Photography

With all due respect, this site has mostly become a JavaScript weblog, but within the last two years I've really started to dive into photography. I own a Nikon D40 and D300 and read sites like Ken Rockwell. If you haven't noticed, my Flickr stream has almost reached five thousand photos. I've made it a regular habit to bring my camera everywhere I go. Yes, this includes work where I've been stopped on a few occasions by a security guard only to show them my badge that every photo I take is fairly legitimate. Nevertheless, the point being is that I've been getting a bit more serious into photography which makes it slightly more complicated to maintain a JavaScript blog. I DO in fact maintain this blog on a daily basis. My delicious feed is updated quite regularly, my prototype submissions seem to come in when people feel like submitting them, and of course my site pulls in my own flickr photos tagged dustindiazcom, effectively showing off my personal favs. However for those of you following my blog because of its original purpose, I apologize, the posts have really come to a minimum. If you haven't done so already, take a gander at my archives or listen to some old podcasts, or perhaps if you're motivated sit down and feast your eyes on a classic screencast.

Back to the point

So yeah, I've been walking around the planet capturing life with a little black machine in the palm of my hands known as a camera. If you've been enjoying what you've been seeing on Flickr, please do leave a comment. I'm sure most of you have added me as a friend by now.

I've been reading

Like I said before, I've been reading pretty much everything on Rockwell as well a few books that have caught my attention like Taking your photography to the next level by George Barr and Designing a photograph by Bill Smith. Both books that go beyond the mechanics of a camera and talk about framing and composition more so than messing around with apertures, white balances, ISO's, and megapixels. I leave the mechanics to Ken Rockwell since he's one of the few nerds that actually goes into high ISO comparisons (which by the way, is pretty cool too) but also believes that your camera doesn't matter (also true (but of course, my opinion as well)).

Depth of Field

Somehow I became a depth of field junky and everything I captured had to do with the fine details. Take for example, this photo: My favorite beer. A Hefeweizen

You can see my favorite beer (Hefeweizen) just coming into focus, which demonstrates a shallow depth of field. As a novice I thought the only way to achieve this was to buy a new lens that stops down with a low number (which is what I did). As it turns out, there's three ways you can affect depth of field as learned through this interactive depth of field tutorial. After knowing such knowledge I then grabbed one of my older lenses and started taking photographs that revealed close-up details like this maple leaf just by getting up close and zooming in close:

I was instantly hooked to this art-form known as "bokeh" disregarding good color or composition. I figured if it had good bokeh then it was instantly a good photograph.

Good color

Bokeh alone is not good enough, and getting good color is often difficult. To this day I still haven't mastered the art of white balancing. I know only a little of the science behind it, but it's hard to tell what's going on inside my Nikon when I set it to auto mode vs. cloudy mode (which happens to make my photos look warmer (even when it's not cloudy)). I'm also a sucker for saturated photos, but sadly enough, over-saturating your photos can make them look very amateurish. I know, I have a lot of bad over-saturated photos that I thought were cool.

Good Composition

This is where "your camera doesn't matter" really comes into play. Composition is really either about capturing the moment or simply lining up angles. Simply centering is the natural instinct of every point-n-shooter. But I've found that throwing subjects to the side adds a nice dramatic effect to the composition. Take for instance this fire hydrant I shot near my usual parking spot at Google.

Centering the image would have boring, but throwing it slightly off-centered makes it feel dramatic. Who knows why, but don't you feel it? It's as if there was a disturbance in the force and you can see it visually.

Making the perfect photograph

To this day I don't know what makes the perfect photograph. It is of course an art form just like paintings or music. Art is in the eye of the beholder. But try locking yourself in a small room and take five hundred pictures. Surely you're going to come out with a picture that is better than one of the other ones.

Photography is like JavaScript

As if you didn't know it was coming to this. But let me be the first to put it into words. Photography is like JavaScript, and JavaScript is like photography. They are both expressive and beautiful. They can be done bad or good. They are both load and go. Pick up a camera and start shooting or simply grab a code editor, write code, and load it into a browser. Both are fun to compose. Both can view things from several angles. Both can detailed and complicated. Both can be simple. They are both object-oriented.

Conclusion

There is no conclusion. I will keep taking photos, capturing life as I see it. This was more or less an excuse to blog about something since I haven't done so in over a month. I hope you've found it entertaining in the meantime. Sincerely, Your Blogmaster