Paul's Photo Blog

It may appear that I've given up on my Project365, but that's not at all the case. I've actually been rather faithful in posting my images to Flickr, but just haven't kept up on blogging about each photo. Oh well, it was the photos themselves that comprise the Project365 not so much the blog posts...

Nevertheless, I'm going to take the time tonight before I head to bed and jot down some things...

I've now burned through 3 rolls of film on my Canon EOS-1 film camera. I'm still getting used to it, and figuring out its quirks. One thing I'm still fussin' with is the battery. Fortunately I found a rechargeable battery on eBay that seems to work well now.

I was very thankful my wife woke me up on Monday morning to tell me to go take photos. I'm not at all a morning person, which really makes it difficult to be a nature photographer. I suppose if my income depended on it, I'd be more willing to adjust my body clock. But for now, I'll remain a night owl. Still, yesterday was a good day for me to take advantage of the day off from work. We were wrapping up a 3-day weekend in the Gorge, and I wanted to head somewhere that I passed on the freeway so many times but hadn't yet explored. After grabbing my shower and a little bit of coffee (both necessities for getting me fully awake) I headed out the door.

One of the places I stopped was at a campground that was closed for the winter. It's off the I-84 exit to Viento State Park just before you reach Hood River, Oregon coming from the west. I was looking at a bluff/overlook that appeared to be an old section of the highway and was hoping to get up there to take some photos from a higher vantage point. Unfortunately that didn't work out, but I did find the creek in the photograph here to shoot.

As I set up my tripod to handle the slow shutter speed, it dawned on me that I didn't know how to use the self-timer. I also didn't have a cable release, so the self-timer was a must in order to keep the camera as steady as I could, eliminating as many sources of vibration as I could in the process...

I was all alone here -- there wasn't even another car in the parking lot. It wasn't THAT early - I'd made a stop at Cascade Locks and it wasn't like I rushed out the door. It was easily 11 a.m. by the time I got to this spot. But there still wasn't a soul around. It was quiet, peaceful, and the fast-rushing creek drowned out the noise from the highway (though I was far enough away that I couldn't really hear it).

Even though I felt like I was way out in the boonies, I still had cell phone service. Yeah yeah, the Verizon vs. AT&T ads are true - Verizon has muuuuuch better 3G coverage than AT&T - but it's not as if I didn't have signal at all. To be fair to AT&T, I had a quite decent Edge signal even if it is woooooefully slower than 3G. But I still didn't get an iPhone to switch to AT&T...

Being the resourceful type, I Googled "Canon EOS-1 Film Camera Self Timer" and of course got the HTML manual provided courtesy of the awesome Mir photography. I quickly found how to set the self-timer and went about my shooting -- hopefully getting sharper and clearer shots than when I just pushed the shutter button on the camera while it was on the tripod. It's one little thing that makes a difference, after all, in getting a sharp shot or a blurry shot...

I finished off the roll of slide film, messing up a few shots because I forgot to turn the self-timer off when I went back to hand-holding the camera. But still - I thought it was wild being able to use my iPhone technology in the middle of what felt like nowhere to learn about my camera (when normally I would've been SOL).

Speaking of technology...

I know not very many people read this blog but that's OK. I have a few followers who are photographers on Twitter and I'll post the same question there (pointing, of course, to this blog entry -- so if you came here from there, THANKS!)

My biggest question transitioning from a film photographer to a digital photographer (although I'm not really transitioning away from film) -- how do you decide what photos to post? With digital, shooting 500-1,000 photos in a half-day outing isn't anywhere close to impossible. Yes, I'm getting better about chimping and deleting the clearly obvious mis-fires. But even with getting 3-4 slightly different variations of the same photo - all of them good shots but with subtle variations in the compositions - how do I decide which one(s) to publish?

Likewise -- I'm just a part-time semi-pro that doesn't shoot nearly as often as I'd like. I'm probably up to 50,000 shots that I've made since 2006. Even if only 5% of those shots were really really good, that's still 2500 photos that I'd consider worth sharing. Now, I don't know about you but I can barely sit through 15-20 image slide shows without getting a little bored. Or at least not paying as much attention as I should. Maybe only 250 of those (0.5%) are really really REALLY good.

How do I present those 250 images? If on a web site, certainly categorizing them would be a big start. Shooting weddings/portraits, sports, and landscape/scenics is a good start -- and I've organized my web site into more manageable categories.

I know I want the best-of-the-best displayed in my online portfolio, and that every photographer's challenge is determining what he/she considers their prime quality images. Still - I go back & forth on several images that I want to include and omit in this portfolio. And this is, of course, compleeeeeetely ignoring the fact that I'm not happy with my web site gallery layout...

The question I honestly ask - knowing that you can really overwhelm people by throwing hundreds of photos at them, how do you decide what to cull and what to show -- especially in your best-of-the-best portfolio?

It's a question I'm really struggling with...