Paul Butzi (Musings on Photography) describes one sort of art buyer:

But there’s one category I know about that no one else seems to think of: people who buy artworks because they want to be artists/photographers/painters by proxy. They want to be the sort of person who’s out on the beach at dawn, seeing how wonderful God’s creation looks as the sea breeze starts to stir and the fog starts to burn off over the ocean but lingers in the trees. The problem is that they’ve discovered that at dawn, on the beach, when the sea breeze starts to stir and the fog starts to burn off, it’s often cold and wet and dark and fairly nasty- any sensible person would be in bed, fast asleep, and not out in the cold and wet and dark witnessing God’s creation.

While not at all sensible, I think I like to be the sort who is on the beach at dawn… ;-)

By the way, visit the original article by clicking the title link above, and enjoy the beautiful monochrome photo that Paul Butzi has included with his post.

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G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him.

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It is December, I’m busy with school work, the weather is a bit less cooperative with attempts to get out and do photography. One way I cope with this is to spend time going back over photographs I shot earlier in the year, but which did not then strike me as being the best images. Sometimes I find what I regard as real gems that I had overlooked, either because I didn’t notice them while focused on other images or because I simply had not yet figured out how to make these shots work.

The process is, frankly, a bit less fun and a bit less rewarding than going through brand new photos at the end of a trip. It involves viewing literally thousands of images on the computer, looking for something that might work that I skipped over earlier. When I spot something interesting I open the file and work on it for awhile, and often I end up simply closing the file and not saving the changes. I’d rather spend time on something that turns out to be a dead end than miss something that might be good, so I often open and work on quite a few images that turn out to go nowhere. However, among these I do find some that seem interesting enough that I’ll devote some time to them.

Some of the images that I’ve posted here recently (and more that will come soon) fall into this category – interesting and worth (to me, at least) exploring a bit. Seeing what I can find and then get out of these images is a type of practice. The result may not be what I regard as my best images; instead, if you follow these pages (and dan’s outside) you’ll see me working through some “problems” that may or may not result in great final images – and learning from the process.

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G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him.

G Dan Mitchell: Blog | Bluesky | Mastodon | Substack Notes | Flickr | Email

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After titling one of my photos as “Volunteer Park Walker” it occurred to me that readers might interpret this title in multiple ways. (Sometimes I like that… for example, dan’s outside is my other blog.) In this case, you might think that this is a photo of someone who voluntarily walks in parks. However, Seattle residents will understand that this is a photo of a walker who is passing through Volunteer Park.

More about this photo… I like several things about this image (and the black and white version, which I may like even more) including: the odd proportions of the trees (which seem huge) and the walker (who seems too small); the motion blur of the walker due to low light, long exposure, and a purposeful walk; the quality of the twilight; the leaves littering the ground.

It was a lucky shot. I was carefully framing some shots of the trees when I saw this person approaching quickly from left to right. As he (she? I’m not sure…) moved quickly across the lawn behind the trees I intuitively snapped four shots as the figure reached interesting juxtapositions with the trees. Of the four, this is the only one that worked for me.

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G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him.

G Dan Mitchell: Blog | Bluesky | Mastodon | Substack Notes | Flickr | Email

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Luminous Landscape is featuring part one of a multi-part article on “http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/Digital%20Focusing.shtml“>Focusing in the Digital Era” by Gary Ferguson.

This article confirms some of what I have believed about the concept of depth of field. Many people seem to assume that objects within the depth of field at a given aperture (on a given camera) will be “in focus” and those outside of the depth of field will be “out of focus.” I’ve always thought it couldn’t really be quite that simple. It has seemed to me that there should be a plane of optimum focus with objects in front of or behind that gradually going out of focus at rates varying by aperture. In other words, an object that is not in the plane of focus may be “acceptably out of focus,” but it is not really in focus.

Ferguson explains the history of the depth of field scales on lenses, and points out that they were designed in an era when photographer did not think to enlarge images to the extent we do today. If one took a 35mm negative and enlarged it to, say, 4 x 6 inches, the fuzziness in front of and behind the plane of focus would not be visible. However, today many of us make quite large prints from images captured on sensors that are often smaller than 35mm film frames, and the focus issues become more critical.

He includes a series of photographs that clearly illustrate just how fuzzy objects that “should be in focus” turn out to be – important stuff to understand and think about.

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