Camera in hand, not enough room!

Here’s a thought that is stressed throughout the industry by leading professionals and educators: always have your camera handy! Now, I’m not going to tell you that every successful photog out there always has their camera with them, no matter what, but I will tell you that they have theirs around more often than not. Photographers may not always carry a “pro-level” DSLR, maybe perhaps a nice point-and-shoot, like the Canon G10, Nikon’s P6000 or the Panasonic LX3, but at least they have some form of photographic equipment near (I’ve surprised myself about how much I use my iPhone to take photographs for mental record of a scene, to visit later with a larger rig).

I was at my fiancé’s softball game yesterday and just thought to bring a camera (actually, I thought, “Hey, the game’s at 8:00 p.m., sunset’s just around the corner from there, they will have lights on the field, there’s some nice clouds in the sky, this may make a neat “American Pastime” type of shot!”) Sure enough, the clouds formed up a very nice looking thunderstorm around sunset, however, the field wasn’t what I was thinking, there wasn’t a very high place to be in order to shoot down upon the diamond. What do you do? Put some people in the shot or course!

OK, so the shots at the field weren’t super, but you can definitely see the power that the sky structure, combined with super tangible light in the evening, adds to the photograph. To make a long story short, the Agletics (Amanda’s team, home team if you will, ha) run-ruled the other team, and within 20 minutes we were out of there…but the lightning wasn’t. Great, but I don’t have enough time now to get out of town to an open field or overlook. This brings me to the next point of the blog.

What do you do in an urban setting, thunderstorm overhead, when you really want to be out in the great wide open? You put something cool in front of the storm, like this mill! Shooting in the city can be pretty dull at dusk, little dots of light distracting from other dots of light. However, if you think basic composition and a layered image, you can blow those little dots of light out of the distractometer in to I’m-not-paying-them-any-attention space. Throw this mill in the photograph, and it automatically feels like Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory!

Don’t forget that even though you have a nice sky above, if your light intensity levels are even enough, structure in the near foreground offer a lot to the image as well, such as this railway, serving as a means of transporting us to the evil laboratory even faster.

For some more interesting recent sky shots, check out one of my former student’s blog at www.davidhalloran.wordpress.com. He even has some images up from this past Texas Tech University Junction intersession. Great job Wild Dave!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 at 7:11 pm and is filed under Blog, Learning, Teachings and tagged with Lighting, Lubbock, Photography, Thunderstorm, Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.