RXA

You all know I like photography … no surprise there WHAT so ever.

Well lately I have had some time on my hands to spend and I have been filling them up with the design of my online portfolio website rxaphotography.com.  Why have I been doing this when it is more than likely that noone will ever buy my work? Because it gets my name out there.

I don’t see myself being a photographer full time … I would like to but I realise that I am nowhere near good enough for that! Even amongst my own family and friends there are numerous people who can blitz me with a camera. Check the work Mike did for Chris’s debut CD (and then buy a CD, they are only $15.00 and seriously, it is an awesome CD), the photography blows me away every time I look at it.

I am going to get on my high horse and say that I can take a decent photograph. Even if others disagree (which you have every right to), I think I can safely say that I can justify the expensive equipment I have. My recent sales also justify this I think. Now I’m rambling and have lost my point …

I guess I am just wondering out loud if I have what it takes to work as a photographer, even for one day a week. That would be cool. I know I need a major lens and equipment upgrade but I’m working on that.  Even today I upgraded my walkabout lens for one that Chris was selling.

I want the opportunity to take photos. In September I am heading to an equestrian meet with a friend. This will prove interesting as I can only just barely tell the difference between the two ends of a horse … but the challenge of getting good photos in an unfamiliar environment was too good to refuse. Maybe I can offload a couple of shots to owners … mental note, have cards, notepad and pens ready.

My photo related activities today involved printing all my portfolio photos, archiving each photo in a variety of sizes and formats on to individual discs and thinking about how to get rxaphotography.com under peoples noses and onto their screens. I have no idea WHY I am doing this but it seems I have to do this as it is a big driving factor for me.

Personally if I sell one photograph per year to a complete stranger … I will be thrilled. And as I have already done that this year … I am completely thrilled.

So to sum up, I don’t know where I’m going … but I know the journey is going to be fun.

Well done to those who made it thus far in this post … I am truly impressed.

Sometimes in this digital world I think we forget that photography is all about the finished print. I agree it is wonderful being able to get the instant feedback on screen and to be able to flash through hundreds of photos in minutes, but I was reminded this morning as I printed out 8′x10″ copies of my portfolio photos how amazing it is to see a good photograph on good paper and hold it in your hands.

I’m using a Canon iP5300 printer and Kodak Ultra Premium paper at the moment. The combination of these two products is really helping my photographs leap out from the page. The daisy and the sunset (you will see this when I get to the last part of my Mornington Peninsula entries) prints just honestly left me standing there lost for words.

My photograph to print ratio is about 1:800 I would estimate, but when you come across a photograph that blows you away on screen, do yourself a favour and print it big on the best quality paper. It will knock your socks off.

Rant over … thank you for reading. Love to hear your thoughts on this.

eBay!

Originally uploaded by RXAphotos

After the park we headed down towards the pier/marina.

The best thing about these walks is you stay as a group but that group could be spread out over two hundred meters or so. This keeps the whole group mentality feel which we all enjoy but it takes the pressure of if you want to sit and spend time time taking a particular photograph.

Another thing I particularly enjoy about photography is the community. I was doing a lens swap on the pier when a person approached and introduced himself. He had a camera and saw that I had two so I must in theory know what I am doing. But as I said to Henry (his name), “Theory is a beautiful, but not always accurate thing.”

We chatted about his new camera and photography for about ten minutes and thanks to Kylee who read a recent post about wishing I had a notepad on me and bought me one, I was able to get his email address and point him towards Flickr (and rxaphotography.com of course).

Henry trundled off and I saw him taking to David about ten minutes later.

At one point the three of us (that’s myself David and Chris … not Henry, Henry had gone by then) were to be seen taking a plethora of photographs of some birds sitting in a line on (for lack of a proper term) pier posts. For some reason this fascinated us and I reckon we spent about ten minutes there. God knows how many frames we got of them (I just counted and I took 47) between us?

Our stomachs were taking charge at this moment and we headed up to the main street for some lunch at Subway.

Aside … A few people have asked me why the photograph is entitled eBay? I now quote from the Pixar Film Finding Nemo:

NEMO: I wanna go home. Do you know where my dad is?
PEACH: Honey, your dad’s probably back at the pet store.
NEMO: Pet store?
BLOAT: Yeah, you know, like I’m from Bob’s Fish Mart.
GURGLE: Pet Palace.
BUBBLES: Fish-O-Rama.
DEB: Mail order.
PEACH (a starfish): Ebay!

I’m hoping for a bit of interaction here guys and gals.

I was just about to rename all 698 (yes I made an error in my original count) photos from yesterday’s Flickr walk when I decided to put some real thought behind it.

As prolific shooters, some of you must be facing the same issue I am having, that being how do you name your mountains of images for reasonably easy retrieval and archiving? Mike, for instance, has taken over 18,000 photos in the two years he has had his 350D

For the last three months I have been using the following system:

RXA_{YY}{MM}{DD}_####.{ext}

Where:

• {YY} is a two figure representation of the year the photograph was taken
• {MM} is a two figure representation of the month the photograph was taken
• {DD} is a two figure representation of the day the photograph was taken
• #### is the image number for the day
• {ext} is the file extension

Note: In case you were getting worried about the level of detail I record when out photographing stuff, the image date and time as well as many other factors like focal length, shutter speed and aperture used is recorded automatically by the camera each time a photograph is taken and stored within the file. Most photo software retrieves and displays this information without prompting.

Now initially I thought that using four figures for the sequence was ridiculous but if you think about it, if we had started shooting at 5 am to get the sunrise and I had more cards on me (I’m still missing a 2Gb card somewhere???) my 698 yesterday images could easily have crossed the 1000 mark.

Most photo sorting/editing applications have an easy way of batch renaming files so I am not actually doing this individually. I’m not THAT stupid.

This system has worked reasonably well for me but I needed something more specific in case I took part in multiple shoots in one day and downloaded the images during multiple sittings during the day. The chance of ignoring a warning and overwriting files is quite high.

So this afternoon I came up with this new method:

RXA_{YY}{MM}{DD}_{HH}{mm}{SS}.{ext}

Where:

• {HH} is a two figure representation of the hour the photograph was taken
• {mm} is a two figure representation of the minute the photograph was taken
• {DD} is a two figure representation of the second the photograph was taken

At first I thought this would work. Luckily before I put it in to practice I realised a possible stumbling block in my plan. Has anyone else guessed it? Like most of my photographer friends, I have a camera that is capable of shooting in burst mode. For the uninitiated, that means that as you continue to hold down the shutter and the camera will take photographs until you release your finger, the card runs out or most likely the camera’s internal buffer is filled. A bit like a machine gun really.

Now my main camera (I normally take two out on a shoot) is capable of taking 5 frames per second. The camera I have my eye on for my next upgrade, goes up to 6.5 frames per second. So in theory, my process above would not work and could possibly end up with horrendous file names with (copy 1) etc on the end. I decided to bite the bullet and give it a go anyway and hope that the clever people at Adobe had put some thought into this.

It appears that they have. Any images taken in the same second have -2, -3, -4 (in one case) appended to the second. So to take an actual image filename example from yesterday, an example filename for all my photos now reads:

RXA_070825_132354-3.CRW

This photo was taken by me (RXA) on the 25th of August, 2007 (070825) at 1.23.54 in the afternoon. This is in fact the third photograph to be taken that second as indicated by the -3. The file extension is .CRW (Canon RAW).

This method seems to work and is quite acceptable. I have applied it to the other 1000 or so images on my hard drive and the system seems foolproof. For how long, we will have to see.

Mornington Daisy

Originally uploaded by RXAphotos

Photograph available at RXAphotography.com.

This is going to be a multiple part post as I highlight a photo from each of the different areas we visited.

Yesterday David and I went down to Chris’s house in the morning camera bags at the ready. We all then drove down to Mornington and started what was to be six hours of shooting.

Within minutes of alighting from the car and getting my camera ready I was on the ground (see last post for photos) getting this photo. This was taken at the park at the end of the main road.

I noticed that we didn’t get many rude comments from passes by as groups of photographers normally do. A lot of people stopped and asked if we were getting any good shots. Most just smiled and walked on.

More to follow!