15 March 2009 Color and Motion
I just came back from a meeting of some photographers who get together every month to share and criticize each other’s work. It’s a truly humbling experience, because some of them are really good. The main “instructor” always has some great stuff (he shoots Canon, but nobody’s perfect).
I spend a lot of time reading gear-related forums on the net, and people there are obsessive about “pixel-peeping,” or looking at fine level of detail that you would never ordinarily notice unless you blew it up a print to the size of your dining room table and inspected it with a magnifying glass. While this is perhaps appropriate to gear forums, I enjoy my meetings of photographers so much because it’s all about composition and intent. Everyone critiques everyone else’s photos, and when you have ten people taking apart the composition of your photo, it’s an enlightening experience. A certain amount of technical proficiency is a given, but it’s not the subject of the conversation.
Of no particular relation to that are these two shots, which I took while experimenting with prolonged exposures. I tried following people with my lens as they walked down the street, at exposures of one-half to a second or so. These two are the most interesting.
