Twin Geeks Photography

So, I’ve really fallen over on my goal to post here every day. Between a heavy workload, an injured hand and a funeral to attend (none of them connected), I really let the blog slide. So I think I’m going to change how I use the Shutteresque blog a bit. I’ll post text-y writeups only when I have something to actually write about, and I’ll try to just post photos of mine on a fairly regular basis. Because, let’s be honest… some of those posts were a bit forced.

However, I do intend to keep challenging myself at the Fremont Sunday Market each weekend, and the challenges are worth posting. This week, my challenge to myself was to shoot as if the camera were a film camera — no Live View mode (though I only use that on tripods anyway), no reviewing of shots, no deleting or ‘I’ll just check the exposure’ or anything like that.

I find that I like to shoot film periodically, as it forces me to think more carefully about composition and exposure in my head; I can’t just take four shots to check my exposure for a situation, nor can I review and go ‘well, I could do that a little differently.’ But I only have one roll of film left in the entire house — 24 exposure roll of Kodak TMAX 400 — so I thought trying to shoot digital as if it were film would provide a good challenge as an alternative.

This became difficult, because I started wondering ‘I wonder if this came out well,’ or ‘how did that one look?’ But loading the pictures off at the end of the walk was sort of like unwrapping a present, getting to see how they had all turned out. Most of the best ones were inside the flea market portion of the Sunday Market…

At any rate, I find that just shooting without concern for reviewing or photo-management sometimes helps remind me to focus more on just taking the good shots. Perhaps this is a challenge others will also find useful!

Okay, eventually, I’m going to run out of odd titles for my posts, but I just couldn’t pass this one up.

Since I live in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood, I’m within easy walking distance of the Fremont Sunday Market. As such, I shoot there nearly every weekend, which starts to lend itself to one’s shots getting a bit stale. So lately, I’ve been issuing challenges to myself.

Last week, my challenge was to shoot from perspectives I normally don’t. This week, I took a page from one of my Flickr contacts and tried shooting everything with the incredibly inexpensive plastic Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II lens, also known as the “Nifty Fifty” to many photographers due to the high optical quality and insanely low price. The challenge was not merely to use the cheap Nifty Fifty, but to shoot everything at f/1.8, no other apertures.

The challenge to shoot at f/1.8, which is a very wide aperture and gives an extremely shallow depth-of-field, forces one to think a bit more carefully about where one places the focal point and precisely how one composes a shot. There were a few shots I saw during the day which I would’ve liked to use another aperture (or even another lens) for, but I stuck to my guns on this challenge even when I came across an unusual photographic opportunity of a car that had been vandalized by a thrown giant porta-potty.

Not all of the shots were successful, but one really stood out.

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I try to find ways to challenge myself, periodically. This weekend, my challenge to myself was to shoot the Fremont Sunday Market — something I shoot pretty much every weekend — in a new way.

What I chose to do for this was to try to shoot things at angles I would not normally do. From odd positions, or in tighter than I normally would, or with the camera tilted in a way I would not normally do. (Or combinations of the above.)

This forced me not to just rely on my usual styles of composition, but to really think about composition as I was shooting. I think overall I was able to come up with better photos than my usual Market photo walks as a result.

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