August 31, 2009
“Clean Lines”
I didn’t have to walk far to get today’s shot. A brand spanking new Mercedes was standing in our driveway. The angle of the natural light was just perfect. I also got lucky with the reflections of the trees and houses, which created interesting patterns. It cannot be seen clearly at this size, but my reflection is right underneath the logo. What can I say… some cars are just works of art, it’s difficult to mess up such shots. While a few specs of dust are visible, it’s really nitpicking given the location of the shoot: the car was amazingly clean.
August 30, 2009
“Manor Park”
Thankfully, it stopped raining today. We spent the late afternoon in Manor Park, Larchmont. It’s a lovely town with a large French community, a short drive from our place. The park itself, while small, is gorgeous. One of my favorite photos was shot there during winter. What’s great about this park is that it’s not crowded. I was happy to be able to take advantage of the late day sun for this shot. The low tide also revealed reeds that I used for the foreground.
A raw file is to digital what a negative is to film. It needs to be developed. I shoot in raw for two reasons. First, it records all of the data captured by my camera’s sensor, unlike JPEG, a lossy compression format. Second, I prefer to develop my photos myself instead of letting the camera do it for me. Developing a photo can be a lot of fun… it’s also very easy to get carried away. It can lead to great and creative results, or to a display of poor taste. Personally, I like my photography to stay as close as possible to the way I saw it when I took the shot. I am guilty of going too far in my editing sometimes, so I go back to it and tone it down. I had initially made the sky a little bit too blue in today’s shot, which made me think of blogging about this. Actually, my wife is of great help as a second pair of eyes. For great nature shots, the best and obvious trick is to be there at the right moment, which may only last a few minutes, when nature is in its full glory. Then, it is beautiful enough to stand on its own without the need to embellish it further.
