I knew there was justification for my many hours spent looking at pictures!

TWIP » Improve Your Images - TWIP

Here’s How To Improve Your Photography - Look at lots of pictures!

It all makes sense. The more pictures you study, the better pictures you take.  I am very selective when I favorite photos on Flickr.  I only press that little star when I really like an image.  The suggestion over on TWiP is to not only view, but study tons of images.  This way you can better understand what you like and what you don't; and how it's achieved. 

This is an image by one of my favorite photographers on Flickr.  There's so much about this picture that speaks to me: perfectly sharp eyes; math on the hand; smirk underneath the hand; the framing that puts her eyes toward the top right, her hand toward the middle, and just enough shoulder as to not over-power the shot.  I'm not the only one.  There's ~119 comments on this image alone.  (Her profile says she's 15; I think that might be an old bio.)


Photo by *Zara

If you haven't already, make sure you check out the This Week in Photography podcast. It always has useful information for all skill levels of photography.  It's run by some professional photographers, but is dumbed-down for the amateur like me.

Technorati Tags: TWiP, photography, Flickr

Inspiration, or discouragement?

For the past couple of months I've been listening to a photography podcast called This Week in Photography, or TWiP. I've listened to other photography podcasts in the past, but I haven't really been inspired, after listening, quite like I have been with this one. I also read a blog of a photographer that has really made an impact on the 'net, in the photography community anyway, and me. I first found Thomas Hawk's blog through digg. He told this story about this ridiculous situation with PriceRightPhoto. I was blown away by how badly a store could behave. I added his RSS feed, and the rest is history.

The real point here is that I listen to this podcast, look through Mr Hawk's photos, and I get inspired to take more pictures. Although, I often get discouraged. These people are so good, even their crappy pictures look better than mine. I often wonder, "how the hell did they even picture that in their mind prior to taking that shot?" I guess the real solution is just to get out there and shoot.

All-in-all though, if nothing else, Mr. Hawk has inspired me to at least get my camera out to take a shot every day. The hard part though, is that sometimes all you can get is a picture of a package of cigarettes.

Technorati Tags: photography, frustration
Photo by me

You can't kill the metal, The metal will live on...

Today I stumbled across Pandora's podcast, this time, about Metal. Although I think the podcast itself is interesting, I don't feel it does Metal justice. They play samples of certain types of sub-genres, usually played by an independent band, to illustrate the particular sub-genre being discussed. The problem with this particular episode is that these samples lack vocals. The group mentions that vocals can, and are usually, play an important part of the music, but they don't play any songs with vocals in the podcast. Like all Pandora's other podcasts, they have many popular music samples on the website to further illustrate the sub-genres. Make sure you go to the page to check out these awesome samples. Or, you could just listen to my Hair Metal station if you want to hear some sweet metal!

Pandora Presents... Types of Metal

Technorati Tags: Pandora, music, netcast