One9Design

Today was pretty cool. I went downtown and spent some time in the shadow of the HP Pavilion. Very interesting area. Lots of small, run down houses around the river. It is a sharp contrast to the steel and glass of the arena. There are also a host of shiny new buildings scattered in the area. It seems like the area is in the midst of gentrification – or at least was before the economy went south.

I have my workflow down pretty good by now. I actually am not using Photoshop at all. I don’t even own it. Everything is done in Lightroom. This keeps me honest when I’m behind the camera. I think my exposure is getting better as I adjust that a lot less than I used to.

Day Twelve. Supposedly a milestone? Almost two weeks. I took about 50 shots and came up with these ten. I am getting better in terms of the shot to keeper ratio. Or maybe my standards are getting lower. How do I keep the quality up while taking fewer shots? The mark of a good photographer is being able to reproduce good results at will – not accidentally. I hope that I am moving in that direction.

Looking at these I am slipping. Three Glass and Leaves Glass are out of focus. Not sharp at all. Need to spend some time on the fundamentals.

This is tough. I am having a really hard time making time to take photos. All of these shots are actually from Tuesday, which is day 9 of 100. I kind of took the easy way out and went to Calero Lake about an hour before sunset. I was thinking about it as I was driving home from work and saw what the cloud cover looked like. I did not take any photos on Monday (or Wednesday either).

The way am approaching this is like eating. If you miss a meal you don’t stop eating altogether – you just eat a little more next time and try to get back on schedule. My final result desired from all this is to become a better photographer. Regardless of how many shots I take and post each day I am confident that will happen. I am not adjusting my goal, just committing to not beat myself up about it if I don’t get 10 shots posted each day.

With that said here is what I have learned so far.

• I am getting very familiar with my tripod. I know it better and can deploy it faster than before.
• Lightroom is very slow on my PowerBook G4. I kind of knew that, but trying to render 1:1 previews of 200 shots reminds you very quickly.
• I make my post processing adjustments a lot faster. I selected & processed these shots in less than a half hour. Before it would have taken me easily over an hour as I hemmed and hawed over a certain shot or tried to figure out how to get the effect I had in my minds eye.