Well, its tax return season and many of us are trying to decide what to spend our returns on. Pay off bills, buy a new grill or some camera gear, heck maybe even a tv...depends on how good Uncle Sam was to you this year. While I'm sad to say that Uncle Sam's paycheck did not bring with it any new camera gear, it did bring me my first month's subscription to Lynda.com. For anyone interested in learning new software (aka Photoshop, Lightroom, Flash, etc) it is absolutely incredible. The site has instructional videos on just about any piece of software you can imagine from Vista (God knows why you would want to learn how to use that!) to iWork to the aforementioned Lightroom. Each "course" is led by a single instructor.
The Lightroom tutorial I am currently taking is led by a photographer named Chris Orwig (I highly recommend checking out his work at www.chrisorwig.com). Every once in a while he breaks away from the lesson to offer a creative tip. The one that has stuck with me the most has to do with reducing the noise in our photography. Now, what he meant by this was shooting for quality, not quantity. With the advent of the digital camera, it can be so easy for us to start firing away without too much of a thought for the photography we are trying to capture until we go to upload the photos to our computer.
With this in mind, I set out prior to the first 7:30 sunset of the year to take exactly 3 pictures. I know, I know...there's 4 pictures posted. The truth is, I'm a horrible person and I took 5 pictures. So sue me, I did pretty good at restraining myself. It was amazing how difficult this actually was for me to do! I felt this flutter in my chest every time I went to snap the shutter, as if each click was draining my possibilities for churning out a successful photo. I'm pretty pleased with the end result though and I found that the whole process had me thinking spring cleaning thoughts about reducing the noise in our lives. Now is when I'm supposed to go off on a rant about how we have too much technology in our lives...but hey, I'm on a laptop and I listen to an iPod about 6 hours a day. I think the key those is to find some time and some way to clear our heads and really hash out what we are looking for, even if it means missing a few shots along the way, because, hey, those weren't the ones we wanted anyway.
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