Hardly Harley

Over at +The Patch - PhotogrAphy Themed CHallenge we're gearing up for architecture themes for the month of March. If you you're not familiar, I'm helping run a project this year that has both a monthly theme and weekly themes. It's a little more challenging than a typical single theme project and has been forcing participants to think a little bit more about their shots. It's been a lot of fun to see how different people interpret the theme and to get together with my co-moderators to pick winning photos each week, which are then eligible for a monthly prize of a +Topaz Labs plugin.

This isn't the shot I'll be using for week one (Building Features & Architecture) but I enjoyed processing this seven shot HDR and thought it'd be a nice prelude to the month. If you're an architecture photographer, or know someone who is, have them check us out. People can join in at anytime.

As I've mentioned, I've been struggling with my photography lately, so I've been reading and watching videos on how to improve my skills. As I've also mentioned I'm mostly self-taught, or more accurately, internet taught. I picked and chose what I wanted to learn to get the final image I wanted. I didn't learn the basics until later in my photo taking life. And I sometimes need to brush up on these skills. So on a surprise free day last week I set out with the camera with somethings in mind as to what I wanted to work on. Sadly, the middle of a very bright day out doesn't make for great photography, and what I was thinking to shoot also didn't work out. Then I stumbled across this.

If you look closely it has a lot of what I call "zen rock formations" on them. Maybe there's a more accurate name for it, but I'm sticking to this. I thought this would make for good practice on composing a shot, focus control and lighting. I revisited this …

This is a tale of futility. A tale of ignoring hard data and still going after the shot. I happened across this rock formation sometime last year (this is probably the best shot of it from it's south facing side) and have been desperately trying to come up with an interesting way to shoot it. I've tried to force different looks on it, all to bad ends. Having only been able to shoot it from the south facing side due to tide issues, I had deluded myself into thinking the other side was the money shot. What I wanted was to shoot this with some sunset perfectly framed in it. So like any good landscape photographer I Google Earthed the approximate location, and this is what Google Earth had to show:

So as we can see my spot is the middle of a cove with two heads to the north and south of it. The window of my formation faces north/south, and as any good Boy Scout knows, the sun sets in the west. And, to make matters more difficult, there's an island (really an oversized rock) t…

It's February 2014 and I've hardly taken a photo. OK, that's not exactly true. Aperture tells me it has some 550 photos in it's library dating from January 1, 2014. But in looking over those 550 photos I can honestly say I don't like more than 10 of them. That's not a good ratio. In fact it was so bad I hadn't picked up my camera in 2 weeks, even to just fiddle with it. The way I know I like a gadget is how often I want to hold it and fiddle with it, not just use it. My camera, my cell phone, and my tablet were, or are, constantly in my hands. The camera lately hasn't been. This wouldn't be so bad except I happen to run a photo project on Google+ and though I'm not eligible for winning anything I had hoped to make it through the year with photos contributed to it. Last week I submitted a photo from my library. This week I didn't submit a photo at all, and that's because I didn't have a photo in my library that I felt met the themes.

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