Full disclosure: I’m not a professional photographer either. However, I’m also not an idiot. My friend Blake (who is – a professional photographer, not an idiot) and I paid a visit to a local military monument Saturday; a beautiful aircraft carrier that now serves as a museum, oozing history and character. We were both having a huge photog geekout, pointing out interesting subjects and angles and fussing over ISO settings and aperture. These excursions aren’t just interesting because of the pretty things they offer as photographic fodder, they also provide an opportunity to become more familiar and comfortable with your gear. We both ended up snapping on macro lenses and taking pictures of rivets and latches and gun barrels. The lighting wasn’t great below deck, but neither of us were about to bolt on a flash. Blake has a d300 and the sensor and that thing will go down to 1600 ISO without a hitch – bit of grain, sure, but not even that much. I was shooting with a fairly new and very fast Sigma prime, so my relatively crappy sensor didn’t matter too much.
That follow focus hack form last week? I got that. I mocked it, but I got it. This though – words fail me. It would appear that the inventor used a hand drill to make this thing. I’ve always loved the spirit of invention that permeates photography. People make diffusers out of milk packs, barn doors out of cardboard, monopods out of string. Some of these hacks have been so elegant that they’ve become viable commercial products. Somehow I don’t think that the hand drill focus crank will be joining those hallowed ranks any time soon.
A lot of people hate HDR with the passion of a thousand burning suns, and these photos explain why. HDR makes it easy to take an otherwise perfectly mediocre photo and turn it into an abomination unto God himself. For every brilliant but subtle tonemapped church interior, it seems there are a hundred of these horrendously haloed monstrosities.
Of course, we really can’t blame the photographers of these things. Photographic tools are so accessible and easy to use these days, but aesthetics just haven’t kept up. It’s like giving people guns, not showing them how to use them properly, and then acting surprised when they end up shooting themselves. Which, by the way, happens more often than you might think.
Here then, in no particular order, are some of the worst HDR images flickr has to offer. If it makes you feel any better, I’ve made a few HDR turkeys in my time. My own flickr account is a testament to that. Click on the. . .thing. . .below to bring up the slideshow.
You thought color photography was out of your reach? Wrong! Thanks to these guaranteed permanent (but easily removable) oil-photo colors, you can now bring out the natural beauty of your photographs!
This guy buys up old and interesting cameras from thrift stores and takes them out for a spin. The results are often funky. Occasionally he gets lucky and finds undeveloped film in the cameras. Nostalgic!
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