7 Topics meme - part 1
This list came from _dragonwolf_. Thanks!
- your choreography process
- photography
- something particularly interesting about the story of Nennivia
- what sort of roles you'd like to play in the future
- looking for the best in people
- your personal sense of aesthetics
- something that really gets on your nerves
Photography first, I guess. Just because.
I don't think of myself as photographer for two reasons: 1) I have no actual training in or knowledge of the field beyond my limited hands-on experience with my camera, and 2) if you were to hand me a camera that had to be manually adjusted in any way in order to take a proper picture, I would probably break it sooner than I would be able to take a 'good' picture.
That said, I do get a fair amount of enjoyment out of my point-and-shoot digital camera, and I do have a few pictures with which I'm particularly pleased. I am well aware that if I were to just sit down and learn something about photography, I wouldn't be as limited by the auto adjustments of my camera, but for now I'm still content with working on basic composition and subject selection. I believe I have a decent eye for composition, and if I'm able to take a photo that isn't too over- or underexposed, that has the subject in focus, and that is interesting to me, then I'm pretty happy. My photographs are mostly for my own personal enjoyment and expression, and sometimes my aesthetic goals do not line up with getting the technically 'best' picture possible, but that's fine with me. Other times, it drives me crazy that I my auto-focus isn't doing what I want it to and I don't know how to fix it. :-P
I love the way that photography can help both the photographer and the audience to notice and appreciate things that they might have missed otherwise. It can inspire someone to think about something in a new way just by seeing it from a perspective that hadn't occurred to them before. It can show a person something that their own eyes would never have been able to see, either because of size, speed, distance or time.
Quite a few people have told me they liked my photos (which is to say that a few photos out of large bunch caught their eye) and that is very gratifying to me. It makes me really happy when my photos have an impact on someone else, even if it's only in a little way.
I also am fascinated with what makes for a good portrait photo. Humans are so tuned-in to the most minute variations in facial expressions and body language that taking an optimum portrait (especially a candid) can be very tricky. My camera has a particularly hard time with this in lower lighting because it's so easy for the subject to blur if they move or if the camera moves. I might take 15 pictures of someone as they sit and talk with their neighbor, but maybe 7 of them will be so blurry that they are worthless and all but one of the rest will have captured perfectly unflattering looks, with the one decent one attaining only the status of "not horrible".
But it is not the blurring that fascinates me so much as the way that a snapshot of a person's face can tell a very different story than if you were to sit down and watch the person for a few moments. I have photographed a man talking before who struck me as perfectly friendly, but whose photos showed him to be angry in every shot. I was so confused. If the man looked friendly to me in person, why did he look angry on my camera screen?
After a good deal of thought on the matter, my current theory is that when a person assesses the personality and emotional state of another person via facial cues, each moment of signaling is context for the one before it and the one after it. What I mean is that first you must establish what the baseline expression is of this individual before you can start interpreting meaning from the various deviations that the face makes from said baseline. Once your brain has determined what the 'neutral' state of a face is, it is free to ignore those particular cues and focus on the the importance of the variations.
A camera, on the other hand, does not dismiss anything. The man's face was naturally somewhat angry-looking, but I hadn't even noticed because my brain realized that the angry part of the expression was not the part that was significant. A snap-shot cannot reveal baselines and variations, it simply speaks of one moment in perfect detail.
Thus, as I try to take a 'good' portrait, I must be lucky enough to capture one that shows only what the mind's eye sees, and not what the camera sees.
Here are a few favorites of mine, just for fun. :)
