.]

This past week's Project 52 submission started out as a pretty simple proposition: We were headed to Nashville for Heather and Devon's wedding (Hooray, Heather and Devon!); I'd bring my camera and shoot a ton of photos; pick one and run with it. As so often happens, it didn't go as easily as I'd envisioned.