Mysterious Rook Moves

When I started this version of my blog, one of my ideas was to do a series of interviews with photographers whose work I’ve liked, especially those that have made me think differently about photography.

Stephen Gray, xgray on Flickr, has totally altered the way I think about photography.  His work forces me to see the world around me differently, and completely changed the way I think about composition.   Shadows and negative space also figure prominently in his work, and it is his photos with brilliant sunlight and deep shadows cutting across the frame that most capture my imagination.  xgray is also a master of the found scene and taking simple, mundane objects and making the viewer look at them in a different way. This is also the first photographer whose work I have seen and then consciously tried to emulate. I’m sure that if I can learn to see the world like he does, which is very much how the camera sees it, I will be a better photographer.

I sent him a few questions and his answers are below, along with  a handful of my favorite images he’s produced.

You can see more shots that I feel best represent what I find fascinating about Stephen Gray’s work in a Flickr gallery I created here and you can find my (so far limited) experimentation with doing work like this here.

Continue reading Photographer Interview – Stephen Gray (xgray)

A friend recently asked me for some advice on a DSLR purchase, ideally for under $1000. I put my thoughts together and this (slightly edited) is what I came up with. Since I took the time to write it out, I figured I might as well post it here in case anyone else is interested. There are plenty of other reviews of entry level DSLRs out there, and I recommend you do some more research before you take my word for it. I haven’t actually used any of the cameras that I discuss here (aside from my old D40).

Continue reading So you want to buy a (Nikon) DSLR

Saturday night I went out to The Magic Room in Brighton, MA to see the premiere of Black Fortress of Opium’s new video and photograph the set that they played. The Magic room turns out to be kind of hard to find. It’s pretty much just a room in a large building full of practice spaces and the like. A nice spot for a show though. The opening band was Jaggery and had a bit of a unique lineup. Fronted by a keyboardist/vocalist and filled out by a drummer, electric viola and electric harp and backing vocals. It also turns out that the keyboard player and lead singer is a friend of a friend from college, though I didn’t know this until after the fact.

I feel I got some excellent photos of this show.

Continue reading Jaggery and Black Fortress of Opium

For someone who is new to the visual arts, an important part of the process is learning (or re-learing) how to see what’s in front of you. I had a brief taste of this when I took a four week drawing course as a junior in college. My drawing skills went from bad to slightly more informed bad, but one of the things I learned is that what we think we see and what is really in front of us are quite different. Long story short, the brain does a lot of editing for us on the fly, and while that may be useful for navigating daily life, it’s not so good for the arts.

At first, you might not think this applies to photography, and it certainly doesn’t apply quite the same as in something like drawing, but it is still a factor. Who among us has used a camera and not realized until looking at photos long after the fact that there are objects in the scene that you never noticed and probably wish weren’t there. When looking through the viewfinder the brain tends to edit out everything that we’re not focusing (mentally) on. I’ve had plenty of pictures spoiled by a random piece of trash in a gutter, or some strange object appearing to sprout from the head of my primary subject.

Fine. But yesterday this was driven home again in a new form. I’m getting better and looking at everything I see in the viewfinder, but everything has to mean EVERYTHING. Those of you in the Boston area may have noticed that we had a fairly brilliant sunset on Monday. I got home just as it was about to fade, and wanted to take some photos out my back window….I’ve been eyeing the tree/house skyline back there for a while and thinking it could make a nice dark foreground to an evening sky. In my haste, I forgot that my prior use of the camera was in a band/club setting. That setting had about zero light which means I was on a high ISO, and I forgot to check the setting before shooting my sunset. Of course, among the many pieces of information available to me in the camera viewfinder is the current ISO setting, but I never even looked at it. I composed, shot, liked what I saw on the back of the camera, sat down to watch MNF and didn’t realize my mistake until the light was long gone. The shots aren’t terrible, but ISO noise from shooting at 6400 instead of 200 isn’t exactly what I was looking for.

There are so many things to think about while operating a camera….someday I’ll do them all instinctively. For now, photography, like the rest of my hobbies, is often a humbling experience.