Not just 140 Characters of Dis!

I think differently but I don’t waste your time by uploading everything from your memory card to Facebook or everywhere else then you & me going though every single blurry/uninteresting photo for the valuable ones. Pick your best photos to share then that big glob of pics from the memory card? Archive those locally on your computers and keep that out of view of public for online backup purposes.

And the iOS version stinks, keeps on collapsing on its own weight. They got the Instagram guys and that app ain’t crashing that often.

So. I had a choice of a giant 32GB SD card for $17 or a 4 GB SD with wifi for $20 clearanced on a certain office supplies store. I chose the wifi SD card because convenience of having a selection of your photos ready to be posted online as soon as possible. And besides, I have 4 other cards I can Use to swap them out if I need say video recording or its another event.

This will be great at Disneyland with that wifi SD card as my primary storage device. I could photograph the general atmosphere and characters and in the downtime like waiting in lines or lunch. Fiddle with the images with a tablet ready for posting on this website or Instagram. Then if it’s a show or a single subject, swap to a different “normal” card and the workflow for those images will be old-skool connect to the computer and sort it out there.

I need a 3rd battery!

Focus the camera on the eyes 99.7% of the time, rules can be broken but we always focus at the eyes 1st in real life. Shoot long and by that, I mean use the telephoto on your camera and if you can, drop your aperture to a low number to isolate the background by that blur/depth of field afforded by those low f-stops.

Camera phone or a camera that cannot do a shallow DOF? Try your best to have a background not distracting or be prepared to blur the background in post. Walk closer. Follow the rule of 3rds, don’t make it a mugshot by having the subject dead center of the frame with the camera flash on.

And talk to your subject like a friend and not like a supervisor blurting out orders to pose like this and that. If everything is comfortable with everyone involved, the photoshoot will be a success and you and the subject will take home awesome portraits.

PS: You don’t really need manual everything, just P, A/Av, S/Tv and exposure comp. and read Scott Kelby’s and Bryan Peterson’s books. I’ve learned from them greatly. Well, Bryan encourages you to go manual and yeah, I agree in cases where you have time or the auto controls completely fail you.

I’m sure I have blogged this before but after reading back to back articles from photography Bloggers telling us that the discipline of shooting film is good, not particularly saying the technical output or the cost calculations is better than digital but the way that you think before pressing the shutter button like “is this frame worth it?” “is everything all right? because it ain’t that straightforward correcting that in post”.

So I’m strongly inclined to get like a pentax k1000 and a roll of film a day at Disneyland when I come back for a lengthy “staycation” coming up soon. I’ll have my digital point and shoot for the majority of the time but if I see something that warrants that fine grained, contrasty black & white negative and better glass from the film SLR, then I’ll take a shot from the pentax or whatever camera I might end up with. I would like to wow myself and other folks with the end result.