Today was my last Florida adventure: a day at Animal Kingdom with my aunt and uncle. The weather was on the chilly side but the company was excellent. I still didn’t manage to go on the Avatar ride, aka the world’s best ride, but the animal walks were terrific. And I remembered to bring my camera!
I took 240 pictures. Lots of them are truly terrible. Blurry, bad light, shadowed, all the problems one can imagine photos having these photos have.
A reasonable number of them could be turned into good photographs with some cropping, maybe a few photo enhancements. Tweak the white balance, that kind of thing. Tug on a few sliders, maybe apply a filter or two… But I don’t want to post dozens of photographs to my blog. A few are nice, a multitude would be overkill.
So I decided (with one exception) to only post photos that are exactly as I took them: no cropping, no editing, no changing, just the moment the camera captured. Well, almost exactly — in order to keep the file sizes small, I had to downgrade the quality and size. The real images are clearer and bigger.
Today’s favorite photos:
Apparently, I like pictures of eyes.
And the one exception — cropped because if I posted the original in a form small enough to easily upload to the web, the adorable baby elephant would look an awful lot like a lump of rock.
Beautiful photos~ You are a photographer too!
Thanks! I’ve definitely been having fun with photography in the last couple years, but I think my photography skill level is about where my cooking was ten years ago — I could make some good meals, but I was mostly following recipes and only sorta knew what I was doing. Give me another ten years and maybe I’ll know what I’m doing!
Glad you cropped the one because that baby elephant is adorable! Animal Kingdom looks like somewhere we want to go if we end up in Florida.
It’s definitely my favorite of the Disney theme parks, well worth a visit (although much better if you live here and can pay Florida resident prices!)
If you get a handful of good photos out of a couple hundred, I think you’re doing pretty good. And the ones you posted here are all great. OK, the baby elephant either isn’t quite in focus or just was too small in the original to have quite enough detail when cropped… although he’s very cute. The others are all fantastic! (I used to date somebody who was very, very serious about his photography, and if being a good photographer didn’t actually rub off on me, being a good photo critic did. Of course, I’m not sure that’s a desirable skill.)
I’d say that 98% of photographers these days- even the professional or serious ones- take 50-100 photos for every really good one. Part of this is just that digital photography just makes it cheap to take so many photos so we never really learn to put the work in to compose the shot and set all the settings right.
Certainly there are some people that have a higher success rate than others, and one can work to increase the number of good ones compared to the number of lousy ones by studying camera settings and learning from what went wrong with the bad ones.
There’s also limitations with all gear. Without a good zoom lens and a tripod to hold the camera still, it’s hard to get a good photo of a baby elephant that’s too far away. And really, who wants to carry a tripod around with them all day? (Actually, I do know some people… but I’m certainly not one of them and I’m pretty sure you’re not either.)
I was also taking my photo of the baby elephant from a moving van on a bumpy road! And yes, that’s a seriously cropped photo, you wouldn’t have been able to find the baby in the original. If I hadn’t known he was there, I would have thought it was just another pictures of some rocks and trees. I am definitely not going to start carrying around a tripod. I was amazed that I remembered the camera! But it is fun to have photos to go with the memories and it’s much more fun when they’re actually good.
I know you said this isn’t a pic blog but I love, love, love,love your pictures!
Quick question where in Fla. is this? And where are you going next?
Thank you!! And this is Animal Kingdom, one of the Disney theme parks. I’m currently in Mobile, Alabama, though, headed west. Maybe Shreveport, LA tomorrow?
Electric company has my power out today so must settle on phone which refuses to open pictures. From past posts though I know you take excellent shots, and obviously know how to fix almost excellent ones and what went wrong with the rest. I love your one or two blog illustrations and agree you don’t want too many competing with writing space, but I for one would follow a link to a set after reading blog. Hope you consider Flickr or some comparable platform to post in bulk. Flickr, sadly is increasing its pro (for those who want to post more than 30 pics a month for free) to 40 bucks. I’m gg to stick with them anyway because I spend about 80 percent of my non-work time on photography–not that it’s good, it’s just I’m one of those people who must keep taking something tangible from my life experiences. Some folks pick flowers, collect rocks, shells, driftwood, what-have-you, but I prefer to leave tiny gems in place for the next passer-by and grab a picture instead. Anywho, there’s other photo programs that may not charge so much– maybe Smug Mug or Snap fish. Google’s a pricey option because in no time you’re out of storage space and have to keep paying for more.
That’s my two cents for the day.
Toodles for now–safe and happy travels,
Tracie
Google is only $2 per month for 100 GB of storage. Or you get unlimited storage with Google photos if you don’t upload them at full resolution- which is fine for most purposes and certainly for sharing online.
Thank you! And brr, I hope you’ve gotten your electricity back. Even in FL, it was too cold to be without power this week! I’ll look into some photo solutions, but my real issue is generally data — when I’m traveling, I’m uploading photos from a cell phone connection and it’s remarkable how quickly the data disappears. I’ve got T-Mobile and Verizon and they both slow you way down once you hit their cap, so it starts to feel like living on dial-up. I like to be careful, in order to avoid that dial-up experience when I’m trying to find campgrounds! Also, thanks for the tips, Kyla!
I somehow missed this post. Every photo of an animal’s eye(s) made me wonder what they were thinking… hmmmm. LOL