Orchard Point Studios, New Hampshire Photographer, Wedding Photography, Family, Individual Portrait, Londonderry, Manchester, Southern NH » Photographing People

For some reason I enter some kind of odd philosophical place when I go the gym and begin my workout. Now that I’m writing this down I believe I may have unearhted a reason for it.

Beyond staying on the treadmill with out falling off, I don’t have a big knowledge base on working out, staying fit, or propper gym behavior. I am hyper aware of this so I constantly feel like those more savvy on the topics are watching me, noticing, and mentally pointing out my obvious ignorance of the way it’s supposed to be done.

I don’t have a lot of these philosophical moments while I’m on the treadmill, because as I said, I’m pretty confident there, I haven’t fallen off yet. But when it comes to weight training, and using the endless assortment of specialized machines I get nervous. I know there are propper ways for each exercise to be carried out and specific methods and routines to be followed for peak bennefit from the efforts. I know that done correctly people with experience and knowledge will be rewarded with better results than someone with less experience and knowledge.

As I am wondering around the gym or stumbling through an exercise, I’m catching the occasional glances from the experienced crowd and second guessing everything I do. It occurs to me that I am on the other side of this fence in the photography department.

I am very comfortable with my knowledge and experience behind the camera, which in no way means I know everything, far from it. As I’ve mentioned before a big reason for my continued passion for photography is there is always more to learn and be challenged by. The knowledge and experience does give me a level of confidence in my abilities to not wory whether the people looking at me are pointing and laughing.

From the point of view of the observer, I have often been in situations where I am looking at another photographer wondering why they are doing what it is they are doing.  I’m always cautious of assuming that they don’t know what they are doing, and even if that were the case, generally, whatever mistake they may be making will lead to them learning more about photography. I sometimes get an overwhelming urge to give them a tip or pointer to help them through what I’m assuming is a difficult situation for them. You know what they say about assuming, I mean it now seems afully arogant of me to think they’d want my help.

A lot of times while I’m shooting an event I’ll have someone come up and ask for help with a particular photography problem. As long as the moment is suitable I am more than happy to share what I know and help out. This now makes me wonder what would happen if I aproached one of the people in the gym, who I assume to know what they are doing, and ask them for pointers on completing tricep presses.

Every time I take a personal picture these days it puts me a few more megabytes in the hole. What I mean by that is, Debbie and I have tons of pictures (prints) from the film days that have been printed and organized into albums. We both have similar archives of images from prior to us getting together, most neatly bound in convenient to view albums. I’m not sure about her but I know that I also have a good sized box filled with a few hundred pictures that never made it to an album for whatever reason.

When we first transitioned into digital we were Debbie was pretty diligent with the process of getting our keepers printed, organized, and installed into albums. Well we got busy with things for a while, and next thing you know the images are piling up in a few little digital shoe boxes known as portable hard drives. Now every time I take a personal picture I’m thinking of this, and it is most definitely affecting my personal photography(more on that later).It doesn’t have the same affect on my business photography because there is no pile of business pictures. Every one of our professional shoots is handled and delivered in order and with priority. Which is exactly the state that we want our personal pictures to be in.

Let me clarify the state of my digital shoe boxes. They are not in the same disarray as the box of older prints that I referred to earlier, which is barely better than being in a pile on the floor. The images in my digital shoe boxes are organized in a folder/sub-folder hierarchy that often includes brief descriptions. That is of course up until I started using Adobe LightRoom now they are still in a similar folder/sub-folder system with the added benefit of keywords, attributes, and searchable meta-data.

How is this affecting my photography? I don’t know whether to classify it as a positive or negative, maybe it’s niether, maybe it’s just an “is what it is”, but it has the affect of lowering the number of shots I take. My initial take was that this was a good thing, not for the digital shoe box reason but for the being more deliberate about what I shoot reason. Like twenty years ago when you went on vacation and took five rolls of 36 with you and had to plan your shooting around that. It was a negative for me back then, because I would always come back with at least two rolls unexposed wishing I had grabbed a few of the shots I passed on. Same goes for processing that film, we didn’t want to waste any exposures because we had to pay for them regardless of how worthless the image was. After turning all of this over in my head (the odd things that keep us up at night), I’m leaning towards it being a good thing. I say that because it really hasn’t had that drastic of an affect on me, I’m still taking plenty of pictures, I’m still experimenting, and learning, I’m just not “willy nilly”. Well sometimes I am…

Anyway, we have talked about a few different plans to get this under control and to get back into a routine of getting our memories into some tangible form. Things are so awesome now, photobooks, digital picture frames, online slideshows, and amazing print opportunities. As we start to tackle this task more options continue to present themselves, how about guaranteed lifetime storage for your pictures? wow.