Goals, dogs, bees, a big shadow and a weird statue
Hello hello hello! I'm Nat Bennett, and this is Photo Newsletter, a newsletter about photographs.
Stuff I'm actively trying to get better at right now:
Composition. Just-- ugh. How. What is it. There are rules but also there aren't? God.
Portraits. Main obstacle here is that I'm, uh, afraid of people. Workin' on it.
Dog photography.
Understanding light, especially in the evening.
Organizing and managing photos. I have over 10,000 in my Lightroom collection right now, and even more on my iPhone. Fragmented backups. I know I need to fix this but have been putting it off. Tips super appreciated here. Most of the advice I have access to is oriented at portrait/event/session photographers.
Street... photos? Less of an active goal and more a thing I do a lot that I think I suck at so I'm constantly thinking about getting better at it whether I really want to or not.
Goals for this week:
Take the DLSR out to the park and offload the photos immediately as a distinct "shoot"
Set up some kind of backup for those 10,000 pictures that are still on my local hard drive only
Take a portrait of a friend
Dogs
I made a decision recently that I was going to try to focus on dog photography. I still shoot lots of other things, and a bunch of other photographic goals (getting better at composition, getting better at portraits) but I'm making a point to bring my DSLR down to the dog park at least a few times a week.
Dog photograph is satisfying (people love 'em) but tough. I probably looked through a thousand photos to pick these out just now. They're fast moving subjects and I'm shooting wide open for both depth-of-field and light reasons.
One thing I wasn't expecting but that seems kind of obvious now is that picking a specific subject, location, and time-of-day is starting to give me a much better sense of light. Especially in detail. Just what do different angles of light do to fur, how light changes over the course of evening golden hour -- little details. I'm also starting to get more shots in mind that I want to get -- there are some specific poses I want to try to get backlit, for instance.
🐝 Bees! Bees!!
Speaking of shots I'm trying to nail--
There's a big lavender bush out front. Bees love it. The color combo of lavender + bee can't be beat, and they're right there, all the time, so I've been trying to get a good macro shot.
It's tough. I'm probably going to have to break out the tripod and spend some real time waiting for 'em but I've been avoiding it because ugh, setting up equipment.
Sketches
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