What better way to celebrate getting a new camera than to have a photo picked as DCist’s Photo of the Day with one of your first shots?
This is the second time one of my shots has been picked up by DCist (the first was for an article on the Metro), but the first time I’ve had something picked as photo of the day. Woot!
Revolution Cycles is a great bike shop in DC (and Clarendon, VA). Their Georgetown store focuses on trek bikes (as might their Clarendon store — I don’t know). Their staff is knowledgeable, friendly, and apparently reckless vigilantes!
Last night a good friend in DC invited me to watch the July 4 fireworks from his 12th floor conference room overlooking the National Mall. Given the vantage point (and my distaste for horrid throngs of tourist, particularly of the size and stripe that are drawn to DC in the summer) I couldn’t refuse!
Last night I met up with some friends in Adams Morgan and brought my camera along so I could take some shots on my walk over. It was an interesting experience going bak to a fixed focal length and I’ve posted some un-altered frames to show what I saw.
Back in high school, when I first began puting some thought into where I was pointing my camera, I shot with an old manual Canon slr and a 50mm lens. This focal length is often refered to as a “normal” lens on full frame cameras (on many digital slrs, 35mm is normal due to the smaller sensor size and the resulting crop factor).
Learning to compose a frame with a fixed focal length prime provided some much-needed structure to an otherwise wide-open creative activity. Typically, one has the option of cropping by zooming. This is a lazy practice and leads to lazy photos. With a prime lens, you have to “zoom with your feet,” and physically move your vantage point in order to change the composition of a shot. This style of shooting often leads to more intentional framing, which I think is a good thing–particularly when you’re just starting out.
Today, I’m going back to “normal” for a while. I just received a nice little 50mm f/1.8 for my D700 and I’m pretty excited about it. Stay tuned!