Quickie light panel
Ever wanted to do a quick product shot and just didn’t want to pull out a bunch of equipment? I wanted to photograph a couple holiday ornaments. They’d be great for greeting cards or something similar and I wanted a white background. so I could get the following images without a lot of Photoshop time:
These are quick, I spent almost no time in Photoshop and this was the quick setup I used. Just a paper towel roll wrapped around a soda bottle and a remotely triggered flash behind the paper towels.
Play when you can’t get what you want
A couple weeks ago we had an amazing moon lit night. I thought it’d be a great time to out the camera and do some nice moon images. But for some reason it just wasn’t working. There was a bit of haze in the atmosphere or maybe it was me fumbling around with the wrong settings. So to insure that pulling out the camera wasn’t a wast of time I decided to play around with some long exposure images. But to take it a step further, I also zoomed the lens during the shot. SO I ended up with some pretty whacky stuff. I don’t know that you could call it anything more than just art.
An Incredible Compliment
The other day I got an incredible compliment, but it was hidden in a matter of fact statement. I went to an end of summer pool party for a bunch of youth. Of course I took my camera because I enjoy photography and a pool party is a perfect opportunity to hone one’s skills in photographing in direct sunlight and high speed action. But while I was there, I got the compliment, “I didn’t need to bring my camera, Philip is here.” For someone to feel so incredibly at ease with me photographing them and feel that they didn’t need to worry about photos for the event is what I consider to be an incredible compliment.
Down Day, Down Week
It’s amazing that something so virtual can have such a physical world impact. Last week one of the drives in my Drobo reported as being bad. I couldn’t replace it since the replacement drive just went in to upgrading the total capacity. So I ejected the drive and began moving and removing files I didn’t need to take it from a 4 disk array to 3 until the warranty replacement came in. Right as I was about to reach the threshold for the redundancy to kick in, there was a file system corruption and the Drobo was locked. I could read the files, but could no longer add, edit or delete. So my Drobo has been locked for 5 days while waiting for the replacement drives. Today they came in and I’ve learned the following from this experience:
1. I have a lot of files, 162 thousand of them are just photos.
2. It takes a lot of time to copy those files from one drive to another. 12 hours just for the photos, the total time will be close to 3 days including video.
3. I’m very glad I have multiple backups of my important and not so important files.
4. I need to spend some serious time cleaning house, both virtual and physical, because when the Drobo is down, the office and the house gets seriously messy.
Sorting through all the photos I found the oldest digital photo I had, which turned out to be a picture of me right after the long flight to Switzerland, taken with an Olympus D360L by Doug Morris (no relation) on May 18, 2000. That was over 10 years ago and I feel drained like I looked on that day. That was a great camera for a point and shoot even though it was slow. It had wonderful low light sensitivity, ran off “AA” batteries and could fit in a pocket if you didn’t mind a huge bulge that made people stare at you with weird contorted faces.
The Photography Tip of the Week #076
- I use them for ideas of ways to pose and shoot portraits.
- I try to figure out how they light a scene to get the look that they do, especially the ones I know that don’t post process their images.
- I try to emulate some of their looks, not that they are my style, but if I can emulate a look I can better serve my clients.
What does “photo” in photographer mean?
Photo is a shorted form of photon or light. What we as photographers use to create our art.
Graphy is the art of drawing or image creation. This doesn’t mean just still images.
80+ years ago film and photography was accessible only to a handful of people. Then around 40 years ago film became popular and cameras abundant in various formats allowing anyone to take photos on a poorer quality medium over the commercial quality. I remember the little drive up buildings where you could drop off your film for 2-day processing, that was quick turn around. Then 20 years ago the notion of digital images come to the public conscious and 10 years later it became a slightly expensive but very prolific and we soon saw the downfall of film and those little drive up buildings. Today you can get a mobile phone that has a camera in it with enough megapixels to rival the grain of any film produced. I know that the lens quality is not the same, but that’s not the issue. This has caused film to become a cottage market. The only thing that has changed is the medium.
In much the same way commercial photographers have had to adapt to the changing medium and the way people want to consume information. Forty years ago there were only a handful of TV stations but thousands of printed magazines and newspapers. News photographers used black and white film because it was less expensive to develop and the newspapers only printed black ink. High end commercial photography required color for the glossy printing in magazines. Now those magazines and newspapers have had to move their markets to the Internet (the go to place for all information) and have had to adapt to consumer desires. There is a greater demand than ever for still images, but coupled with that is the demand for the story to be told to the consumer in the form of video. So the still cameras have evolved to capture motion and the commercial photographer is now required to capture video as well as still image
There will always be a place for iconic photography. That one image that strikes a chord in the viewer to draw their attention to the article or video attached. The same is true with portrait photographers are now faced with consumers wanting photos on a disk for facebook, yet there will still be a need for large framed photos as artwork. As photographers we now have new mediums to consider. And in order to excel as photographers we have to consider that the word photo in photographer no longer means a physical image printed on archival quality paper. Photographer means an individual who is skilled at capturing light and telling a story with either a single or many images.
Should photographers then change the name of our companies and businesses to exchange the word photography and photographer to something more appropriate? I am at that point now that I have been doing just as much photography as videography. So in the upcoming weeks the site will change with a slightly different name. It’s only purpose is for customers to better understand what I do and can do for them. But should I still refer to myself as the Time and time photographer? It is after all where I started, even if my business will be changing from Phil Morris Photography to Morris Media Group.
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I am a top photographer in the Mocksville, North Carolina Professional Photographers guide on MarketingTool.com.
