Is Blogging Birdsong for Humans?

Whistle Tweet Whistle Tweet Whistle!!

I spent the morning wondering around local woods with an amazing chap called Terry Spratt who could tune into the bird song and tell us the names of the birds that were around and then point out to where they were. (Just like someone might be able to decode my birdsong hello - yes it really is an apt code - answer next week sometime!) I love birds, perhaps in the past some of my energy existed in birds, who knows. I’m a bit lens limited for the little ones, but I can just about get away with a big crop on the web.

” a very pretty little bird on this mornings walk”

Listening to all that wonderful birdsong, the complex communication that was going on all around me in the trees got me thinking, about how we communicate, let others know what we are up to, what we are doing. Is blogging a human birdsong? - what a transition!! CBC I’m waiting for the call! So I’ve been flying in and out of other peoples doors and windows to see how the experts do it.

This led me to a number of conclusions when seeing 500000+ hits on some sites. Perhaps I should visit my site all day from my wife’s computer !!!!!!!! No I’m honest really I am! But I did stumble across something of a strategy to get the hits without resorting to sly marketing, a sexy avatar or being naughty with the keywords. Lets have a schedule, I mean it almost seems to be a rule, like a “rule of thirds” for blogs. So lets make it like a magazine here at “The Compete Picture.”  So here it is, my first draft, well if you click continue!

Critical Event

The past week has been very busy, and the outcome wasn’t just improvements to the organization of my hard drives, or the disorganization of my blog by playing with different themes and losing all my widget info!

Critical Event is the name given to my event photography work, and it will now reside with its own galleries and info blog - “criticalevent”. This will just make it easier to navigate around each zone, I mean if you are looking at event photo’s do you care about arty fine art prints that cost several times as much?

 

 

“Thanks Dad”

One thing I don’t subscribe to is that a “lower” standard of work should be acceptable just because you are not always in control of every aspect of a shot, and any workflows needs to be carried out promptly. Yes some moments do have to be grabbed very quickly and people don’t want to be standing around while you make several camera adjustments, or attempt some more creative angles. So a use a puff of fill flash, set f8 and keep an eye on your shutter speed and ISO - Oh, watch for those highlight blow-outs that wreck images! I still shoot Raw, you just never know when you might need all the data!

I think, if you are photographing other people at an event, then as a photographer you have a responsibility to ensure that the images you present respect the moments that you capture. So I still have a quality over quantity approach, even if that does mean dumping the million dollar winning smile because you’ve managed to capture, in the soft focus of the background, a view down some mum’s top as she bends down to adjust her point and shoot. 

 

Outside Event work isn’t all about smile, grins or gritty expressions either, my over-riding photographic philosophy applies - stand still, look around and with the benefit of a quality telephoto you can reach into magical moments, and capture them forever.

So have a look at these shots, take a peak at my latest gallery let me know what you think.

Take Care

Steven

 

www.stevendraperphotography.com

Weather or Not?

Hi

Well I’m busy trying to sort out my hard drives into something of a workable archive in Lightroom. Through my big office widows I can see the mornings sun has been replaced with an ominous grey. Was that a rumble of thunder?

A few minutes ago, I came across this old scanned image of mine. It dates back to Mildenhall Airfete 86 or 87 and was taken on my big heavy “everything manual” Zenith TTL with, with its mid range lens, felt like a bazooka. It seems strange to think that in the latter years of the cold war I was “shooting” Nato aeroplanes with a Soviet camera!

The weather that day started sunny and warm, the cumulus building up and up until, like today, it all went very sudden grey. Blast, it might rain I thought, and boy, it certainly did. The crowd line was no longer ten people deep as many of the 200000 people dashed back to cars, the gift tents or the hanger, where for a few pounds or dollars,  you could buy a really greasy BBQ cooked burger to go with your icy tin of US beer, and then eat it under the wing of an F-15 Eagle while pretending to be American!

I stayed put, as a 16 years old an airshow was a massive treat for me, and I wasn’t going to miss anything, especially as the Royal Air Force’s aerobatic display team the  Red Arrows were on soon. However there was something very exciting about to drift through the Suffolk air that afternoon, and it wasn’t burger smoke!

 

“Weather or Not”

It almost looks like a  ”mid west” Tornado, but we are in the rural flatlands of Suffolk, in Eastern UK. But on the right you can see the you can see the moist air being sucked downwards and then into the rotating tunnel cloud. Not surprisingly flying stopped for a while, the unstable air around this cloud would certainly cause some unscheduled aerobatics!

But it’s not a Tornado. This is a “roll cloud” that forms along a storms “gust front” when cold air from a storm downdraft lifts warm air above the condensation level to produce a menacing looking site. The Red Arrows have their smoke trails too, but this cloud was one rare aerial display I was very glad to see. Even so I only took one exposure of it, and I’ve never seen another picture of it on the web, despite searching! OK mine has not been seen for 20+ years either!

That leads me on, and sort of back to what I’m meant to be doing right now. Going by some online galleries you’d think that you have to take 70+ exposures of each flypast now days, and that kind of amazes me. I only took one exposure of the cloud because I had only taken two rolls of 36exp Fujichrome 100 with me that day to an 8 hour air show, and by now we were very close to the end of the day! Back then, when a roll of film would sometimes last me for several days out, plus other photo missions, many of my competition successes came from sequences of just one or two exposures. Two films in one day was a luxury!  And thankgoodness, the trunk of slides sitting in the corner of my office, awaiting the day I finally buy a decent film scanner, is big enough as it is!!! 

Take Care! Steven

 

stevendraperphotography.com

Crystal Rainbows

Hi everyone.

OK, I should be doing some other things right now! I’ve a couple of posts that my “coming soon box” has been advertising for a little too long, and then, some prints to make ready for Mondays post. But overall I should actually be in bed now, planting 100 trees with my son and a few others tomorrow will be hard work for a day-dreamy chap like me.

But if you’re creative then you’ll understand that sometimes your energy gets focused towards something you just need to do, regardless of what’s going on around - smoke pouring from oven, my eldest boy screaming in one ear “Dad, the chips are burning,” whilst on the other my accountant saying, “just to let you know we couldn’t file your electronic tax return……….” And that happened to me today, stubbling across an image file whilst sorting out my hard drive.

But before I reveal everything, I’m not one for creating those long pages that scroll on forever in the tag searcher, here’s a little teaser.

“Image Detail -Teaser”

 

Look to the sky and what do you see,

Can you see what is hidden in me,

Or do your eyes view shades of blue

with hazy greys that drift on through,

Maybe, that is a thundercloud!

With noise that rumbles long and loud,

But I am there, just look you’ll see,

click continue, a rainbow - maybe?

 

Dear oh Deer!!

Hello

One of the great things about photography is breaking a few rules from time to time - now don’t start me on the  ”There are no rules in photography” debate, I’ll save that for later.

Anyway as someone who does gets paid for their images, well sometimes, I should only show off the finished, highly polished, 0.0001% of files that sit on my hard-drive!

But sometimes life provides a moment of excitement that although the image isn’t going to win any prizes, is possibly worth sharing. And this is one. It’s a massive crop, and by that I mean I’ve kind of zoomed in on the interesting part by getting rid of most of the image. (this would have required a lens of about 800mm to fill the frame like this) It’s a bit blurry up close, but then it was getting dark,  hand held, and taken through the highly camera friendly optical properties of the car windscreen, of which I had carefully parked, hazards on etc!!!! 8^) Actually, it doesn’t look to bad on the web, perhaps I should have kept quiet!!!

“Dear oh Dear”

I’ve seen the deer as little dots at the bottom of the field behind our house, but this was much closer - I’m not sure who was more surprised, me or the Deer - it didn’t hang around for long!

Take Care, Steven