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A friend eloped last weekend and asked me to take some pics. I put together a little montage of some of the better shots. As always, feel free to let us know what you think.

Snow blankets the ground, yet life still unfurls.

M83 – Kim & Jessie

M83 – Skin of the Night

Got the dogs in front of the tree…

A couple of street shots around NYC HDR’ed all to hell. Extreme, yes! Bad, crappy, stinky? You be the judge.

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Finished with the second part. Still trying to wrap my head around Final Cut and video editing in general. Would love to hear your thoughts, criticisms, advice, etc… Drop a comment and let us know. Also, any tips on getting photos to ‘pop’ in Final Cut Express? The compression seems to flatten mine out and makes ‘em look poopy.

BTW, I could live in Brugge for awhile. Small, quaint, charming, and rustic. Move me, move me, move.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is my first go at making a video. Using it as a learning experience. Let me know what you would do differently, liked, hated, etc.. All comments welcome.

Made with the Canon 5dmkII using the 16-35L lens and edited in final cut express.

In the above photos, I implemented some of the things I talked about here, as well as restrained myself even more. The main difference between these photos (all taken in the NYC subway system), and the ones on the Brooklyn Bridge is that I didn’t allow myself to use the view finder or the LCD on my DSLR in the subway. This was a bit of a conscious choice, and my desire to avoid confrontation while photographing people (if you’ve ever shot on the streets of NYC, you know exactly what I’m talking about—people aren’t afraid of confrontation!) In other words, I was treating my expensive DSLR like a cheap, throw-away, point-and-shoot camera. “That defeats the purpose of the control a DSLR extends to the user,” you say. But does it?

My goal behind this article, and the previous article, is not to completely change the way you shoot day in and day out, but rather for it to act as: 1) a catalyst to see things differently. And 2) just another tool in your camera bag when you’re bored, or not satisfied with the way your images are coming out.

As photographers, we get complacent just like any other vocation out there, and with that complacency comes a systematic way of thinking and seeing the world. If you’ve ever worked a desk job, you know exactly what I’m talking about. You wake up, find your ‘Monday suit’, grab the same coffee on the way to the office with only a dash of milk, and 1 packet of sugar, show up, sit down, check your email and begin to tackle the days chores—most of them ‘a change the client name, and a few facts in the report’, or just a continuation of yesterday’s leftovers. That routine may work for the corporate world, but it certainly becomes a bane when trying to be creative. And as photographers, we often chain ourselves to similar routines while shooting, often allowing  only little room forvariation  —rule of 1/3rds, similar framing to shots we’ve seen, bracketing, horizontal and vertical planes. You get the idea. Now, I’m not saying that all routine in photography is bad—trusting certain brands, shopping at certain retailers, favorite places to shoot. All of these things can be inspiring too. What I’m trying to get you to do here is not change how you shoot, but rather change the way you shoot…sometimes.

The most important reason to occasionally alter, and limit the way you shoot is simple—to surprise yourself! For me, it puts the fun back into things and reminds me of why I got into photography in the first place. By limiting ourselves, we’re removing the stress and pressure we photographers put on ourselves to get the shot. If you’ve ever been on vacation in a foreign place, or at the beach with skies so blue they’re almost purple, or horizontal and vertical lines for miles, you know what I mean. The pressure stacks and you feel you need to capture the scene like a pro. It’s my belief that when confronted with a scene that we think will make a perfect photograph, our subconscious shuffles through the similar photos we’ve seen like a Rolodex, and we try to replicate them with maybe a tiny twist of our own. And that my friend is where the ‘seen-that-shot-before’ syndrome kicks in and you capture images that are no different from the hundreds of others you’ve seen on flickr, or the mammoth size books sitting on your coffee table. There’s really no innovation in that. And I’m guilty of doing it, just as I’m sure most of you are.

What it boils down to is not how often should you put the brakes on and restrain yourself—if you’re happy with the pics your capturing then by all means keep up what your doing—but if your burnt out and looking for something to shake up the way your seeing the world, or want to separate yourself from the thousands of similar shots, then try a few of these techniques:

- Don’t use the viewfinder—shoot from the hip, point and shoot, etc…
- Tilt the camera—go nuts and avoid worrying about keeping leveled planes.
- Change your preferred subject matter—like shooting landscapes? Then shoot people. And vice-versa.
- Change perspective—shoot horizontal? Then shoot vertical. And vice-versa.
- Shoot into the sun and avoid the traditional back-lighting.
- Use the different modes on your camera for things they weren’t intended for—landscape mode for shooting portraits, etc…
- Rent a lens you’ve never used before.
- Give yourself an assignment—photograph an object/place at different hours throughout the day and night.
- Shoot from from different levels—put camera on ground, stand on bench, or wall, get on someones shoulders and shoot down.

These are from the same walk across as the ones here. I decided to limit myself to a walk across and back and play the odds. Sometimes limits can force you to get creative. They challenge you to find something when you’ve settled and decided there’s nothing new, or ‘great’ (all relative) to capture. A way out of this funk is to just shoot loose. What I mean by that is to not really worry about your horizontal lines, rule of 1/3s, and all that other crap you’ve read about in the dummies guides, and photo books. Pick the camera up, turn it, make it cock-eyed, shoot vertical if you always shoot horizontal, point the camera at people if you normally shoot landscapes, etc. You’ll often surprise yourself.

Walked. Saw. Snapped.

Grabbed this a few months ago while walking back to my apartment on the west side from a friend’s on the east side. One of my favorite parts of Central Park.