I sure know how to live it up on a Saturday night. I spent most of last night poring over the flash photography tips on this site. Everyone knows about Strobist, which I also like (I loved his interview with Rembrandt a while back), but I need a more basic education right now, and planetneil provides it.
I also spent considerable time discovering the down side of having a brilliant new monitor: I’m becoming a pixel peeper! And my pixels aren’t measuring up. For one thing, I discovered that some of the pictures from my new camera have horrible noise in the shadows, even at low ISOs.
During my obsessive research about the D700, I learned that Nikon’s RAW converter, Capture NX2 sometimes gets better results than Adobe Lightroom on Nikon RAW files. Luckily, Nikon thoughtfully provided a 60-day trial of Capture NX2 with my camera (I’m being sarcastic, since the price tag on the full software is about $200 – couldn’t they just throw it in when you buy a crazy expensive camera???). Anyways, I opened up some of the troublesome files in Capture NX2, and sure enough they’re better. It seems like Lightroom tried to lighten the shadow areas, which introduced noise, whereas Capture NX2 left those areas darker, as I intended, but still with some detail and very little noise. Unfortunately, now that I’m so familiar with Lightroom, Capture’s interface is just confusing and frustrating.
As well, when I produced jpgs from the files in Capture NX2, I discovered they’re much darker and have less detail when viewed through my Windows explorer and web browsers than they do in Capture, which kind of negates the whole thing. See how a new monitor can drive you crazy? Or maybe it’s just me.
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Other things I’m thinking about:
I can’t get Alec Soth’s NIAGARA out of my mind. It started when I kept seeing quotes from him all over the place, quotes that really spoke to me. I wondered who was this Alec Soth (I’m horribly ignorant about contemporary photographers)? (Answer: established Magnum photographer.) When I went through the first few photos of NIAGARA, I thought I had it sussed out: a study of cheap motels around Niagara Falls. But then we see couples, love letters full of creases, a soaked and muddy newspaper, and we go into the hotel rooms. And the series becomes a meditation on our culture’s ideas of love and its end. I think it’s my first experience of a series of images with all kinds of different subjects, individually, but a single theme or statement, collectively.
JM Colberg mentioned a while back that he’d like to see fewer typologies in 2009, among other things. Given that I’ve only worked on one typology (Parking Meters in Lunenburg), and it was only for an afternoon, I think I still have some exploring to do on that front. But Soth’s NIAGARA has really started me thinking about other ways of working.
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A few weeks ago, David duChemin suggested developing a plan for 2009. And I always do what David says — well, except for calibrating my monitor. I only did that last weekend because my pictures looked overexposed on the new one.
At the start of 2008, I decided to start a website from which to sell my prints and raise money for charity. My passion for the medium exploded, and I found myself just hoping the momentum would keep up for just a bit longer. Whenever I started to feel discouraged, I just told myself to never mind, just keep shooting. No matter what, keep shooting. Now here I am at the end of the year, and the momentum hasn’t really slowed. I do alternate between extremes of optimism and my work totally sucks so what’s the point negativity, but I just to observe those shifts, and keep shooting.
For 2009, I have a few more specific goals. I may not have a hardcore plan, but I have a vision and a direction. I want to focus on more project-oriented work, and I have lots of ideas. I just need to start putting them into action. I also want to learn how to use my new SB-900 to balance flash with ambient light.
Putting my ideas for projects into action will require that I get over myself and my analysis paralysis. I’m starting to wonder if I read Susan Sontag’s On Photography and Roland Barthe’s Camera Lucida way too early in my explorations of the medium, and it’s just fucked me up. Which is funny, because I can’t actually remember anything specific from either of those books. Maybe that makes it even more dangerous for me; I’ve just adopted the ideas wholesale with no awareness of where they came from. The only reason I’m suspicious is because I watched part of this video last night, and I recognized a lot of Sontag’s ideas in many of my own hang-ups.
One of my ideas is to photograph some of my neighbours in their homes. I’d like to find some who are the original owners of their50s-built house, to see what things have remained from that era and what have been replaced. It might also be interesting to photograph other neighbours, like the university students in their rentals, or the few younger families around to contrast the different demographics. This project could also help me get to know our neighbours, which is something I’m not particularly good at. This project would also be well-shot in winter, since I can shoot it indoors, and the lower-angled winter sun could be nice if my neighbours have windows like mine.
Ok, I think that’s enough for a Sunday morning…