dav.d photography

Yep, crazy old dav.d is back with more film photography – and of flowers no less. Right now the downside of film photography has been the time it takes to remove dust and scratches after I scan the film myself. I probably have 1000+ images created on film that are waiting for me to go through and remove the dust and color balance them. Fortunately the film is just a personal project. If I ever do more film I think I will outsource the scanning to a company to save me time. Time I could be using in Photoshop creating composites or removing pimples on portraits.

Ok, maybe everything gets a bit of Photoshop treatment. The real lesson could be to look for a different photograph each time I click the shutter. We don’t want to have the same photograph over and over again. Much like every flower species is unique and different – each photograph should be unique and different. I know I have been guilty of photographing someone with 300 photos and only 20 would have been necessary.

I'm using a diffusion panel to create some beautiful lighting on daffodils at Red Butte Gardens

Not sure where I am going with this blog post. Sometimes my mind just spews thoughts to the keyboard and I type. And I don’t know what I could really add about flowers in general. By nature they are beautiful. It is probably really difficult to screw up the photographs of flowers. Bad lighting would be one way. In this case I changed the lighting with my diffuser. I like the results of said diffuser. Maybe I should use this with people more often.

Photographing flowers is like shooting fish in a barrel -easy. Creating awesome photos is a bit more challenging.

As with film, it is teaching me that photography shouldn’t be like using a machine gun. Too often photographers are coming home with 300 portraits from an hour of a portrait session, or 5000 photographs from a wedding. Occasionally I have done that myself. The more I photograph the more judicial I am with my shutter clicks. I am hoping I click less and click when things are amazing. For this flower shoot I would find a cool spot and try to capture that batch of flowers in one shot. I wanted to limit myself to 2 rolls of film – or 72 exposures. Suddenly with that limit in place I start to behave different.

Not sure what these flowers are but when I saw them I knew I was going to create something I loved.

My next film project will be to create a person’s portrait session on one roll of film. In the case of 35mm film that would be 36 photographs. In the case of medium format (120 film) I would get 10 to 12 shots. That would definitely challenge me to think more about the click of a shutter.

These white daffodils were probably past their prime. Especially with film I am in there with Photoshop making these perfect.

Maybe afterwards I can do a whole shoot on Polaroid – that would be 8 shots. With instant feedback!