I know social media has a way of occasionally causing stress and tension and all that but good things can come of it too. I was killing a little time last night and found an article B&H posted on facebook of some exercises for photographers. Cool! So I read through it and there were a lot of interesting ideas. I've found over the last few years that I actually miss college mainly because I always had some sort of assignment that I had to figure out and work around, there were other people there to bounce ideas off of and learn from or experiment with, and there was constant feedback. Now I try to find reasons to go shoot and new places to go and things to do, but because life changes of course, photography usually gets pushed onto the back burner and I try to squeeze it in here and there. Then what used to be preparing for a crit has turned into editing down a shoot and posting a quick album for a "like" or two. Anyway!! Getting a little off topic, the point is sometimes it's nice to have a new idea or a new challenge, so this article of photography exercises was just that. I was thinking of going to the aquarium today if the weather was nice anyway, so I picked an exercise and that was going to be the focus of my trip. The exercise I chose was to "shoot a roll of film". No I didn't dust off my 35mm (which could be a lot of fun, but I miss developing myself in a darkroom - another reason I miss college), instead I shot digital but I only took 24 shots, just like a roll of film. To make it a little more like shooting film I didn't do any photo review, when I turned it on to check how many shots I had left, I covered the screen so I could only see the number of shots taken. Now I know a lot of people who would have a hard time going anywhere and taking 24 pictures, for me, I love shooting animals so going to the aquarium I could easily take 100 pictures . . . of the belugas . . . so this would be a little bit of a challenge for me, but it forced me to stop and think a little, to skip some pictures I probably would have experimented with, and not rattle off 50 shots doing portraits of each penguin . . . not that I would do that in the first place . . . Are they all perfect masterpieces? No! Of course not! But they're fun and this was a good little exercise for myself. So now that I've rambled on and on, here's my roll of film:
This one is of the octopus, I know it's a little hard to tell, and I will admit I cheated a little and took a picture on my cell phone too since in all the times I've been this is the first time I've ever seen in out on the window like that, I was a little excited.
I've never seen so many giant tadpoles in the pond before!! They were everywhere!! And, like this guy, you can see his little arm holding onto the lily pad. Then there were a couple frogs that still had their tails . . . I would have loved to take a bunch more pictures of them, but I did resist!!
Since when I used to shoot a roll of film I would manage to get 1 extra frame every time I decided to give myself a bonus shot on my phone, one of the belugas was nice enough to pose for a selfie with me :)
So truth be told I maybe ended up taking more like 30 pictures in total today (but if I was shooting with a roll of 36 exposure film I was actually under the number I could take . . . just sayin), but overall it was a good experience for me, even if there were a lot of moments I was itching for the shutter button and had to resist. Oh well, that's the joy of a membership, right? I can always go back and experiment a little more.
Cheers :)
