Friday, May 28, 2010

Experimentation vs Execution

So yes it's been a while. For those three loyal readers of my blog, I'm certain agony was to be endured, but now one can rejoice! For I am back with a bit of insight into what some people may call my mental septic tank.

Current count in my active library of shots is 32627 images. These are recently shoot in the last three years. So about 10,000 images a year get to make thier way into my Lightroom library for immediate access. For you math freaks that's about 27.3 images a day, which I like enough to stash nearby. Many more images exist, hidden away in archives, hard drives and other places I've bound to have forgotten about!

My library is highly organized into categories, then sub categorized. One large category is "Models". This category is broken up into the names of each model, and if I've shot that model more than once, I sub categorize some more....

Ok, so who really cares? Here's the meat of my post. ~32000 images....One of my categories is "Exeriments" which contains a little more than 2100 images. Sub categorized into 37 folders of all sorts of oddities: LightingTests, MultiTest, Smoke, Sheets, Water, Fork and three different folders for Fire :)

It's safe to say about 6% of my images are experimentation. Learning how things work, working on ideas, trying new things. Some of the shots are REALLY horrific! This is my sandbox. I recommend everyone should set one up and know there is a safe place to play without ridicule or self consciousness.

Recently I was asked to shoot a VERY difficult to execute image. Not that the composition is tough, but the tone and lighting arrangement is going to be a challenge. I've attempted this one before and got mediocre results. But this time I'm less dumber (not smarter!) and I will be adding to my 2100 experiment library soon.

Below are views into the septic tank that which is my mind. I never show my experiments, but for you loyal three, you each get one image from the secret stash. Thanks for reading :)



My Hand


My Sheet


My Livingroom



-Experiment
Mark!