Digital Parsimony

I still tend to think that I suck at taking pictures. The reason I got into photography is because my dad and I invested in a fancy camera. The pictures I shot were so bad we thought the camera was defective. We compared it to our point-and-shoot side by side. All my stuff was blurry and out-of-focus. Then I discovered what the little M meant on the dial on top of my still-smelling-fresh Olympus DSLR. I quickly realized that in order to get a better shot than the point-and-shoot camera, I had to do some tweaking. The automatic mode on the Olympus assumed you had great lighting, a tripod, and a remote; I had none of those things. So I did what the Merlin Mann did, I took thousands of photos. I changed settings, lenses, filters, and anything I could think of. Eventually, they got better, and that’s why I like this post from 43folders.com.

First, I got a couple eye-level photos of the optimistic little shoe
that turned out about as badly as most eye-level shots of the ground
do. But, on review [always review the first few shots and zoom way in],
I thought the color looked cool on the dark street, so I got on one
knee to take another. Yeah, better. But, it still looked like a lame
overhead snapshot that was way too dark and noisy. So, I did something
that surprised me.

I laid on the sidewalk. All the way down. On my gut on 50° of western San Francisco concrete.

And, I took my time, thinking about the aperture (all the way open
for depth of field) and the available light (very little, so I put the
the camera right on the ground to steady it). I snapped a dozen or more
shots with slightly different settings. No idea what I was doing.
People walked by, cars passed, the L barreled by, but I kept shooting
until I was satisfied that I might have something. Then, I
grabbed the shoe, stood up, and trotted back up the hill, triumphant,
with a recovered piece of footwear, plus what I suspected might be at
least one pretty good photo.

I like how it turned out.

It brought back memories, that’s all. I remember lying down on my stomach on some nasty pavement to frame a shot, I remember risking my camera by resting it on some uneven surface hoping it won’t fall off the end of a cliff (just to get a sharp picture).

This theory applies to everything else you do; you’ll fail at first, but then you’ll get better. Here’s one I took in August: