Thoughts About My Photographic Life

The Digital Story: "Aperture and Shutter Priority" - Digital Photography Podcast 87

I'm not just catching up on my blogging and cleaning. I've been catching up on my podcasts. I haven't listened to them since the beginning of June and that's a lot of listening to do. This week I heard this podcast from The Digital Story. This podcast finally helped me understand the terms aperture and shutter speed and how they interact. F-stops and ISO are terms that, while I am slowly learning how to use them, I still don't know what they are. Because I am a kinesthetic learner with technological things, I am confident that I will come to understand these things as I do more with my camera settings and see the results.

Derrick Story is a great podcaster because he doesn't assume that you know too much. He adds a lot of details for people like me so that we can figure things out. He also makes me think I can be as good a photographer as he is, which motivates me again and again to try the things he talks about.

I submitted a grab shot and put stuff on TDS Flickr group but there has never been any feedback. (To be fair, I doubt I tagged my stuff correctly, but all these groups and all their tags are overwhelming me.) TDS seems to be a one-man show, so Derrick is doing all this stuff himself, so I'll be patient and try again.

What I really want to try is his Photo Assignment: Derrick choses a subject or technique that he discusses on the podcast and you can submit your photos on Flickr (you have to be a member of the group, which means simply clicking "Join"). The September assignment is "Duotone." I have to listen to the Duotone podcast out of sequence in order to learn about it.

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Drew sent me an invitation to Vazaar.com. At this site, topics are chosen and you can upload one photo a day per topic. You can request that your photos be critiqued. You have to earn points to request critques by commenting and critiquing on the photos of others. I have done this with one photo and used up my free 5 points. I have not yet commented on anybody else's photos because I simply don't have the time. This "points for comments" system guarantees that Vazaar has the traffic for the advertisers. But I have gotten to the point where I have to pick and choose where I go and to whom I listen.

I will continue with Vazaar a bit longer and see if it fits into my life. But I want to focus on Hummie's, Rachel Clark's and Derrick's photography challenges and, very importantly, participate in Drew's New England Photowalking (and his New England Photowalking Flickr group). I know these people and can trust their judgement. They certainly give me enough to do to occupy my time and thoughts.

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In order to get the camera that I used to divide the sections of this post, use the Webdings font on Blogger and type option-m. Play with the Webdings font. You get different little pics depending on whether you use caps, lower case, or option- (alt- in PC). I also used the largest point size possible. I did not try ctrl- key and I didn't use a combination of caps with ctrl, option or the Apple key.

Technorati tags: The+Digital+Story Derrick+Story BenSpark New+England+Photowalking Hummie's+Photography+Challenges Rachel+Clark+Design+Filter+Challenge Vazaar
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