I didn’t get home until 7:45 p.m. last evening. Needless to say I didn’t get a chance to shoot anything during the day. So after grabbing a quick bite of dinner (a warmed up sloppy joe) I still hadn’t captured my image of the day. With little fore thought and even less preparation this is what I took. Hopefully this will be my lamest of 2013.
I’ve been thinking about my goals for 2013. I had my 2012 goals taped to my desk top and looked at them every day but didn’t accomplish any of them. Some percentage of them but not the whole part of any one goal. I haven’t been able to think positively about setting 2013 goals because of my miserable performance on last year’s goals. Then at 3:47 a.m. it came to me. “GET BETTER!” That’s the goal. Just Get Better! Doesn’t matter at what because it applies to every aspect of my life. Get Better! It’s only been 2.5 hours since the epiphany, but I’m liking it. 🙂
Here’s an article I read this morning on one of the blogs I follow. I’m copying it without permission. This is some thing I’m going to practice.
~ by Darren Rowse
Grab your camera – what ever one you have handy (I used my iPhone last time I did this) and head out into your backyard (or if you’re in the middle of winter you can choose an indoor location – perhaps your living room – really anywhere will do).
Now find somewhere to sit – somewhere in the middle of whatever place you’ve selected.
Now for the next 10 minutes just sit there. You’re not allowed to take a photo for 10 minutes but rather your sole task for this 10 minutes is to observe what is around you and to plan your shots.
Observe
- Soak in your location.
- Look at the light and how it hits your surroundings.
- Pay attention to what your setting makes you feel.
- Look at the details that perhaps you’d not have noticed if you’d rushed through the setting.
During this ‘observation’ phase you may like to move around your environment to look at it from different angles – but don’t use your camera yet.
Plan
As you sit there – begin to think about your setting and the elements in it as a photographic subject and how you’ll photograph it.
- What will you shoot?
- What perspective will you shoot from?
- How will you compose the shot?
- What settings could you use to get different results?
- How will you convey the emotion of what you’re feeling?
- Picture the shots you’ll take in your minds eye.
Shoot
Now that you’ve spent 10 minutes observing your location and planning your shots you can now spend 5 minutes using your camera to capture the shots you’ve been thinking about.
I find that this kind of ratio of observation, planning and taking of shots brings about a marked improvement in the shots that I take (as opposed to the times I race into a situation to take a quick shot… or worse still a heap of shots without really much thought to what I’m doing in the hope of getting a good one).
I find taking time to observing allows me to notice details that I might otherwise have missed. Taking time to plan often leads me to photograph my subjects in more creative ways than I’d have otherwise done.
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