One9Design

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.

This was a fun day. It was a Jazz Jam at Tessora’s, our favorite wine bar in Campbell. The afternoon began with some white Sangria made by our favorite Sommelier, Hannah. Absolutely perfect for patio jazz on a Sunday afternoon. Frankie, the sax player is absolutely amazing! He can play two saxophones at the same time. He loves to work the crowd. Isis put this thing together and they will be doing it every other Sunday at Tessora’s.

The lighting was a bit problematic as the musicians were under umbrellas, making for a lot of contrast. Once I switched to spot metering things came out okay.

Once again I am a day behind. These pictures were all taken in haste on Saturday. There are only 7 as I could not find 10 that I liked that were different enough. I only took 62 shots. It seems that if I can get up to about 100 or so, finding ten that I actually like is pretty easy. A goal for this whole exercise is to get that ratio down. I’d like to be able to take 25 or 30 shots and get 10 good ones. I am not sure what a good ratio is or even if that is a valuable way to measure myself as a photographer.

We shall see.