With the rate of these coming out, I think it would be reasonable to say that ambientAspect is going through weekly highlights at a somewhat consistent rate. Due to the change of routine, I'm changing these "Quick Highlights", into a proper series of "Weekly Highlights" as they should have been since the beginning.
This week's highlights come from the Highline (as it turns out, the highline is pretty empty at around 10AM on a bitter cold Saturday morning), and the ice rink from the Winter Village at Bryant Park. Sadly, it was a relatively short picture-taking session, so I'll be sure to get more pictures next week!
Click on the
READ MORE text for one thousand shards of ice.
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| Holding your breath |
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| Switched my lens to a 35mm f/1.8 here. Just a quick fun-shot here. |
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| Winter Village at Bryant Park. |
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| Not sure why, but I really liked this one. Perhaps it's the sense of strong, distinct lines. |
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| Top one or bottom one? |
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| How about both? |
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| Sad Fact of The Day: This picture is actually out-of-focus. My camera picked the guy wearing the red over this little girl. In retrospect, I should have immediately followed up this picture with another to hit the focus (of course, it would be challenging without looking a bit too obsessive-- especially over children). Enjoy it in lower resolution though. |
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| Feel free to click on the image for the larger resolution version. Camera hit the focus without any problems. Mid-stride when I took the image. |
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| These both were going in a circle and chatting on the ice for at least 15 minutes. |
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| This picture actually postponed the entire set of images because I couldn't decide how I wanted to crop it. I ended up with this one. In all honesty, I deeply regret not jumping into the vendor's store to take the picture-- they were looking at the puzzle pretty deeply. |
Love the photography! I will definitely keep up with it. Message me whenever you can ("we" are back, come by to say hi!)
ReplyDeleteHi Norman. Found your photo blog when I binged for info on rigor mortis and found your fascinating post about the after-death conditions of bodies. That blog's post about why you weren't posting there anymore worked and brought me here.
ReplyDeleteA brief intro to myself: I am a 58 yo, married, female engineer in Arizona.
I think your caption under the last photo above could start an interesting debate around cropping. Now, I do it all the time. But, it makes me feel like I'm not a "real" photographer. I know some "real" (i.e. professional) photogs who use old fashioned (i.e. non-digital) cameras and they seem to believe (or maybe it's me projecting?) that it would be sacrilegious to "cheat" on their art by using a digital camera and Photoshop. What do you think? Do you feel like an amateur just because you can do fancy things like crop, adjust contrast, etc. via a computer program? I know I do but I wish I didn't - an awful lot of "professional" photos all around us are digitized and edited by the pros earning big bucks at advertising and movie making companies.
Hi, Laura. I'm actually pretty amazed that people have actually gone through some of the work that I've made almost... two odd years ago.
DeleteBut to respond to your thoughts about cropping, and digital photography as a whole, I think it's one of those age-old questions that keep coming up when there's new mediums being introduced.
What I mean is, when photography first became "mainstream" how long did it take for painters or sculptors to consider photography a form of "higher art" when all a photographer might do in essence was turn a few barrels to adjust the aperture, and open-close a shutter? But when you consider that photographic giants like Ansel Adams or Henri Cartier-Bresson who have solidified and set the stage for modern photography and techniques as a art form, we've come to another stage questioning how we feel about the craft as a whole.
And in regards to that, I personally don't consider that there's massive difference between digital or analog shooters other than skill and technique. Adjustments like cropping or contrast changes could have been done just the same in the past in a darkroom with dodging, burning, or even cutting-- the same things digital photographers do in a pinch today.
When you consider that many photographers today have adapted their gear to digital (say the legendary Magnum Photos), it's been the common thought that digital and film have their own niches (be that one is cheaper or another is more hands-on, or another has more pleasing grain texture) and many "professional" and renown photographers often use both for different reasons.
At the end of the day, most that have a background in art would agree that it doesn't matter what you used, but whether or not you make "good art". That being said, there's a big stretch of a difference between trying to make good art, and what the commercialized/"professional" industries of today's world need to accomplish (selling that perfect burger to appeal to your senses may be art in another realm)- though that's another discussion entirely.
On a side note, as you may have noticed, I haven't been updating ambientAspect as well, and that's mainly because I've finally found someone to collaborate with, and we're currently on another website called "Cognate Photos" where we try and post the 'best' photographs that we take. Maybe you should check it out-- http://www.cognatephotos.com/
Thanks for reading!
Norman