Year 5 Day 4 - Vision vs. Action

One funny thing I like to say is "It's easy to sneak up on a sunrise..." I find that funny because I value photographing things that are not easy to find or shoot. The sun is going to rise EVERY day... I also like to joke about architectural photography - "It's easy to sneak up on a building".

Nikhil is someone that I respect and I can tell he has spent more time thinking about making images vs. finding wildlife. His obvious skills...

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Nikhil's skills when it comes to light, composition and image-mood/feel are obvious. And what I think about when I look at his image is the subjects are often not the same ones I want to pursue but they have a mood/feel that I DO want to find and capture, just also with an animal in the scene. (I know he shoots wildlife too, so I don't mean to down play that, however his site has mostly non-animal images.)

And that's not 100% true because I like landscape images even if they don't contain animals, but I like ones with animals even better.

Sunrise on the Susquehanna River


I want to make images like the above more often.

So I think what I need to work on this month is strategies for sunrise and presunrise shooting. Working on composition more - a bird that close, cropped, nothing but blue sky - for me that now isn't enough...

Nevada Wier has a great blog post on 'punctuation' - where things sort of multiply on each other to make in image better and better....

I am going to start to try to use less mm's and crop less, and think about the bigger picture a little more. Something that is counter to what I've been doing for a couple years, but knew, is - if you look at much of the imagery in National Geographic Magazine they are not super telephoto images, and cropped to show eye balls. They more often are wide angle scenes, or scenes that well - they're scenes not just a tighly focused angle of view of a subject...

-Jon

Year 5 Day 4 - Vision vs. Action