*Pulls out giant roll of paper, starts reading…*
"I’d like to thank my mother, my father, my wife, my camera for not screwing up like it usually does, the statue that stayed still… "
But seriously, this is the absolute high-point of my brief photographic career – having not one, but two photographs published in a coffee-table book.
As much as I would like to chalk this one up to sheer talent, I think it would be more interesting to talk about some of the real factors that lie behind this little achievement:
Luck – This more than anything else was why my photo got picked in the first place. Being in the right place at the right time, being prepared – whatever you want to call it. For some reason, I chose to carry my point-n-shoot with me that day. I lived dangerously for a moment and stopped to shoot this, despite a hungry wife waiting impatiently beside me 
. I managed to shoot a relatively sharp photo, despite the poor lighting and lack of any stabilization. Whatever you want to call it, I call it luck.
Location – Add location and location to that. After all, who knows how many beautiful photographs are out there, condemned to obscurity on some obscure photo-blog that no one has heard of? And then there’s Flickr – which is to image search what Google is to the rest of the web. Flickr is far from being an ideal solution for photographers – as Lane Hartwell, Scott Beale and many others would attest, but if you want to be noticed on the web, edgy does not do it.
Licensing – This is really only applicable because I host my photos on Flickr, but it’s important for a photographer to think about. If you are somewhat serious about photography, you have spent hours looking for just that right angle. You have spent far too much time (mostly by your significant other’s standards) in front of a computer, tweaking every photo till it just so. And most likely, a fair chunk of cash on the right gear. So it’s only fair that you want people to give you credit (or cash) when they use your photographs elsewhere. You might decide to go with the licence "All Rights Reserved" in Flickr. But if you take a look at the search function in Flickr, you’ll see they give a lot of love to photos that are Creative Commons-licensed. Which is only going to help your photos get found. Not convinced? Let’s consider a hypothetical situation – some one out there is hunting for a photo to accompany a blog post. They hit Flickr, punch in some keywords and get a few hundred results. They open a couple of interesting photos – one of those interesting photos is yours marked as All Rights Reserved and the other, is marked as Creative Commons licensed. Your blogger-in-a-hurry has 3 options here:
1. Contact you either via Flickr PM or email, requesting for permission to use your photograph. Wait around till you check your email and reply. Negotiate the terms (if any). Embed the photograph.
2. Right-click your photo and Save to Disk. Embed the photograph.
3. Link to the Creative-Commons licensed photograph on Flickr and add a little text attributing the photographer.
Which option do you think the Blogger is going to pick? A lot of them are going to rip off your photo (even if it’s Creative Commons-licensed) but there are some folks who don’t mind doing the right thing – but even they are going to prefer the Creative Commons-licensed photo for it’s ease of reuse.
The reality is that if your work is digital and on the web, it’s going to get re-used without your permission. With Creative Commons-licensed, you stand a better chance of getting some credit.
I personally use the most open of Creative Commons licenses – the free-love Attribution license, which basically lets you use my work (or a part of it) in any way as long as you credit the author. I chose this license for a few reasons – my photography is still fairly ordinary and mostly by luck – if someone wants to use it, why stop them? There is another factor – although I post full-resolution images to Flickr (and I allow the original image to be downloaded), the small sensor size of my camera means that my photos can really only be used on the Web. It’s not good enough to be used in print form. When I do eventually upgrade to a better camera, I’ll be moving to a more restricted license – the Non Commercial, Share Alike License.
Metadata – Now I would have liked to keep that L thing going (you know, Luck-Location-Licensing..) but I couldn’t find any words to match – your loss, I guess 
. Next to music, I find that photography has an extraordinarily robust mechanism for storing and preserving your metadata – the IPTC Core Metadata Standard. The IPTC standard provides for a vast array of pre-defined and free-text fields that can be embedded into a photograph. Once you take the time to input this information, a vast number of programs and websites (including Flickr) can read this information and expose it to your viewers. The part I really love about IPTC metadata is that it’s inextricably linked to your photos – you move your photos, the metadata goes with you. When I switched from Iview Media Pro to Lightroom earlier this year, that migration was made much more painless by the fact that I had been using this sort of metadata for some time. It allowed me to very rapidly establish my hierarchies in Lightroom and be productive. I expect that you will see this sort of metadata usage grow rapidly over the next few years, as more basic photo organizing software such as Windows Vista Photo Gallery and Picasa encourage people to enter metadata and then store this information using such industry standards. The final question about metadata that one should ask is – how much metadata to include? That is an entirely personal choice, but really more the better. For example, and although I don’t have access to stats in Flickr to back this up, I just know that including a tag "Fuk Tak Chi building" for the photograph that was picked for publication made the difference.
Bonus metadata – skip this section if tech-talk makes your eyes glaze over . Very few cameras support this out of the box, but all photographs can be geo-tagged, i.e., have latitude and longitude information embedded that tells you exactly where in the world this photograph was taken. If you are willing to invest in the time, you get to visualize your photographs in a whole new way. I’m not going to spend too much time talking about my geo-tagging workflow , suffice it to say it has far too many moving parts in it 
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What it essentially boils down to is this – I happened to be in the right place in the right time, I was prepared and I put in some effort afterwards to help my photograph get noticed. In other words, I was lucky
It is with a sense of disappointment that I draw the curtain on my collection of photos for 2007. There were a few “a-ha” moments during that time, but more overwhelming is the sense that I didn’t do much in pursuit of this art.
A simple look at the numbers says it all – My 2006 collection contains a staggering 294 photos, posted in approximately 230 days, starting in late September ‘06 and ending in May 2007.
My 2007 collection contains an anaemic 58 photos. The kicker? I took 226 days to post that number, a glacial pace of 1.8 photos a week (the daily number is just too pitifully low to talk about).
Now, it is often said that in photography volume is no measure of quality. I could offer that statement to defend the lack of effort I’ve put into my photography.
More practically, I could tell you that in May 2007 I moved from an apartment near the Lower Seletar Reservoir to an apartment right in the concrete heart of Yishun. It is true that the loss of my muse affected me deeply. Not having a ever-changing subject close at hand every day definitely dulls the desire to take out the camera and go hunting.
I could always fall back on the old standby – work was a killer this year. That would be somewhat true as well.
Truth be told, none of those really explains why I have almost no photographic output to speak of. The reality is that I used a mixture of all those reasons to stay within a zone where I felt I had some idea of what the final result would look like.
So, yet more photographs of buildings and shots taken in the dawn hours. I worry that the ability to shoot portraits or just street-shooting has simply withered away under this onslaught.
What then does 2008 hold? A few points are worth talking about:
#1: To establish my geek cred, I will begin by talking about my photographic workflow. For most of 2006 and 2007, I really didn’t have a workflow. Despite access to an extremely powerful photo management software, I spent a lot of time organizing my photos manually. Now that I’ve run of photos to actually go through, I spent some time thinking about how to speed up organizing and editing my photos and came up with a workflow that hopefully is a lot more organized.
First, I decided to switch to Adobe Lightroom – being able to organize my photos and do most of my processing in the same application should help speed up things.
I also spent a fair bit of time looking over how I organize my photos on Flickr and the keywords I set up in Iview. I then split them up into distinct sets of information and will be exclusively organizing my photos this way. Lightroom will take care of where the photos actually live.
#2: In contrast to the constant travelling that characterized 2005, I spent almost the whole of 2006 and 2007 right here in Singapore. Now I like this place a lot, but nothing quite gets the photographic eye working like something new (my Macau trip is proof of that – a fifth of the photos I posted in 2007 came from that 2 day trip). I expect to travelling again in 2008 to a couple of countries and even if it’s just buildings and hotel rooms, hey atleast it’ll be new buildings and hotel rooms
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#3: As much as I love the portability of my current camera and have been amazed by what it can do, there’s a lot missing in it – manual control of aperture and shutter speeds, optical stabilization, better high ISO performance, RAW shooting; the list could go on. I’ve been talking about buying a new camera for years now but if a few things on the personal front come together, maybe this year will be it (and I’ve probably jinxed it by saying that – oh well).
So there you have it – my very short look back on the year that was and an ever shorter look ahead. I would say watch this space, but that would just be cruel and unusual punishment
The “It” in the title refers to a couple of different photographic techniques – namely, HDR and “Strobist“.
Now, one might argue that HDR has been mainstream for quite some time now. Witness for instance, the incredible abuse of this technique by perusing the “hdr” tag on Flickr, or even worse “hdr+kittens“.
By mainstream here though, I’m referring to the use of these techniques in the print media. Which surprisingly enough I found examples of both techniques in a single issue of a magazine.
The magazine issue in question, is the Time magazine with the cover story on Princess Diana.
An editorial article on India’s newly globalizing companies carries with it a shot of the Tata Automobile assembly line. The shot has the unmistakable “feel” of a HDR shot – extreme amounts of detail; and very high colour saturation. Now it’s possible I’ve misread this : the subject matter really is not very suitable for HDR – there would too much movement when bracketing the shot needed for the HDR; the extreme range of exposure can be achieved through curves and so on. But still, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck etc.
The final page of the issue carries an article on the growing role of China in African matters. The accompanying photo is of an African Union soldier. Again, looking at the photo, it becomes clear that a second flash fired from low and to the side of the soldier, has been used. This is classic “strobist” technique.
So, now that HDR and Strobist have sold out – I wonder what the next big technique will be?
Working on this photograph gave me an oppurtunity to reflect on the remarkably full life that my grandmother has lead.
She married my grandfather aged 18 and was a mother before she turned 21. She suffered the heartbreak of watching a daughter die, but has seen the birth and marriage of her grand-daughter.
She has lived through seeing her uncles put in jail fighting for India’s independence, a World War, the Independence of India, an Emergency, the slow death of those grand dreams of a socialist paradise and the emergence of a new “liberal” India.
Coming from a generation where most women never left thier homes, she would travel the length and breadth of India, found a school, run a charity that educated the children of a 100 poverty-stricken families and still run a household that had 7 families and over 20 children under 1 roof.
She would conduct the marriages of nearly half the children who grew up under her care, and remain the person everyone turned to when it came to the marriage of those children’s own sons and daughters.
She suffered a massive heart attack that left her bed-ridden for months, but has through sheer determination, beat the predictions of every single doctor who has treated her.
Through good times and bad, in sickness and in health, she remains the anchor-stone for my extended family.
I salute her and can only say one thing in summary – They broke the mold when my grandmother was born.
I have been on a serious photography trip recently, and the blog has suffered for that. Having seen the efforts of some truly magnificent photographers, I have been motivated to try my hand at it as well.
Here are some of my more recent attempts that I judge relatively worthy..
For contrast, here are some of the great photos I have seen on Flickr recently:
I still have a long way to go.
Since I am at heart a geek, I immediately set about finding out what better tools I could have (though great cameras do not mean great photos) and for now, have my heart set on a Sony Alpha 1000 dSLR. But it will be a while before I can actually get one