2007 Kansas City Airshow

I received a lot of postive feedback in response to my last post about being in a funk. Thank you very much to all who offered ideas. I have resumed my medication and I am feeling much better now. =)

The air show was in town this weekend, so I grabbed the camera and headed out to take some photographs. For two reasons I did not go to the airport to watch the show. The first reason is that you have to shuttle in and once you get there, you are stuck until the show is over. They don't have any buses leaving until the show is over. The second reason is...I am cheap! I originally stopped at an area of town that is on a hill but it was too far away to get any good photographs.

There is another area of town called Quality Hill that looks down on the airport. I was on my way there, but on the way I passed an area of town that seemed to provide an equally good view. I was maybe a quarter mile from the airport which is pretty good considering I did not buy a ticket.

I chose the 70-300 lens as it is the longest one I have. I know from past experience this lens gets very soft past 250 so I tried to stay around 200mm. Now, a quarter mile does not sound that far, especially when you consider how much ground an air show covers. But, most of the action is designed to happen directly over the air field and even with a 300mm lens, a quarter mile is a long ways away. All of my shots had a LOT of sky in them. I cropped pretty heavy to get these shots and some of them show it. This was my first opportunity to film an air show, however, so I was happy just to be there. I did get a few opportunities when planes flew very close to us, like this shot of the Golden Knights jump plane.

I spent about 3 hours shooting photographs and went through two 1GB cards. These are my favorites out of the bunch, but there are a few others that I also liked and I put all of these up on my Flickr account.

I am eager to get a better telephoto lens. The poor quality of this lens is evident in the softness of some of these photographs. I also have to take into account the distance, however. I am not sure how hard you can push even an "L" series lens from that distance. In reality, I may just need to shell out the cash for a real ticket next year.

In a funk!

Lately, I find myself in a photographic funk. What is a photograph funk? I am glad you asked!

I hate every photograph I shoot. Nothing seems worthy of being photographed, and I can barely stand the thought of pressing the shutter release on another photograph, only to be disappointed with how it will look. My studio lighting system is driving me nuts. All my photographs seem soft and fuzzy. I spend hours setting up and shooting stills only to find flaws in my backgrounds. I have several ideas for shots written down, but either my studio (aka whatever room in the house I set up in) is inadequate for the shot, I can't find the right natural background, or I don't have the right equipment (flash guns, umbrellas, soft boxes, macro lens, etc.) For many of my ideas I need models, but I have no idea how to work with models, and without the right equipment I would just end up wasting their time for shots I will still hate.

Add to all that the amount of information bouncing around in my head that I still don't fully understand. Every potential shot now presents me with what feels like 100 different questions, each of which must be answered correctly, or the shot is a failure. Which lens should I use? What settings should I choose? Shallow depth of field or deep DOF? Zoom in or go wide? How should I frame the shot? Flash or no flash. If I use the flash, do I bounce it off a wall, use a bounce card, or diffuse with a cup? What about the flash exposure compensation, move it up or down? What ISO? Which is more important, to freeze action or risk noise? Where is the natural light (if any) coming from? How will this impact the photograph? I mostly understand each of these concepts separately, but putting them all together in a way that works requires experience I don't yet have.

I am in a funk!

OK. Enough whining. Every photograph is work right now, and that is not going to cut it. One of the great things about photography is how fun it can be. I need some of that back. I really do want to be successful in stock photgraphy, but the reality is most of my shots will have no commercial value at all. If I maintain that as a standard, I will continue to hate my own work until I have no confidence in my abilities at all (I am almost there now).

I think I am going to spend the next week or two just taking tons of photographs with no expectations on them at all. Maybe they will all flop, but maybe there will be a few that are keepers. Either way, I hope that gets me back in the saddle. Experience only comes from doing something a LOT, and I clearly need the experience that comes from shooting a LOT more photographs.

Microstock Photography

I took my first faltering steps into the world of microstock photography this last week. For those of you not familiar with stock photography, this is the arena where photographers sell photographs commercially through an intermediary. Stock photographs usually sell for $10 - $200 or more. Obviously, these need to be some really good photographs. The catch is that a photographer may submit hundreds of photographs, and only a few are purchased at any given time. Still, these photographs usually don't go out of date and any given photograph may continue to sell for years providing a nice income over time.
Microstock photography is the same concept, but the photographs sell for much less and they are royalty free. Microstock photographs sell for a few dollars or even less. There are many sites online that sell microstock photos. A few of them are:
www.istockphoto.com
www.shutterstock.com
www.dreamstime.com
www.bigstockphoto.com
www.fotolia.com

Each of these sites has slightly different criteria for the photographs they accept. Some are more picky than others. I have read that istockphoto and shutterstock are more picky than some of the others, so I started with dreamstime, bigstockphoto and fotolia. I chose 9 photographs and submitted them to each of these three sites. The results were mixed. Fotolia accepted all but one. Dreamstime rejected them all as having low commercial potential. Bigstockphoto has not reviewed my submissions yet making them the slowest of the three sites to review photographs.

Still, I am excited about this. For me, this is the acid test of my photography skills. When I can consistently shoot photographs with good commercial value, I will know I am making genuine progress. I have many ideas of photographs I want to shoot and submit. Now I just need to discipline myself into doing the work of setting up the photographs and actually taking them. This no small task in itself as several require models and careful background selection. I will share some of these in future blog entries as I build up my portfolio of stock photographs.