Photography...the beginning

Boy, that title looks pretentious. To call the snapshots I take "photography" is a bit rich. I've always been, even at my greatest moments of genius (but mostly luck), a mediocre photographer.

One of the best photos I ever took was this one, achieved with a 110 camera in 1985 or 6. It has everything I think a good picture should: vivid colors, crisp lines where definition belongs, an interesting scene, and people. Rather, person. There's a story here, and enough of it is captured in this one frozen moment for the imagination to fill in the rest. (What you see here isn't exactly true to the original. The blurriness and washed-out color appear in these scans but not the print photos, which still look pretty darned good in their actual-physical-really-made-of-paper photo albums.)

The boy is my brother at about 8 years old. He was catching hermit crabs. This was during a trip with visiting E family to the Florida Keys.

I liked the odd shape of this tree, in contrast to the other almost unnaturally straight ones.

Those photos were the result of persistence, not skill. I snapped several full rolls of film (remember those?) during this family visit. While I kept some that show faces of people I love, none of the others are very good photos.

I chanced on a couple other good snapshots in 1999 during our trip to Aruba. This time, the medium was 35mm film, but I got there the same way as before: by processing and keeping maybe two dozen kind-of OK ones, and chucking a few dozen awful others. (Scanned prints again. Repeat quality caveats above!)

along the rocky northwest coast of the island. I like how the various textures show up.

The Natural Bridge...exactly what its name says it is.

The Natural Pool: a little less obvious than the bridge. Half of the rock that creates this ring of calm water it is beneath the surface. Still, it's a pretty picture.

Having a digital camera (thanks, Dad) made me a little less tentative. It's nice not to spend a small fortune processing garbage shots along the way to catching the occasional good one.

Here's one of my favorites that you've probably seen before. It's about a year old now. True, portraits--especially when they include wiggly children--pose (ha ha) an additional challenge. I am glad to have this one, which is full of personality. But I didn't really know what I was doing when I caught the picture. This shot was the only keeper from an entire memory download.

Brief digression...this past spring, I was downsized from the local community newspaper along with a half dozen other freelancers. It was a shock; I had loved the work. While pictures to accompany my stories had always been a bit of a trial for me, I only needed one usable photo per story. So I managed.

Now back to the present. I'm getting occasional work with another community paper. I'm enjoying the research and writing so far, but the paper's layout is different. It uses far more photography. For small stories I can get away with only one photo, but for most, the editor likes to run several photos. Good ones. With varying composition.

Oh, dear.

And so, the time has come to learn how to use a camera properly. Or at least, better than I have been. My goals:

1) to learn to identify where a good photo is NOT, before I waste time and battery life shooting. So many of my photos now, I look at when I download and can't even tell for sure what one thing I had been trying to capture.

2) to be much, much more efficient in getting decent article photos. It makes no sense to spend hours researching, interviewing, writing, and editing an article, then just when I'm about to finally hit "send," have to travel back to the story site for a second or third batch of photos because what I thought I had turned out to be so unenlightening. Would love to put an end to that exhausting, discouraging cycle.

I'd love to take a real basic photography class at some local college, but given our schedules, that's not possible. So I've started out by reading my camera's user guide--cover to cover this time, no skipping around--and doing practice shots with all the automatic settings. I'm also reading online tutorials and articles to get familiar with the big concepts and terminology. So I'm just now beginning to understand what generally makes good pictures good. The beach shots above? I think primarily "the rule of thirds" and unexpected contrast are what work there. I think.

I'll read some books our library has available, too, and then maybe do a more structured online course later. Maybe. But for now, foundations and lots of practice.

So I'll be posting photos here as a sort of progress journal. The best tip for novice photographers I've read so far (it was somewhere on this very instructive photography site) says to keep yourself from being discouraged by only judging your newest work against your own previous work. I think it's sound advice. My baseline assessment, then: The photos above--those represent the best of my previous work. What I've included in just about every post on this blog before now--those represent what I more ordinarily turn out, now, before making a point of learning something.

The photos I share here over the coming months will probably run the gamut from miserable to...blessedly adequate. Maybe even, once in a great while, very good.

If you have any favorite photography books or sites, I'd love to hear about them.

Shoot on--and I will, too!