Tag: Photography

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WHY I use a DSLR for Street Photography & How (Nikon D850) by Samuel Streetlife

As one who evolved from the film/darkroom to digital age, I found this a very captivating video on street photography. From the 35mm Kodak Tri X 400 film days of street photography to today, all of the images produced over that span still fascinate me, regardless of how they were captured.

In this video, he captures the most stunning street photography images and video using a blend of the hardware and formats available over the span of 30+ years.

From a personal standpoint, I have much of the gear he uses in this video, from a small Leica D-Lux 7 pocket camera to a Nikon 35 mm film camera and lenses to a Nikon D750 full frame digital camera and lenses. His reason for using the gear is subjectify situational but aligns with what I feel work in capturing street photography images. Where we depart on that, is on many levels, mostly in the when, where how to use the small compact camera vs, the big body DLSR, and in using a manual lens on a DLSR. After watching this video, that will change.

He is shooting carnival scenes in this video, which I have done, but what he does here is nothing short of extraordinary. It gives me some great ideas to practice and use next time I am a State Fair and/or Carnival event. That practice will start today.

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Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) and American Photography by Lisa Hostetler | Department of Photographs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Alfred Stieglitz

https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/stgp/hd_stgp.htm

When I was in photography school years ago, besides learning all the facets of working with film photography, we also studied the history of photography, including the biographies of the great photographers from its roots to the present.

Of all those, I found Alfred Stieglitz one of the most fascinating. He was schooled in engineering but was a pioneer who took photography beyond the technical and just capturing images, into the aesthetic , artistic world of infinite creative possibilities. His life spanned a time of significant geopolitical events and modernization that changed the world. His life with Georgia O’Keefe helped further assimilate photography into an expressive art from. He was a skilled photographic technician but also excelled in whatever genre and style of photography he chose to work in.

If anyone enjoys art, photography, history and a good story as much as I do, but is not aware of the life and work of Alfred Stieglitz, then I would suggest you take a look at the brilliant legacy he left behind to enrich our lives.

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Trinity River after the Flood

All the images above were taken the day after Dallas received a historical level of rainfall the day before. The rain amount was from 10″ to 15″ in 24 hours depending on where it fell. This record of rain fell days after a heat wave record of 67 consecutive days without rain and heat above 100 degrees ended. This deluge caused the Trinity River bed to go from cracked parched earth to flood stage above 30 feet in less than 24 hours. With that rain, the dry cracked earth caused by the drought and heat was under water.

The picture below was taken a few days before the rain.

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Photo Subjects at Home

It is often said that one does not need to travel far to get good photos, there are many a few feet from your door if you just look for them. Sometimes, they can be a few feet inside your door. Then black and white/grayscsle image of the lamp, window blind slats, and black background screen on a stand is a few feet from my bed. It has been there a while, but I didn’t “see” it there and visualize it as in this picture until I woke up the other morning and there it was! One thing I enjoy about photography is how it encourages he to look deeper into object around me and grab a nice image from the mundane.

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The Capturing of Flying Seagull Mayhem & Edit Success in Lightroom

Four years ago, while on a walk around the lake with my camera one afternoon, I began to hear the sound of seagulls making a tremendous racket and then saw quite a number of them in the sky, darting around in all directions above the shore. They were very active and making quite a squall. As I got closer, I noticed a young couple feeding them near the shoreline. I saw this as an opportunity to get some Seagull in action shots so moved closer. It was absolute pandemonium at this point and almost impossible to plan a shot. The couple had left some bread on the shore and I began trying to toss some of it up in the air to draw the Seagulls closer with bread in one hand while holding my camera with the other, then quickly juggling it all to try “grab” a shot. This whole planned process was not working so I just set my camera to a shutter speed that would freeze the fastest movement and action, while not opening the aperture so much that I would lose my depth of field. Fortunately, it was a bright sunny day so the ISO stayed low and I basically joined the mayhem and shot at will. When I downloaded the pictures that day, what I saw was pretty sad, and felt like a total loss. I didn’t go back to look at them, until recently. The attached picture looked hopeless from an exposure standpoint and the image of the seagull was small and in the corner of the frame. Fortunately, I was shooting with a full-frame Nikon D750 DSLR so there was a lot of room to crop and still hold the image together. In the end, I pulled the JPG image of the one attaches scene, and made adjustments to it only in Lightroom. To get this image at 1/4000 of a second (didn’t realize I set it that high) and f10 with an ISO of 100 pleased me! Of course, this has compelled me to go back and look at the rest of the Seagull shots from that day to see what else I might find to work with!

Seagull Before and After Lightroom Editing
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5 things a DSLR still does better than an iPhone – TECHRADAR

https://www.techradar.com/features/5-things-a-dslr-still-does-better-than-an-iphone?fbclid=IwAR1B19WHpHBBu_2exIBH2Rr5I-r_CG9mxGXwFQfK1rBT_yr7HWaiETmLnSE

techradar – (Image credit: Future)

I use my Samsung Android Smartphone camera, small mirrorless Leica Dlux 7, and Nikon D5300 and D750 DSLR cameras all the time. They all serve different purposes for me and each has its pros/cons. This article clearly points out clearly a DLSR does best and I couldn’t agree more.

For me, the final image is what counts. In the end, it is what matters most. The details on how it was created come after that.

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Photography within Feet of your Bed

Photography within Feet of your Bed

Once you start looking at all that is around you at any given point in space and time, as a photographer, you begin to see endless photographic subject matter possibilities in almost everything. Some of my favorite creative photos were taken on days when I felt there was “nothing to shoot” until I started looking deeper.