Welcome to the future home of Improved Capture!
What is a “capture?” The first time I heard a photographer refer to a photograph that way, it sounded snooty to me. I expected that they were one of those armchair photographers who rarely go out shooting but rather sit around online, calling themselves “pixel peepers,” bragging about how much they’d spent on “glass” and criticizing everyone else’s photos or methods. Maybe you know the type — They’re in every hobby and profession.
But the more I thought about the term, the more I realized it’s actually quite appropriate. After all, what is a photograph if not a captured moment? The first flight of a juvenile eagle through a long lens. The wide angle shot of a large city’s nighttime skyline as a storm blows through. The sly, lopsided grin of a mischievous lover who noticed you sneakily reaching for your camera. Things in life are largely temporal, so it’s wonderful if we can capture them while they’re there. The photons of that moment are turned into pixels, coded into ones and zeros and any given “capture” might just be an image that you look at decades later. One that reminds of a time and a moment that once was. That someday brings you great joy…Or tremendous sadness.
The better it captures the moment, the more poignant either will be.
Such things can extend far beyond your own life. Who hasn’t inspected photographs from history and experienced a sense of that time and life? They could be from the Great Depression, or the trenches of World War One, or show the natives of a land since modernized. Or the people of a nation once prosperous before it was laid low by war. Personally, I feel the winds of change in the air right now. Not just for the world but for me as well, as I consider a dramatic lifestyle change. I want to be ready to capture what I see, whether it’s the experiences that lead to a future me or how things were before everything changed. Perhaps you feel that, too.
This blog is borne out of my desire to dramatically improve the quality of my own captures. I’ve loved photography for decades now, especially while traveling and as a pastime, and have spent at times a little and others, a lot, on gear. I’ve learned a lot along the way, fallen in love with shallow depth of field photography, experimented with GoPro-only photography, spent some time with the Olympus micro four thirds ecosystem and so on and so forth. But what I haven’t done is ever take the time to start at the beginning and learn photography skills from the ground up, relying instead on my own intuition and what I’ve picked up along the way.
As such, I’ve purchased a bridge camera (a camera that “bridges” the gap between a point-and-shoot camera and more advanced interchangeable lens cameras) and downloaded several books to teach me. From the beginning, more or less. And living here in beautiful Florida, I have a diverse selection of scenes to learn on.
I hope you’ll join me and learn along with me as I pursue the improved capture!
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