Twice a month, we have the pleasure of listening to amateur and professional photographers talk about their work at our local camera club. It’s typically entertaining, sometimes thought provoking, but truthfully, only rarely compelling.
What do I mean by compelling? For me, that means photography with a clear message, obvious story and emotional reaction. Compelling may show human beings, other lifeforms, places on earth (or not on earth), human activities, the impact of human activities and on and on. But in all cases, there’s has to be something about the work, the way it is presented that is different from what I’ve seen before.
While the familiar can also be compelling – for me, any shots of mountain ranges or oceans, for example – the unfamiliar is another way to get my attention.
In a recent visit, a pro photographer by the name of Dave Sandford definitely got my attention. Along with stunning photographs, Dave told story after story after story and backed it up with undeniable proof. That proof was video. Continue reading “How to Produce Compelling Photography – Shoot Video Too”
My colleague then said: “I’m bringing this flash back. It doesn’t fire consistently.” He demonstrated the problem, with the unit set first on TTL mode and then on manual mode while attached to the hotshoe on his mirrorless camera. He was right. Without changing camera settings, sometimes the speedlite would fire and sometimes it wouldn’t. He returned the unit. But it got me to thinking about how the speedlite and camera work together and how to make sure they always work when needed. 
Travelling on assignment or for personal interest is typically a big part of most photographer’s lives. The challenge of managing gear – taking enough, but not too much – is always top of mind. But what about managing your images while you are on the road?
I gave my first full length feature talk on photography this month, to a sister camera club. Its members were knowledgeable, animated and fully open to the challenge of challenging me to entertain them. It isn’t easy spending 90 minutes in front of an audience, especially when any of them could have as readily been the speaker for hire.
Although I use cloud storage as my primary storage option, most of these services “sync” at least some of that content to a local hard drive. Until today, that hard drive was my computer hard drive. But I’ve now run out of room on the local drive, and had to make a choice about where to put the local copies. Here’s what I came up with. 
Unfortunately, there was a series of missteps with the upgrade and it was initially retracted, then re-released, which is a surprise for a company that prides itself on its quality options for photographers.
oldgirlphotography.ca 