Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Grey is a color... isn't it??
















E-GADS!! It's been over a month since I've posted... bad Cheryle, bad...! I have no excuse really, unless working like a dog counts... Unfortunately, travelling for weeks at a time results in working for weeks at a time. Ahhh, the trade-offs!
Anyway, 'nuff about that! Today, after a bit of a picture-taking lull, a friend and I took our beloved cameras for a walk. The temperature was about 35 degrees Celsius warmer than it has been over the past month, and we wanted to take full advantage of it! Neither of us could remember the last time we were outside without 12 layers of clothing and massive boots and mitts, etc. Of course, along with above zero temps comes overcast skies and... rain!! But we were determined to snap some pics anyhow. Which brings me to GREY. I find that moderate cloud cover can actually be very photography friendly - sometimes the midday sun does nothing but blast every shot into over-exposed oblivion - and it is nice to have the reprieve of 'soft' light as opposed to harsh glare and deep shadowing. Today however, it was just plain GREY. The clouds were low and socked in, making the light extremely flat, and contrast was non-existent. Everywhere you looked, it was so... blah! We wandered around for a couple of hours, mostly chatting, stopping every so often to take a token photograph, but not finding a whole lot of interesting subjects to take pictures of. Or so I thought. After we went for coffee and chatted some more, I got home and realized that I had clicked the shutter almost 50 times! I was impressed. Although I only ended up with about 10 frames that were worthy of keeping... and out of the 10, almost half of them required extra attention during post processing.
Oh well. It was great to get out, even if it wasn't in the best conditions. Towards the end of the afternoon, my friend reminded me of a quip we had read once... "Anybody can take pictures, but a good photographer is somebody who knows when NOT to take pictures..." True, true, true! But I'm adding to it by saying that a good photographer also knows how and when to use the 'delete' function...
Cheers!