This time I wasn't there to photograph the performance. I left my pro gear at home but, as I often do, I brought along my digital pocket camera and snapped about a dozen images of the show.
A little silver PhD* camera naturally is less capable than a big black SLR with interchangeable lenses. It works well for documenting events and preserving memories, but even its best work should be passed through the filter of lower expectations.Then again, because it's much smaller it's more likely to be carried. (That should sound familiar, by the way.) And "getting the shot" requires actually having something to shoot with.
Put another way -- if Jeff Cooper, quoted in Friday's post, had been a photographer instead of the Father of Modern Pistolcraft, he might well have said,
"Remember the first rule of photography: Have a camera."So a point-and-shoot camera is, potentially, an EDC item. For the committed photographer, however, a high-quality PhD* has other, less obvious applications.
Photography's components -- composition, exposure, highlight and shadow, color, etc. -- are fundamental. Different equipment may render a given subject in different ways, but I've found that spending time with a pocket camera and then transferring lessons learned to a like-branded SLR (I choose Canon) to be extraordinarily helpful.
Most often I use the smaller camera to play around with composition. I bring the results of those tests back to my PC, looking for promising angles worth exploring with my SLR.
Essentially, it's equivalent to the artist's sketchpad.
That's what I did two years ago with the barns. I do it whenever I shoot a knife, a morning's harvest or other subject to accompany a post on KintlaLake Blog. It was my mission last night, too, as I captured McGuffey Lane's show from a band's-eye perspective.
The images I've posted here today document a scene but by no means are they great photos. That's ok by me -- the goal of the exercise was to create sketches, continuing my exploration of the medium. *PhD = "push here, dummy"
