Pummelvision takes photos from your Flickr, Tumblr, or Facebook account to create a unique and rapid slideshow of your life set to music. When it’s done, it’ll upload it to YouTube or Vimeo for sharing with your friends.
It’s a little scary to watch your last five years flash in three minutes infront of your eyes.
Go shooting … and take your best shot. Now look at that one good and hard. Got it? Good. What I want you to do now is create 20 more images from a different POV. … Work for it. Walk 30 feet back and shoot lying down with a 200mm lens. Get close with a 24mm lens and lie on your back and shoot up at it. Move left, move right. … Now review the images. … Are any of them stronger? Do any of them say something completely different about what you’ve photographed? It’s all about point of view. Get used to seeking a new one.
Excerpt from Ten – by David duChemin
Having just had a prime lense on my camera, I took the challenge just with a 35mm lense, i.e. no possibility to zoom – however, a great opportunity to play with depth of field. So, being stuck outside of a grocery store waiting for make-up purchases being made, I remembered that saying ‘there’s always a great shot within 10 meters from you’. Challenge accepted. Continue reading
This week’s exercise was all about contrast:
Take your camera [...] and go for a walk. Look for scenes in which you can put conceptual contrasts into the frame. Start easy. Wet and Dry. Big and Small. Rough and Smooth. Young and Old. Easy right? Now get a little more esoteric. See how far you can push this.
I was a little nervous about this assignment since it was less technical and easy to follow than last weeks assignment on getting pickier. Fortunately, I had Mayra helping me with this assignment. So we went out to an abandoned brick factory in Munich, which provided a perfect play ground … and I got my first contrast picture quite early. Below you see the view out of a run down house to a new built house. The longer I look at this picture the more contrasts I recognize: Old vs. new, broken vs. intact, inside vs. outside. Continue reading
Sunday I started my first exercise: Get pickier.
Head out with your camera for an hour and force yourself to shoot a hundred frames – push yourself creatively. [...] But now do the opposite. Go out and shoot only 3 frames. [...] Shoot less, not more. [...] Would you put this on your wall? No? Delete it. Try again.
So I went out and tried to shoot those hundred pictures in the hour I was given. Unfortunately I just made it to just 75. However, I saw a lot of things in my immediate neighborhood, that I haven’t notice before – the first one shown below, being literally within 100 meters from my flat. Continue reading
A little over a year ago I bought a DSLR – a decision that way accompanied by a lot of initial doubt, frustration and great joy when things started to fall in place. Ever since I carried my camera to various places around the world – from the US West coast to the Japanese East coast and back to Munich. It was always fun. However, it was a highly irregular hobby, with my camera lying around for weeks, sometimes for months.
Therefore I made a resolution: I want to shoot more regular and become a better photographer. To gain traction on this resolution, I want to publish my progress once a week on this blog. That way I have a journal of my progress.
Making things a little more interesting, I’ll use David duChemin’s book ‘TEN – Ten Ways To Improve Your Craft. None of them involve buying gear‘. It’s an eBook, I bought being intrigued by its low price (just five US$ – less than a latte at a Munich Starbuck’s) and by the reviews I read. It’s structured into ten separate lessons, each accompanied by so called’ creative excercises’. Although I cannot tell whether the guidance is good or not, it’s an interesting read by itself. The verdict about the quality comes in ten weeks.
So, if you’re interested, follow me on my way to photography greatness … or watch me fail. However, I hope it will be fun and one of my highlights of 2010 – yes, it’s a totally self-indulging activity, but this is my blog and I can do whatever I want to.
