A Scenic World

Mike Autry and I are shooting a wedding on April 12th. I’m not a fan of shooting weddings - my usual anxiety skyrockets; I’m too laid-back to be forceful enough to get the shots I need; and I’m not keen on the idea of weddings in general.

Still, we promised a mutual friend that we’d shoot hers, so only a little more than a year after our last (and first) wedding shoot (when I distinctly remember thinking “Never again!” as I culled through 1,200 photos), we’re preparing for this one. I feel a bit more prepared this time; I certainly know a lot about photography. Still, I wanted to scope out the wedding and reception venues to get a better idea of what to expect, so we took the long and scenic route down to Ocala today.

Once we were there, we realized the whole clan was coming: the bride, the groom, and the groom’s two children. After Mike and I checked out all the locations, we somehow wound up with the kids while the couple tied up some loose ends at the site. Photo hilarity quickly ensued. I have photos of them as monsters, with their hands bigger than their faces (perspective shots, ha!), dancing in the ballroom with me, and pretending to be the bride and groom.

Amidst all the craziness, I also managed to get a few “traditional” photos:

Jeremyokai had included a 1:06 snippet of “Ask Her to Dance” by Coconut Records on his latest mix. Intrigued by the sixty-six-seconds of goodness, I went in search of the full version.

I have now been listening to it for 18 hours straight.

After a disastrous cleaning experience with the K100D, I purchased the Pentax K200D. It arrived yesterday, but true to form, I couldn’t open it and play with it until Mike Autry got off work (we’ve kind of gone through this newbie SLR thing together). The light wasn’t quite good enough at 11pm to manage any good shots, so I took it out this morning for some emo flower shots.

First thoughts:

Camera: It’s sturdier than the K100D. The buttons require actual pressing. This will come in handy when I’m doing wacky holding methods for my 365 (I was constantly accidentally turning the camera off when I was trying to trigger the shutter with my pinky finger). All the hinged doors feel like they’re attached better. The button to remove the lens is really smooth. The menus make much more sense, although I kind of miss the silly acronyms on the K100D. Everything is more customizable - white balance, auto-ISO range, color dynamics (there’s even a spiderwebby thing you can move around, although frankly I have no idea how rotating the spiderweb affects the color), etc. etc. Auto-focus is definitely faster and seems to be accurate. I haven’t actually read the manual yet.

Photos: Holy crap, they’re huge. I’m glad I got an external hard drive last week. Since Lightroom doesn’t support PEF files yet, I’m shooting DNG, which are larger. That translates into only (gasp!) 120 photos per 2GB card. But the photos themselves are marvelous to behold. The resolution is just amazing.  There’s a lot more depth to them, so much so that I didn’t use any presets when I processed these today - just tweaks for the contrast, vibrance, saturation, a little green channel adjustments (I’m not sure why, but I had to do that in a few of these). I added vignetting because most of the backgrounds were pretty blah. Otherwise, I’m really happy with how these look, particularly since the shooting conditions were impossible (30 mph winds, any one? Seriously.).

A wise person once said, “The camera captures light, you capture the moment.” Today, I woke up with a raging sore throat, so I wasn’t feeling very keen to take a self-portrait. I knew that this was going to be one those days where I needed to find some prop to make my photo interesting. I headed outside (still in my pajamas, naturally), and looked for something to use. With the warm weather we’ve had, the wild flowers are in full force, so I started looking for one to incorporate.

I turned the corner of my apartment building, and a rose bud caught my eye. One flower had just one petal left. I snapped a photo of it quickly and realized that I had photo gold on my hands, but I couldn’t get the focus quite right just holding the camera. My 365 was instantly forgotten as I ran inside to get my tripod.

I returned moments later, turning the corner with my tripod in one hand and camera in the other.

It wasn’t there. The petal had fallen.

My neighbor chose that moment to come out of his apartment. I’m fairly sure I was standing there open-jawed, still in my pajamas.

At least I’d caught that moment before the petal fell, if imperfectly.

I decided to update the “Photography” section of this blog. Just having the section within the blog construct seems still a big incongruous to me, but since it’s primarily about photography, I feel like I can’t leave it out. All of the photos are now (basically) the same sizes, and I changed the categories, deleted old photos, and added new ones.

I also added a dedicated section to my 365. I don’t see that link staying there forever, but since the project comprises roughly 75% of all my picture-taking, it makes sense to place a spotlight on it (I think, anyway; it might just be vain). At any rate, I categorized my favorite SPs. Lots of the photos work well in multiple categories, but the three “Laundry” photos seemed different from the others. I’m not entirely comfortable having that category, and I wish I had more than three photos in it, but it’s there for now.

Things I wish I could do that I can’t figure out:

• Display the titles of the photos when the photo is clicked on.
• Have a nested system so that the “Back” button doesn’t have to be used.
• Have the option to display data for some sections (the “Great Books” series comes to mind), but not all.

Please feel free to throw any suggestions out there!