silverflight8 | let me throw words and see if they stick (Reply)

Two types of photos:

1. Aesthetically pleasing or technically well-executed.
a) beautiful things, objectively
b) beautiful things, subjectively (me)
c) exceptionally well-executed beautiful things
d) exceptionally well-executed subjectively beautiful things
e) exceptionally well-executed interesting things

These are easy to deal with because they already have a baseline of "a good photo" and so I don't have to adjust for people's faces all blacked out because they're against the sun, for example. Things that fit in here: cherry blossoms photographed in the May sunshine (exactly as delightful as it sounds), macro shots of odd things that are nevertheless well framed.

Well executed falls into a few different categories:
a) Lighting (highlights subject well, enough illumination, correct colour balance or temperature of light, exceptional illumination that says what I want it to say [tree with yellow leaves in the forest!!])
b) Depth of field (landscape photos appropriately sharp throughout, big/small enough depths so that subject is highlighted)
c) Sharpness/focus, especially for fast-moving objects and people/animals (oh, my attempts to cap sparrows)
d) Correct framing, picture taken from good angle (buildings when trying to capture full-scope, or failing that, at least perpendicular and parallel lines). Also managing to transfer what I see with eyes to camera, esp to show something unusual.
e) Human emotion/expression
f) Got the right feeling throughout somehow all the above.

2. Journalling-by-photography impulse, usually employed when I travel somewhere or bring my camera to document some event.
a) Personal meaning or memory of this exact moment capture
b) Important people in photo
c) One time/non-repeating event
d) May never come to this place ever again

It's much easier to cull the first category, because I can filter based on "is this interesting or beautiful?" If there are repetitions, I can delete those photos without much guilt, and also that means I don't have to develop them all. The latter, because they're often all laden with memories, I have a really hard time going through. The interesting/beautiful criteria (to be honest that sounds so reductive, but that's the two reasons I keep category 1 photos) keeps conflicting with my desire to keep ALL the photos, even when they're blurry or so dark you can barely see people or everyone is magenta or green because lighting, because those photos are snippets of a memory I love. They document something, but they're technically terrible and I have to expend so much energy trying to make them something half-decent. And it frustrates me that I can't get them to the crisp clarity of category 1, because the ISO is 3200 and I still had to shoot with a speed of 1/50 (very grainy and almost guaranteed to be blurry). You can't sharpen and mask it, or up the exposure to fix it, they just will never be that beautiful.

It's so frustrating. I spent most of my Thanksgiving weekend developing a ton of photos I've been neglecting, and there are so many photos which could be good if only I were better at actually taking pictures. Or if the sun was shining the other way... It would also help if I had a better processor, my computer keeps locking up for several seconds (and it goes into overdrive when I ask Lightroom to export pictures, which applies all the adjustments.) And I don't trust my eye to make temperature adjustments because my monitor has been wrongly calibrated--believe me, I have spent so many hours trying to correct this--and so everything looks too blue to me, and it's frustrating. I've printed pictures and some of them are appallingly, overly-yellow in exactly the wrong ways :(

However! To make myself feel better, and anyway the muddling about with categories isn't very interesting, here are two photos I did like, click through for full size.