Some time ago on one of our cruise vacations, I made it a goal to take a hundred pictures every day on my digital camera. This plan came from a couple of thoughts:
- If I were to conciously take pictures at every available moment, one or two of them might just be reasonably interesting. It’s kind of like the idea that by throwing enough mud on a wall, eventually some of it sticks.
- Taking pictures is like any other skill … good practice makes for better results. By taking lots of pictures, reviewing them, deciding which of them I liked, and then determining why I liked them, perhaps I’d get better at taking pictures that I liked. The mechanics of the digital camera would become easier to use. I’d better understand the relationship amongst several of the digital camera features, such as white balance, ISO, and sharpness.
For the next several vacation or cruise opportunities I did implement the plan and was able to take at least a hundred pictures every day on these trips. When we went to Maui I only took my digital camera with me and left the 35mm camera home. So what was the result?
I found that I did get better at using the camera, but also became much more frustrated at what the camera could not do that I could do with the 35mm film camera. From a mechanics perspective, the plan was indeed useful. Picture taking with a digital camera is very inexpensive. Once the camera is purchased, I can take as many pictures as my compact flash cards will allow with no other expense. I can download the pictures immediately to my laptop computer and make room on the camera for many more pictures. The only cost is time and wear and tear on rechargeable batteries.
I also confirmed that digital picture taking is much more involved than just using the digital camera. Almost none of the images from the digital camera were complete by themselves. They all required cropping, work on color balance, contrast, and brightness. They all needed to be resized to fit the intended end application, such as displaying on a web site or printing as a 4×6 or 8×10 picture. So just learning how to use the camera wasn’t sufficient. I also needed to have good computer software and a good understanding about how best to use that software. The digital camera has has a much narrower dynamic range than a film camera, so a picture with lots of shadows and a lot of contrast doesn’t come out well. Getting a good picture under these circumstances means taking two pictures — one set up for the shadows and the other set up for the highlights, overlaying the two pictures, blending them, and then collapsing the two layers into one image that brings out the detail in the shadows while not blowing out the highlights. That’s not straight-forward, out-of-the-box utilization of technology (meaning it’s not for the faint hearted) and requires some pretty expensive computer software.
I also found by taking all these pictures I was still "timelining" rather than picture taking. That is, I took a lot of pictures, but most of them were more like a travelogue rather than taking a lot of pictures of one item of interest from a dozen different angles, lighting, and exposures. I ended up with pictures of every few minutes during the day. That meant the screening and decisionmaking about what pictures to keep and which to throw away didn’t have much to do with whether or not I liked the picture, but whether I wanted to keep the documentation of that particular point in time. Rather than having a few pictures taken at various times during the day, I had dozens of pictures taken at different times during the day.
As a result, picture taking has reached another dilemna. The 35mm film camera inherently takes better pictures. The pictures from the film camera are quite expensive. If I also want the pictures scanned onto digital media, such as a CD-ROM, that further increases the expense. I could buy a film scanner and reduce the expense of getting film to digital media, but I need to calculate the cross-over cost. How many pictures do I have to take and have scanned for me before I would pay for a good, high-quality scanner? I tend to take more pictures of specific events or objects with a film camera for some reason.
The net result is that I’m going to put my digital camera into the point-and-shoot category or when I’m taking film specifically for my web pages. Otherwise, I’ll shoot 35mm film and try to get much more proficient with that capability.
Now, what does all this have to do with Blogging? Since putting this capability on my web site, I’ve tended to put an entry into the blog every once-in-a-while. I think I need to make sure that I make an entry more often than that and at least once a week on Monday. So the goal from here forward is to make an entry every Monday. Beyond that, if I some up with an thought needing some expression, that’ll get blogged as well. I’ve also no idea if anyone reads these things, and actually don’t really care very much. I write for me as the primary audience. This system has the capability of allowing folks to make comments and reply to these missives. Perhaps it’s time to turn some of that capability on as well.
It’s Monday and now I’ve BLOG’d!