This topic came to me as I was driving into work today. Aside from the Maslov hierarchy of needs, the question of what drives us to continue has always been of interest. Whether you work to live or live to work there is still something that drives you. I personally try to use work to earning money which supports my lifestyle. My career aspirations were thrown to the rocky shores years ago through a layoff and I don’t expect to recover a 19 year career in the IT field as I would be too old to do so. That is when I made a decision to work to support enjoying my life in every moment.

It’s those moments that photography allows me to keep. A birthday party, a parent who has passed away, memories of pets, places and loved ones.

This is why I think it is so cool, because these are MY images, I am the one that took them, its personal. They aren’t from a travel book or a web site. The situation is different if I am showing those photos and seeking approval from others. I ask myself some questions to make sure that I am on a right track.

• How can I compose this to make it interesting
• Should I use a portion of the entire image
• Does this tell a story or bring out an emotion?

Sometimes I just take my best guess and just press the shutter button. It is similar to being an author of a book. Should the declarative sentence in the paragraph always be the first sentence? I have always liked the saying… “It is OK to break the rules. You just have to know what rules, when and what the consequences are”

This is Fred, My most patient photographic subject. He is on a chair and looking down. If you look at the image you will see his face in the area of the photo of the intersection of the “rule of thirds” basically a tic-tac-toe grid. It is supposed to draw the viewer’s eyes to the right spot and the lines of the cat also form a triangle.

I didn’t shoot it this way. I cropped the image and adjusted for the blinding on camera flash. I did this from my laptop while running low on battery power over the course of several lunch breaks.

Here is the original image.

You can see that I had decided in an instant that it was better to get the shot of him on the chair than to spend a couple of minutes getting it right “in Camera.”

He moved (ran down the hallway) shortly after I took the shot. I tried to lower the exposure in Adobe Lightroom on his face to be closer to the rest of his body, but to get it close I have to give up something. It’s always a trade off.

In the next weeks I plan on images at car shows and sporting events. Keep checking back

-Dave

The last vacation I was able to take was in December 2011. We went to the St. Petersburg area and it was beautiful! I understand why snow birds fly south for the winter. On this trip I wanted to fly light as I would be the one hauling my own gear along with the other carry-ons.

I don’t mind flying but what really irritates me is that I can’t even put stuff in the bin over my head. It belongs to all to dolts that are in the back of the plane. They don’t want it and will pick it up on their way out or it is the size of a steamer trunk and takes up the entire compartment. Just because they are too cheap to check it.

I try to zone out on the flight. Just to run through things in my head about what I want to do and where I will be going to. Kind of like a mental checklist.

My gear is a Canon Digital Rebel XT circa 2005. So I do what I can with what I have. Besides I am an enthusiast amateur and don’t make a living from photography. I would if I could, but there is more money in computers.

Anyway… The trip was fun. Jim even got a chance to do barrel inspection.

He figured out that it was level and everything was in good order.

We had lots of fun on this trip. I even had a chance to do something that I wanted to do for a couple of hours.

It involved beach and rest. I am employed as a contractor and it isn’t fun at all. It is a far cry from being an employee at a company where you feel that you belong to an organization. A contractor is just a slab of gifted meat. I get paid by the hour. If I don’t work, I don’t get paid.
I can take as much vacation as I want. Benefits are zero and I can’t even get into a 401K until after a year of service. Not fun at all.

So this is why you tend to enjoy every single moment you can and it is very important to find time to smell all the roses you can.

The picture on the right is the Dali museum.

That guy had a fascination with Abraham Lincoln.

The Florida sun is brutal and I just couldn’t get away from the lens flare. I tried, but it’s the camera (not the photographer)

-Dave

OK Here is goes. The first blog posting from a Microsoft WORD 2010 Blog posting template

I took this picture in December 2011 in St. Petersburg Florida

We went on a much needed vacation.

I am including this in the blog entry to see if it will post correctly.

If this does, then I may have a reason to carry my laptop with me and tether it to my phone or a public hotspot.

I think about this often as a means to earn a couple of bucks when I retire from the work force.

Which I am hoping that it is very soon that I do so. I want to spend more time with the wife and the only way to do that is to retire.

Well it looks like I typed enough so that the word wrap around the picture took hold.

Now it’s just a matter of saving this file and getting it to uplink correctly when I hit the publish button.