There are three things I struggle with in my photography. Well, that is, if you ignore the overarching problem that I'm just not that good a photographer.
The first is light. Or more precisely, lack thereof. I live in Oregon. Our winter days are short, dark, and rainy. To make matters worse, my apartment faces north and east, so I don't get a lot of what natural light there is. You could see that in yesterday's photos of stash in situ. Even though yesterday was a gorgeous sunny spring day, a lot of my apartment still didn't have enough light to get good natural light photos. On rainy winter days it's even worse, as you can see in this photo of my Yuletide Teddy.
The background is really white posterboard, but it shows up grey in the low light. The red and green of Teddy's sweater are nowhere near as bright as in real life. Another example is these socks photographed on Halloween last year.
There're really a rich shades of a nice olive green, but you can't really tell in the photo. Maybe I should just move to somewhere with more sun? Arizona? New Mexico?
My second problem is that I live alone so I generally use myself as the model in my photos. It's hard to get the shot I want holding out the camera at armslength and clicking. I take some humorous photos sometimes.
Oops, missed most of my head trying to get a good shot of the top of that hat. Notice the skilled shot includes the camera wrist strap. I take a lot of even worse ones too, where I miss the knitted item all together.
See the cool hat I'm modelling in that photo? Here's another model who didn't want to pose.
And he's my last photography challenge. He doesn't like to pose but he does like to nose his way into photos he's not meant to be in.
He's a handsome cat, so I put up with it.
PS I guess I should learn to read instructions more carefully. I'd read through the topics last week and knew today's topic was the photography challenge. I didn't have any really good ideas and was busy during the day. I thought maybe I'd skip today's post, but really didn't want to. As I stepped through my RSS feed of blog posts this evening I saw a few posts where people talked about what challenges they struggle with in their photography. And I kind of got it in my head that the topic was what about photography challenges you. I forgot about the challenge to take a creative, imaginative shot. So I wrote a post about the things I struggle with in my photography.
Looking through my photos, I don't have any really creative shots. Guess I should work on that. The most creative I can find is the one above of my beast in the Leprechaun hat. The hat was intended for Teddy, but failed to shrink in the felting process. It's much too big for Teddy so I tried to put it on Tuft. He didn't want to pose in it but I managed to get that one shot.
He sure is a handsome cat! (and Fluffy too)
ReplyDeletebtw, that fair isle sweater (it it fair isle right?) is absolutely stunning, it almost makes me want to give it a try to that technique... If only my tension was looser :/
Happy blogging/knitting/cat snorgling!
Tuft thanks you for the compliment.
DeleteThe sweater is Fair Isle. It isn't anywhere near as hard as it looks, but you do have to keep the floats of the unused color lose enough that the finished fabric doesn't pucker. Just practice a little and I bet you can do it. One way to get some practice is to do a felted Fair Isle item. Unless you have seriously bad puckering, it'll literally come out in the wash when you felt the item.
The best thing I ever did for my project photography was to get a tripod. You can get really cheap ones off eBay. Mine cost £16, which isn't a lot when you consider it is full size and folds down quick small.
ReplyDeleteJust thought you might be interested to know you don't have to pay a fortune and they fit every camera I've come across.
I've been thinking about getting a tripod. I really should.
DeleteI love the fair isle sweater and your cat! He's adorable! I have the same light problem in the winter with my pictures, but I've found that with a bit of editing, it's fast and easy to fix. I use a free program called Photoscape, but I'm sure there are many more.
ReplyDeleteI do some minimal editing in Picasa. I really should put some time into learning a decent photo editing program. I'll check out Photoscape - thanks for the suggestion.
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