If there's one thing I've learned from photography, is that you don't always know what your best shot will be. Sometimes I spend a lot of time planning and setting up a photo, shooting multiple photos from various vantage points, only to be disappointed by every one of them. Then other times I'll shoot a one-off photo without thinking, and that ends up the "winning" shot.

This is evident looking at my photos on Flickr. Some of my most popular photos ("popular" meaning highest number of views and favorites) weren't planned. One July 4th we watched the Boston fireworks from the top of the Museum of Science. When we were leaving I put my little point & shoot camera on the wall and took this shot of the Zakim Bridge in the distance:



I didn't think much of it — and I still don't particularly like the photo — but Flickr members sure seem to like it. Even more so was my cousins' wedding cake, which was near a window and I happened to notice how it looked while the sun was setting:



I think it's important for me to always be practicing and learning to the point where things become second nature. So when a perfect unplanned photo opportunity presents itself, I'm ready for it.

I can be a pretty compulsive photographer — not a professional by any definition, but I do enjoy shooting…perhaps a bit too much. (When I recently told a friend that I shot about 950 photos on our weeklong Disney vacation, he commented "I don't think my parents took 950 photos of my entire childhood.")



But unlike a lot of people today, I still have them printed and organized in albums. I used to use Snapfish but switched to Shutterfly for the simple reason that they had an iPhoto plugin. Even though I preferred snapfish.com's user interface, allowing me to export my photos directly from iPhoto was worth dealing with Shutterfly's crappy site. I don't know when Snapfish finally released their iPhoto Exporter, but when I found it last month I happily switched back.

And as an aside, Snapfish's Christmastime shipping was amazing: I ordered almost 450 photos on December 21 as a gift to my in-laws (I printed and organized their photos for the year). I didn't expect to get the prints until early January, but they were delivered on December 24! So kudos to Snapfish for (unexpectedly) coming through — my in-laws loved the photo albums!

I've never really been a fan of HDR images. There are a lot of examples on Flickr; some really boost the colors to near-cartoon levels, and others push their photos to a have a more dreamlike look. While many are interesting, I don't want that look for my photos, so I decided I didn't like HDR.

Well, like I ask my kids to at least try something once — "How do you know you don't like it if you've never tried it?" — I decided to give HDR photos a legitimate try. So yesterday on a trip to Plymouth I took my tripod and did some shooting while Jill did a little shopping. New England winter photos probably aren't the best to play with colorful HDR photos, but it did show me something: a more subtle use of HDR can really enhance photos — especially those with big variations in light and dark areas — without having to push it to overly-unrealistic looks.



I put some of my HDR photos on Flickr. I'll keep experimenting — especially when the colors of spring arrive — but I think having another photo tool available to me is a good thing to have, and I don't have to push it as far as some photographers do. (I agree with a commenter who said that too much HDR makes the technique the subject of the photo, rather than the actual photo subjects.)

If you're interested in creating HDR photos, check out this how-to.

Boston.com's The Big Picture published their three-part Year in Photos of amazing and moving shots: part 1, part 2, part 3.

Are photographers really a threat?

Given that real terrorists, and even wannabe terrorists, don't seem to photograph anything, why is it such pervasive conventional wisdom that terrorists photograph their targets? Why are our fears so great that we have no choice but to be suspicious of any photographer?

I've sometimes felt watched when taking photos in a public place before (because I tend to take a lot from many angles, as many photographers do). It makes no sense for me to feel suspicious when I'm doing nothing wrong, but sometimes I do.

Even if I were a terrorist scoping out a place, would I do it right out in the open for everyone to see? Wouldn't a small point & shoot be smarter and less conspicuous than an SLR and a backpack's worth of equipment?

Wow, this looks pretty cool: the Eye-Fi wireless memory card is a 2GB SD card that makes your digital camera wireless. After setting it up, "whenever your cameras near the wireless network you selected and idle, Eye-fi will upload all your photos to your online photo sharing service. Next time your computer's online, they'll download there, too!"

Strangely interesting and almost hypnotic: a photo series of people and their breakfasts. Not exactly breakfasts of champions for some. And what's with the guy who has coffee and two mini Reese's peanut butter cups? (via kottke)

Daring Fireball has recently been on a tear singing (and linking to) the praises of the Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens, and I couldn't agree more. For about $80 ("the best deal in photography") you get a great lens -- though with less-than-great construction -- that is a lot of fun to use and a great learning tool. I find it especially good for portrait photos (some of my shots with that lens are here). I recently convinced photo friend Hollister to get one, and she'll back me up on it.

"In the spring we'd make meat helmets." -- Dr. Evil

This is very cool: Snipshot is a website that is essentially a very basic photo editor (think Photoshop Elements Extra-Lite). You can edit a photo from your computer or a website and resize, crop, and adjust brightness/contrast/saturation/sharpness to your liking, then save it. It even allows for undos. If you need to do basic photo editing and don't have the software to do it, check it out.

I'm trying to get in gear to take more photos and get to the point where I feel like I'm actually a good photographer and not just a competent one. (Of course, that time will probably never come, so I should just try to get to the point where I can shoot photos that I'm satisfied with.)

I need to just shoot more often, but part of my problem is my "fear" of taking photos: I often feel that if a shot isn't going to be great, I shouldn't bother taking it at all. (Not too long ago I could make an argument that I didn't want to waste film...of course I can't use that excuse any more.)

Photographer Paul Butzi has an article on his site, Ability, Accomplishment, and Art that was useful to me, and hopefully will inspire me to just shoot, regardless of whether the shot will be a "keeper." He mentions a book ("Art and Fear") that he paraphrases:

99% of the art you make will fall short of what you hoped for, and the purpose, the function of that 99% is to enable you to make the 1% that soars and actually exceeds your hopes and expectations.

The article also contains a good anecdote about pottery class students, and ends with: "we need to let go of the quest for quality, and focus on making the art that's genuinely ours, and trust that the quality will take care of itself."

Related: Note to self, look into the Greater Brockton Camera Club sometime.

A new site I built is now live: Hollister Thomas Photography. The original designer sort of disappeared so I took his initial rough design, finished the details, and built the site. It was a lot of fun to do, especially adding the Lightbox 2.0 slideshow and the page load/fade-in code (which I needed to do because of the way the content is centered on the page). And Hollister's photos are great, too!

Flickr has added a pretty cool feature to their site: geotags let you can point out on a map exactly where you took a photo. (FlickrBlog has all the details.)

For example, take my photo of the Zakim Bridge: Under "Additional Information" in the right part of the page it says "Taken in East Cambridge, Massachusetts" and clicking the "map" link shows you where I shot it (from the Museum of Science). You can also explore photos other people have taken near that photo to see what other people shot.

This might get kind of messy (and possibly unusable) for very popular sites -- especially touristy destinations -- but might be fun for less popular locations and/or your hometown.

Screw this guy and his photos that make mine look like total crap.

How to Shoot People (and Places and Things)

The first two [photos] I showed in class this evening ... were technically passable but artistically bland. More than anything, they’re examples of my modest competency in selective focus and the one-third/two-thirds rule for composing pictures, but little else. The more I learn about photography, the less interested I am in close-ups that fetishize surface textures, and the less impressed I am by well composed but basically inert subjects that don’t communicate a narrative of any particular stripe.

The "modest competency" comment really describes how I feel about my photos. Sure, some are well-composed and nice to look at, but they don't really say anything. I just need to practice and explore more..

If you use a Mac and shoot digital photos, you should be using Apple iPhoto to manage them. But my mom -- who, for reasons unknown (despite numerous major problems with Windows over the years) -- has yet to switch to a Mac. Since she asked for help backing up her photos, I needed to find a Windows iPhoto-equivalent...which I assumed didn't exist.

Well, for the most part, it does: Google Picasa is a very cool, simple, and free (!) digital photo management tool for Windows (there's no Mac version). It organizes your photos, has basic editing tools (cropping, red eye removal, lighting & color effects), and makes it easy to email pictures, order prints, and burn CDs. Since it's free and owned by Google, it's definitely worth checking out.

Why Do-It-Yourself Photo Printing Doesn't Add Up (NY Times)

Despite the ceaseless efforts of manufacturers to convince consumers that printing at home is fast, convenient and a whole lot of fun, the evidence shows that many people are tuning out the marketing.

I have to say, I gave up printing photos at home last year. I bought a Canon i950 photo printer early last year (or was it 2003?) and really liked it for a while. But soon I got sick of color correcting, fading photos, and replacing ink. Now I just order my prints right from iPhoto and my life is easier and our photo album looks better. So if you're interested in a slightly used i950 printer, let me know...

Sure, I've taken a few zoo photos before, but those suck compared to these -- flamingo & peacock.