We had a pretty solid, soaking rain the other day, and I noticed this Red Shouldered Hawk, hanging out on the back fence. I managed several photos, and hit paydirt when it turned its head with a water drop at the end of its beak. I'm quite pleased with how this turned out:
Meanwhile, one of my photo sites does a challenge that involves putting a quote with a photo, and this fit the bill. So here's the version with quote: "Some People Walk In The Rain, Others Just Get Wet_ - Roger Miller
"Being Ignored is a great privilege...
That is how I think I learned to see what others do not see."
This is the closest I have to his style in my recent photos, but not very close at all... I'll need to study and try.
"To see something spectacular and recognize it as a photographic possibility is not making a very big leap. But to see something ordinary—something you’d see every day—and recognize it as a photographic possibility, that is what I’m interested in."
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One of mine:
The worst thing you can do with creativity, worst thing you can do with trying to be original, is to force it. You need to just chill out.
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"You're the only one who knows what it was 'supposed' to look like. No one else knows that this wasn't the plan."
- unknown
Note: This was posted on a photo site I frequent, credited to "a friend" of the original poster.
I am not interested in shooting new things - I am interested to see things new.
- Ernst Haas
"Photography has been my way of bearing witness to the joy I find in seeing the extraordinary in ordinary.”
- Harold Feinstein
“I never have taken a picture I’ve intended. They’re always better or worse.”
– Diane Arbus
"The Fundamental Thing About My Personality Is That I Think I'm An Imposter"
-Sally Mann
"Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world."
- Arnold Newman
"Photography is a way of feeling, , of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever... it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything." - Aaron Siskind
There's a saying I have repeated often: "The best camera is the one you have with you". And I do believe that, with a caveat. Point being, I (almost) always have my cell phone with me, so that camera is (almost) always with me. I can't carry my "real" cameras everywhere, much less my various lenses.
BUT, that does not, by any stretch, mean that the phone camera is the best camera for any task. There are photos that I can take with my 400mm zoom that my phone camera can't come close to matching. Most notably, my bird photos...
Here's a baker's-half-dozen of bird photos taken December 2024. All with the big-zoom.
That said, a high percentage of my favorite shots, overall, are taken w/ my phone. 9 of the past 10 photos on my Instagram (as of today) are phone photos.
Dark Eyed Junco
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“The other day I was talking with Nick Carver about photographing, and being alone in places. And he said that he can’t get on when he’s photographing with people; that he finds it difficult. And I feel the same way. If I were here with, say, a bunch of people from… you know, from like a mentorship group, or from the TPE community, and we were all kind of like just going to explore things, I wouldn’t be in touch. I wouldn’t be in tune with this place."
From Youtube
"I know people have tried to put me off as being crazy. Sometimes it's to your advantage for people to think you're crazy"
- Thelonious Monk
"You learn to see by practice. It's just like playing tennis, you get better the more you play. The more you look around at things, the more you see. The more you photograph, the more you realize what can be photographed and what can't be photographed. You just have to keep doing it."
- Eliot Porter
A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject. - Winston Churchill (ascribed to)
