Category: Photography

Equipment, examples, history – all matters photographic

Photojournalistic style

These are some of the nicest things about having a quasi-journalistic photographic style:

  1. Most of your gear is light enough to carry around
  2. You don’t need to spend endless hours in Photoshop applying otherworldly effects
  3. The gear is versatile, and useful for almost every kind of photography
  4. It could help to secure permission for projects like my hospital idea

It would be awfully restrictive to only be able to work in a studio, and it would be tiresome to spend an eternity with a mouse in hand, coaxing exotic images from RAW files.

Digital Photo Professional, Photoshop, Flickr Uploader

I have finally processed some photos that had been too-long ignored:

Now I can go get some new images – maybe some indoor portraiture, or still life stuff. Or some more ‘spring emerging from the Ottawa freezer’ shots.

[Update: 1 May 2011] Bonus: Enriched Bread Artists – Open House 2011

Sex and understanding nature

Walking around the other day, observing the slow emergence of spring, it occurred to me that there is another whole set of reasons to provide children with early and accurate sexual education, aside from their important right to understand their own bodies.

Briefly, it is impossible to understand nature, history, or biology well without knowing about sex. Why do plants have flowers? Why do birds and insects fly between them? Why do animals form pairs? Why do some species of bird have males that look very different from females (displaying sexual dimorphism)? Why is there such a variety of life forms on Earth? Conversely, why are there so many similarities between life forms on Earth? What defines the human species?

None of these questions can be answered in a satisfactory answer without reference to sex. Plants have flowers because sexual selection helps produce diversity, which improves survival odds. Plants bribe more mobile creatures into carrying around their sex cells (pollen), paying the bribe in the form of nectar. Animals often form pairs to ease the burden of parenting. Sexual dimorphism is reflective of differing investment costs in reproduction between sexes, as well as the way in which sexual selection can drive evolutionary development. Sexual reproduction has contributed to biological diversity, and yet the fact that many organisms need to perform the same basic tasks explains some of their similarity. Humans are the set of organisms that can mate and produce fertile offspring with one another.

Any understanding of nature that excludes sex is sure to be terribly impoverished. As such, it seems foolish to delay telling children about it until they themselves are starting to reach sexual maturity. It seems much better for it to be a fact of life they have learned accurate things about all along.

Grandfather birthday photos

On Flickr, I have uploaded photos from my paternal grandfather’s 90th birthday party.

For the most part, they are lit with two flashes – one in the back corner of the room and one in a window alcove. One flash was fired using a radio trigger, the other using an optical slave sensor. Both had their output set manually.

They can also be viewed as a slideshow.

iPhone 4 camera

The camera in the iPhone 4 doesn’t compare with a dedicated point and shoot camera, when it comes to image quality or creative flexibility. At the same time, it is a camera that is easy to carry around everywhere, so it is a way to document things that would otherwise go unrecorded.

I have added an iPhone set to my Flickr page, and I will keep adding to it bit by bit.

The EXIF data for the photos includes geolocation information, which should be useful for anyone who wants to stalk or murder me (hint: I am often around Bank Street in Ottawa).