I’m still blogging though – you can still follow me at Musings of the Great Eric, which I’ll be folding a lot more photography related discussion (you can bookmark or subscribe to just the photography category if you don’t want the other junk).

The main reason is that I’m trying to consolidate and cut down on the number of projects I have going. One blog is easier to stay on top of than two.

Title: Without Color by Me

Flowers are so wonderfully colorful that a photographer’s instinct (mine, at least) is to simply shoot the color. Bright, beautiful color.

But I think flowers in black and white have their charm as well – it takes the focus off of color and lets us appreciate the other aspects that might otherwise be missed – the shape, the form, the patterns, etc. Plus, the black and white tones have a beauty in their own right, don’t you think?

Title: Late Afternoon Sun by Me

Bloody hell, it got hot today, in the 80′s and humid. Bleh.

Title: Red, White & Blue by Me

Enjoy the long weekend everyone.

Title: Lego Porn by Me

Sometimes a macro lens and a splash of color is all you need for a photo. Of course, it also helps if you’re an adult that never really grew out of his Lego fixation…

Title: The Edge of Darkness

One easy way to get silhouettes is to shoot into the late day sun, which is what I did here.

Title: Defying Gravity by Me

Ducks are my favorite animal to shoot. Mostly, that’s because they’re among the few wild animals I can find around where I live and they let me get relatively close to them, but I also happen to think they’re cute (which puts me in some sort of minority).

Anyway, I think this shot illustrates that timing is everything. A fraction of a second after the shutter went, he was in the air, jumping into the water. But in this thin slice of time, he was maintaining an impossible pose over the edge.

Title: Summer’s Coming Soon by Me

This was actually shot in April, but it makes me think of summer – probably because the water is so blue. Sometimes there’s an advantage to shooting in the middle of the early afternoon, even though every photographer and every book you’ll read tells you not to because the light is supposedly terrible. In this case, the advantage is blue water reflecting a bright blue sky.

So let me a share a few ‘secrets’ about getting ‘once in a lifetime’ images again and again. It all comes down to luck. You were there and everything fell into place perfectly, just at that moment just as you pushed the shutter button. Look at many of the astounding photographs of our time and what do you think? Yes, that photographer was darn lucky to be there at that moment.

While I’d encourage you to read the whole post, this one part struck a chord with me personally:

After the shoot I reflect on the images I’ve taken and how they can be improved further. Often the key to getting those ‘once in a lifetime’ shots is to use the knowledge you gained the first time shoot and go back and do it all again, if you have the opportunity. And then go back again. And again. Always refining and pushing it further. Never settle for second best.

I’ve always said that the key to a great photo is luck, and I’ve previously tried to make the same point Paul made above (albeit less eloquently). Just being out there with your camera, a lot, separates good from mediocre photographers.

Personally, I’ve also found myself revisiting the same places and subjects over and over. Because every time I do, I’ve learned since the last time I was there, and learn something new from the experience of re-shooting it. It’s something that’s been very valuable to me as a learning tool over the years, and one I’d encourage others to try. Go back to the first place/subject you ever took a photo of, and take a new one – you’ll be amazed at how much you’ve changed since then. Then do it again a year from now, and again, and again.

This base is made of the 50,000 more intensive users, where the intensity of a user was measured by taking the sum of the normalized ranks of a user on each of the functionalities. In this base, the average number of posted photos is 915 (with a maximum of 75,737), of contacts 181, of favorites 270 (received 307), of posted comments 775 (received 751).

My own stats, at the time I write this:

1,824 photos posted
10,480 photos faved
7,928 given

I can’t find totals for faves and comments received, but my 10 most faved and commented photos have 385 faves and 490 comments respectively.

Amazingly, till today I didn’t think of myself as that much of an outlier. But going by the numbers in the study, I’d be somewhere in the top .01% most active users.

Title: He’s daring you to checkmate him by Me

I’m not sure the people who came up with chess really planned for one of the kings to be of the tyrant lizards…

Most of the time photos I upload are anywhere from a week to a month old by the time they hit Flickr, simply because I have a backlog, I like to stick to chronological order (mostly), and if I do too many at a time, they don’t get the views that they deserve.

But this is a rare exception – uploaded about an hour after I took it. Why? I don’t know. It was raining, I was bored, and once the idea struck me I just had to share it.

I don’t have any sort of real studio or lighting in my apartment (and I hate using flash for anything other than fill light) – so it’s all natural light coming through a window. I probably could have done a better job with real lights – but it’s not an option for me right now. The backdrop is simply a bed sheet.

Title: Stump Speech by Me

Raising the age old question – if a political party nominates a tree stump, how much of their base would still vote for it? Sad thing is, it still depends on who the other party was running – given a choice between McCain and a tree stump… I’m not even sure it’d be a contest.

Anyway – this is a wide angle, tonemapped HDR. The softness around the edges is due mostly to the lens and the merge of five frames, but I rather like the effect, as it keeps the focus on the main subject.

Title: Clear by Me

This photo is available to buy as a print through Imagekind

A peaceful, shallow pool near a favorite spot of mine in the woods. I shot in the summer a few years ago, and applied the orton effect to make the colors jump.

Title: Up Above by Me

It’s amazing the things you find floating above your head…

Title: Devilish Smile by Me

This is the result of an attempt to turn my bedroom into a makeshift studio last January-ish. Lighting is a combination of natural light streaming in through a window on her left, on camera flash, and a remote SB-800. The window light was coming through as a slant and wasn’t high enough to illuminate her face, and as I don’t have a stand for the SB-800, it was stuck at table height. The result isn’t terrible, but my photographer’s eye sees the problems with the lighting right away. (Her sheer beauty makes up for it though).

Moral of the story: I need me a real studio…

Title: Overexposed blossoms by Me

I’ve been kind of posting things out of order lately; mostly because I have a backlog of approximately three million flower photos I’ve snapped in the last month, and I get bored if I think my Flickr stream is getting too monotonous. So I’ve been switching it up and posting things out of chronological order.

Anyway – this photo is mostly just what the title implies; a macro shot of cherry blossoms, overexposed by 2 stops.

Title: April’s Floods by Me

Title: Waterfall by Me

Actually, it’s the same waterfall; the bottom picture was taken several years ago in either July or August. The top picture was taken a few weeks ago in April, just after the snow melt. Quite a difference, eh?