My overcast skills need work
Seriously. I came up empty yesterday. I like this shot because the bridge cables are white against the gray sky. I compared it with a blue sky day photo and the cables are white against the sky when it's blue, too. I am a person who frequently needs to have the obvious spelled out. I like the teeny tiny bus against the leg of the bridge. The scale is insane.
Yesterday I bought a Gorey-a-day calendar. Even though it's March something with two digits already, I wanted 365 little Gorey drawings. I am hopelessly calendar impaired and even having a calendar won't help... we'll forget to pull days off until we're 6 weeks behind, then we'll jump ahead to something good... a particularly gory Gashlycrumb Tinies death, maybe. The calendars were really cheap (being well into 2006 by now). I just wanted the pictures. I got myself a Gustav Klimt daybook which will embarrass my boss, and my sidekick picked up a Bad-Cat-a-day calendar.
The reason I bring up Gorey here is the guy could render anything in pen & ink, a skill I really envy. This photo is so black & white it would be good pen & ink practice. Hmmm, wonder if I could design a photo effect that rendered photos in pen & ink lines. (if something like that already exists, hooray... I don't have photoshop.)
This is not a great photo, but when I looked at it I discovered a pleasing arrangement of birds at the top left. Thanks for the assist, my avian friends!
I shot this block. I love old weathered paint. I know someone who always draws very solid shapes... everything is square and you know you could never tip it over no matter how strong you were, that's how solidly built his drawings are. The navy yard is full of cement blocks. I'm trying to capture the solidness and the shading. This is an example of how not to do it. I'm hoping my next effort will be more successful.
I had another opportunity at overcast shooting today. I think time of day is probably important. I also looked for lights, like neon (thanks for the tip!)
posted by Someday Maybe @ 6:17 AM
4 Comments:
There is a way to make photos look like pen and ink in PS, but I haven't seen it used well, myself. In the long run I'd probably find it less frustrating overall to print out the image and copy it by hand, which would allow a more expressive line. But then, I'm still a rank beginner with PS.
I'm with you on the Gorey, mostly because we had a bunch of his work lying around when I was a kid. I loved how atmospheric it was.
I was thinking about shooting in less-than-ideal lighting conditions myself--I'm an "available light" stalwart, which is tricky because I like shooting at night. Look what I found!
There's some other interesting stuff on the site, even if you ignore all the PS discussion.
That is an awesome site. I'm bookmarking it. My camera is an ultra-portable but completely automatic and not SLR Nikon Coolpix. I have some serious film cameras, and I'm now thinking of getting a serious digital camera. I have a handheld light meter-- I actually went to photography school back when there was nothing but film. Digital really confuses me, so this is really helpful.
I'm with you, there is no light but available light. Sometimes I find a ledge or fence to balance the camera on but it's frustrating not being able to control the shutter. I should go out at night and see what I can get anyway.
Glad you liked it!
I made the film-to-digital transition a couple of years ago, but am still trying to figure out how to make my Camedia behave like a film camera--I miss being able to get a crude star filter effect by shooting through cracks, for example, and I miss manual f-stop control. I suppose eventually I should read the manual, not that it's helpful.
You mentioned before that you were having a hard time keeping your camera steady. I've been having the experience lately that my hands just aren't as steady as when I was a teenager, and I could shoot anything, with the slowest imaginable film. We don't need no steenkin' flashes and so on. Age? God, I hope not.
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