Photography – Page 2 – D’Arcy Norman dot net

iPhone photo apps

I’m a sucker for messing around with photo apps on my godphone. I go through phases where I need to try out apps that totally mess up photos, and then I revert to wanting more realistic captures. Lather, rinse, repeat. Lately, I’ve come back to Instagram, simply because it’s so fracking fast at processing the photos. Very little delay between shutter and moving on – I’ve really wanted to like Infinicam, Hipstamatic, and ShakeItPhoto, but they are frustratingly slow to process the photos.

Now, I’m playing with a couple of new apps. Camera Awesome is a new (free) app that adds some funky filters and composition aids. Seems like a very cool app, and is fast enough in workflow, but slow at saving the processed photo to the phone’s Camera Roll. It can also export quasi-automagically to a bunch of third party services, but not WordPress.

The other app I’m playing with, Decim8 (app store link, because their website kind of sucks…), goes in the opposite direction, away from faux-retro-analog, and into exploring what kinds of funky digital artifacts can be generated. It’s also dog-slow at processing the photos, but the effects can be kind of amazing. Like Tron meets Matrix. And you can mix and combine effects and save custom presets, which are all rendered fresh each time, so the exact effect is never the same twice. Ephemeral glitches. Awesome.

And then Snapseed, which looks like a really powerful photo app, with much more control over the effects… (thanks to a nudge from Michael Smith to give that one another shot…)

The apps are fun, but still aren’t optimal. What I need is an app that is quick to load, quick to process, and automatically saves the processed photos into the phone’s Camera Roll (bonus points for background processing). I don’t need built-in sharing or anything. Just shoot, process, save, repeat…

a week in playa del carmen

My niece got married on the beach in Playa del Carmen last week, so we tagged along. So nice.

The bride asked me to photograph the wedding, but my DSLR is a bit under the weather. I wound up shooting it on a borrowed DSLR – the first real DSLR photos I’ve shot in about a year. I need to pull mine out of the basement and get it back in working order again. I still haven’t seen the photos, but the ceremony was beautiful and fun. I think my fave shot of the entire thing might have been a quick Instagram I shot on my phone, though…

Here’s the gallery of photos from the trip. Minus the 1000-or-so still on the borrowed DSLR somewhere…

photo friday – polaroids

I’ve been using the ShakeItPhoto app on my phone to shoot for the last couple of weeks. It’s like an Instagram kind of app, but doesn’t upload the photos to a third party service. But that’s not why I’ve been enjoying it. It started out as a novelty thing, in a hipster “hey, look! I’m all retro, shooting polaroids!” kind of way. But it’s more than that. It’s changed the kinds of things I photograph, and how I do it.

One of the novelty gags built into the app is an imitation of the polaroid’s photo developing process. Click the button, and a sheet of film pushes out and you have to shake it to help it develop. At first, that seems like a silly and pointless bit of skeumorphism – slavish copying of the ornamental decoration of a thing without concern for the design – but it also has the effect of forcing me to slow down. If it’s going to take several seconds to “develop” a photo, then I can’t just rapid-fire bursts of photos in the hopes of catching something. I have to pause, compose, and wait for the decisive moment.

The other novelty gag is the square cropping and artificial “print” border superimposed over the photo. Again, this seems like a silly bit of skeumorphism. But it has also changed how and what I photograph. Knowing that edges will be cropped, and that the details of the image may not survive “developing”, makes me either a) select a single thing for the photo to be about, and/or 2) not really care too much about composition, falling back further into documentary mode.

Even though the photos are technically crap, have annoying reproductions of analog processes artificially grafted onto them, and the process of taking a photo is demonstrably “worse” (slower, harder to compose, etc…) I’m definitely enjoying shooting this way lately. And, I’ve set ShakeItPhoto to store full resolution versions of the photo (rather than a small downsized image) and to store the original image as well (so I can go back and do something else with a photo, without the fauxlaroid limitations if needed).

Polaroids

barrier lake autumn hike

We headed west today, for what seems to be a Thanksgiving tradition – an easy family hike in the mountains. We stopped at the Barrier Lake ecology research station, which is now part of the University of Calgary campus. The site was originally a military camp, used as an internment facility and later a prisoner of war camp during world war II. Evan was pretty blown away that this camp even exists, and even moreso after learning some of the history. After exploring the research station path, we went across the highway to check out Barrier Dam, and the lake. Definitely not an unattractive region, especially with autumn colours.

riding through bearspaw in autumn

I got the chance to go for a quick bike ride this afternoon, and headed out west of our house, into the Bearspaw region. Some really nice rural roads for riding, and gorgeous scenery. One stretch of road has a very steep and longish hill, and I occasionally try to see how fast I can go down it. Unfortunately, the wind was not cooperating, and I only got up to 67km/h. Still, total fun, but not quite what I was shooting for. The wind did line up to make some really fun stretches of open road. Hill climbing into the wind, which is way more fun than it sounds. And fast flat stretches – cruising along at 48km/h on a flat highway is a blast. After that, some quick bopping around roads to the northwest of the city, and then back to ride around our community before heading home.

I love this time of year.

tribute in light

[Duncan Davidson](http://duncandavidson.com) has been mentioned many times on my blog. He’s an amazing photographer, but is most inspiring because he just does it. He walked away from a programming gig, picked up a camera, and made a go of it. He takes that same approach to personal projects. Like a 9/11 tribute project. Some people would just say “man, it’d sure be nice to do a short video to mark the 10th anniversary of 9/11.” And that’d be the end of it. Duncan booked tickets, made arrangements, and [just **did** it](http://duncandavidson.com/blog/2011/09/tribute_in_light).

Tribute in Light from Duncan Davidson on Vimeo.

I want to be more like Duncan, and it has surprisingly little to do with photography.

on shoeboxes and hoarding

[Duncan just wrote an interesting post](http://duncandavidson.com/blog/2011/09/editing) on the decline of photographic editing. Not pixel-mashing editing, but selecting and critiquing. **cringe** curating.

Duncan is a professional photographer, who does some amazing work. He works with other professional photographers, who hang out with other professionals. And, apparently, they’re all noticing the same thing. Less actual editing of photos. Finding the best and tossing the crap.

In the olden days, it cost money to take, process and print every photo. But that cost put a limit on the number of photos taken (for most people). Which further meant that editing was more feasible. Fewer photos, easier editing.

But, photos took physical space as well. A shoebox could hold maybe a couple hundred photos. Past that, and you start moving into filing cabinet territory. Past that, and you start renting storage lockers, etc… Storing tens of thousands of photos was something done by museums or media companies.

Now, everyone can trivially store as many photos as they can take, forever, without taking any space outside the hard drive stuffed in their shiny computer.

I can’t generalize, but for me, that essentially limitless and infinite repository makes it harder to delete photos. There is no real reason to do so. The photos won’t start spilling over the tabletop. I’m not going to appear on an episode of some godawful TLC show because I have tens of thousands of photos stored in my home.

Deleting a photo is now a simple willful act. The only reason to do it is to say “I want this photograph to no longer exist.” But, what if that photo becomes meaningful later? What if that particular frame captured something that the “good” one didn’t? What if my son needs a few blurry frames from a childhood summer vacation, to finish some future project? What’s the incentive to delete a photo?

I try to delete obvious crap. But I find I keep non-good versions, buried in stacks under the “good” ones in Aperture. Just in case. But why? Will the alternate versions ever see the light of day? Is it some silly documentarian obsession?

My Aperture library is currently holding 24,926 photographs. About 3,000 of those are alternates that could easily be deleted. Probably many thousand others could be deleted without ever being noticed. Why keep them? Is it just the unpleasant and time consuming task of combing through the archive?

Aperture stacks stars

I’ve been using metadata to avoid deleting too much. Star ratings (no stars = crap. 1 star = not crap. 2 stars = ok. etc… 5 stars = good), stacks, and flags. Maybe the tools for managing photographic archives have made deleting obsolete? Maybe I need to stop using the tools as a crutch to avoid honestly critiquing my photos? Maybe I’m over thinking this, too?

Then again, there’s a banker’s box buried on a shelf in my basement storage room, stuffed with decades worth of photos that haven’t been seen in decades…

photo friday: chaos at the northern voice sessions

During Northern Voice 2011, much time was spent at [Sanctuary Studios](https://www.facebook.com/pages/Sanctuary-Studios/183141518372731), making noise and having fun. I brought my DSLR to the Thursday session, to see if I could capture some of the energy.

It was not a large room – we were in the “stage room”, which, surprisingly, has a stage filling half of the room, and a couch/sitting/standing area taking the rest. Not a lot of room, once everybody got in. It was also *very* dark in there, in line with the B Horror Movie motif for the entire studio (which was awesome). I didn’t bring my tripod, so had to figure out a way to get a decently stable shot. I put on my wide angle lens, and shot at 10mm, wide open (which isn’t very wide, only opening up to f/4) and ISO 1600. Even at that, I was only able to get decent shots with nearly a second of exposure.

IIRC, I grabbed a stool on the stage, plopped the camera on it, pushed down to stabilize it, and started blindly firing off a few shots. I didn’t want to use the flash at all, because that would have been distracting and interfere with the energy in the room. Which meant any shot would have a whack load of motion blur. I’m a big fan of motion blur, because it shows motion and emotion and energy and activity. Technically, it sucks, because with too much motion blur you lose any definition of shapes/edges/faces. Whatever. I love the entire series.

The photo above caught Mikhail Gershovich wailing on the guitar, Brian Lamb on drums, Bryan Jackson on guitar, and Alan Levine on (my!) guitar. I have no idea what the song was. The entire evening was awesome, and made only better by repeating the entire experience on Saturday, with more people.

Edujam

I think about the time in the Stage Room a lot. It was fun on so many levels, with a room full of insanely smart, funny, creative people who were completely relaxed and having fun making noise together. And so many of them are talented musicians, having fun letting those of us with… less talent… to play along. So much fun, had by all.

Camping in Kananaskis Country

We headed out to Peter Lougheed Provincial Park, in the Kananaskis region of the Rockies, to do some camping and hanging out with family.

There was plenty of wildlife in the area – there was enough bear activity that the (awesome) bike paths were closed and completely off limits. They were tracking bears right through our campground, and they came within 100m of our tent. At one point, half a dozen deer (that we hadn’t even noticed in the bushes) scattered right behind our campsite. We have no idea what spooked them, but we didn’t go wandering off to find out…

We spent some time on Lower Kananaskis Lake, and Evan got to try kayaking for the first time ever. He likes.

Then, we had to go for a bike ride. Because the pathways were off limits, that meant Evan and I had to ride on the highway. The narrow, almost shoulder-less, winding, extremely hilly highway. We wound up doing just under 16km, but with the hills we had to climb, it was much more demanding than it sounds. Beautiful countryside, and some good time for Evan and I to hang out together. The road we were riding on isn’t far from the Highwood Pass highway that I rode back in June. Epic hills in this region. And Evan climbed like a champ. Impressive legs on that kid.

Then, back to Lower Kananaskis Lake for some more kayaking. The mountains make an awesome backdrop to the lake.

We also got to see some absolutely brilliant stars, like nothing we ever see in the city. We even saw the glow of the Milky Way – something I’ve only had the chance to see a handful of times in my life. Unfortunately, my iPhone camera wasn’t quite up to the task of capturing that (not for lack of trying…)

The sheer scale of the mountains – both geologic and temporal – always seem to amaze me. Piles of rock, much larger than anything man-made anywhere on earth, pushed upward over the span of millions of years. It kind of puts everything into perspective, with the artificial urgency and inflated importance of the stuff that fills most of my days.

race day

We headed to Race City Speedway for the day, to watch some of the 2011 Drift Mania Canadian Championship. We’d never been to a drifting race, and Evan had never been to the racetrack. It was a really fun day at the track, between watching qualifications of the drifting racers, then some drag racing, then the actual final-16 and final-4 drift races. Great stuff.

We’ll definitely be checking out the 2012 schedule…