Archive for February, 2007

Little kids are amazing subjects.

I shot a wedding last weekend. The groom was a Marine. A lot of his friends showed up in full Marine regalia too. With the evening winding down, the Marines all got together in a huddle and started singing… Marine songs I suppose. I saw a photo opportunity and stuck my camera in between the guys legs and shot blind.

The lighting was already horrible. I was maxing out everything, at f/1.4, ISO 1600 and underexposing by 1EV to get the shutter speeds I wanted without resorting to a flash. The resulting picture I got is below. I initially thought the picture was a loss. There was almost no detail to work with except the in the ceiling – which is worthless.

I wanted to see if I could salvage something. I pushed the RAW image +3EV (equalivent to ISO 12800!) and converted to black and white to kill most of the chromatic noise. And now I have a picture, woot! It’s noisy as hell. Details are pretty much shot, but the mood and spontaneity is all there, eh?

This is really f-ed up.

I cruised over to Tate’s blog to check out his latest update and with complete suprise, read this:

Tim Kettering whopped mine in the Best Photography Blog! Congrats to everyone who got nominated even. Keep A-blogging and next year I want to see new stuff up there! I love how our community works online!

HUH? My thought was – “When was I nominated? When did I win? How did I win with a blog that has posted almost no pictures in the last two months? And how the hell did Tate not win, when his blog is far more ‘photography’ oriented than my blog?”

So I checked around. Ah. DeafRead was sponsoring the voting for the Best Deaf Blogs for 2006. And somehow my “blog” was nominated for Best Photography Blog, along with Tate, Claire, and other talented deaf photographers. You can find the page here.

And just to take a look, I click on the link that has my name and it takes me… NOT to this blog, but rather, to the online gallery for ‘Black Friday’.

So not only was I nominated for, and won a best blog of 2006.. it was for a link that isn’t a blog – but a freaking online photo gallery!

So to go over the major points.

• I was never notified I was nominated (so I might have corrected their link).
• I was never notified that I won (dont you usually want to let the winners know?).
• The “blog” nominated was nothing more than a photo gallery of photos taken in four hours on a single (but important) night out of a whole year of people blogging about the deafworld.
• Four other bloggers (whos sites I have recently checked) were in my opinion far better photography-oriented blogs than my blog has/ever been.

To everyone who voted for me I wanted to say thanks for the votes and most importantly, thanks for your support. However I cannot in good consicence accept this award. This award truly belongs to everyone else nominated for Best Photography Blog – not me. Here are the REAL winners:

• thetate – as always, love his work and free-roaming opinions!
• People of the Eye – faithfully covered the protest day after day.
• pictures by der sankt – love his black and white work of new york city!
• All About The Pictures – if i could only do candids and storytellling as well as she could…