take more and better pictures

I’m spending less and less attention on pictures but I’m still taking them. Why? Because I can. How? With my Motorola E815 camera phone, and with my Canon 5D, both of which I purchased in the last two months.

Yeah, totally worth it.

If I’m going to make better pictures, I am going to have to get all these crappy ones out of my system first. This goes on the theory stolen from writing, where you have to write a million crappy words before you will have anything worth publishing. Well, this is often true. Photography’s not a a science, it’s a practice. And I’m practicing, dammit. I’m having a little fun.

Still sucks that I’m not producing more images I like though.

Stuck at home, pretty much, ostensibly due to the wet, deep snow that kept falling all day. Watched three movies so far, and put up a few entries like this here and there. I’m bored, and lonely, but none of the people in my life feel like they’re really interested, so I haven’t called. Which is my fault – all of it. Because I’m only interested sporadically, in them, in me, in anything. But today is the last day of that. I should be putting up this entry under another category, because I really want this to mark the end of the bullshit rationales I have for not doing what can be done, should be done, and must be done. Let alone what I want to be done. I’m giving myself two more hours of that. Tomorrow morning, I wake up, I take charge of my shit. So to speak. Meanwhile, I did make a few pictures today, through the window.

I think I’ve had about a dozen shoots or so since the last time I posted. Some of them were really good, others not so much. I keep reading how most photographers’ images are mostly crap, how few of them are actually good, but it doesn’t make me feel any better or worse about the process. I like the process, and like experimenting. I still feel like a rank amateur most of the time, and am ecstatic when I get a good shot, or a dozen good shots, out of a 2 hour shoot.
The level of intentionalism with model photography varies with location and the model. With my relationship with the model, with my awareness of the line between us. But images of women, aren’t we suffused with them? What creatively do I have to say in this arena? These doubts plague me. But I still go out and shoot, and look for more opportunities to make pictures.

I shoot pretty much every week as an amateur photographer, but haven’t been happy with a lot of my pictures due to the inexperienced nature of my models, and my own inexpertise and bad equipment. Everything came together this past weekend, new lights, great model and experimental rapport, and we made the best pictures I think I’ve ever done!