I've been taking a lot of walks lately. I've been waking up at or before dawn lately naturally. I've been getting to sleep early at night lately thanks to Melatonin, which I blame for me waking up before dawn so rested. I've been taking long walks of over 2 miles each time, and while I'm out I wind up taking a lot of photos on my iPhone with Instagram.
I've started gaining an interest in photography. I blame Instagram. They make it too easy. I now am starting to see things I walk past through the frame of my Instagram app, and am walking new routes in search of things to photograph.
Most of my photographs are of random scenery in Marion. But I've been trying to focus a lot on shot composition, while playing with Instagram's built in filters. I would say it's becoming quite the hobby. I have no aspirations of becoming a professional photographer, I know plenty of those and I know what the market is like. But I am considering taking the photos of Jovy for the label to save us money on a photographer.
That's not my best shot of him, by a long shot. You'll have to wait for those.
The obsession started slowly. I'd take a photo, play with the filters, then post it to my Instagram feed. My first photo was one of my "Behind the wheel FROM behind the wheel" self portraits that I like to post on facebook. I used the built in filters to create the look, but it's nothing too special.
Then on one of my walks on an overcast day, I took a photo and autocorrected it. The autocorrect brought out blackness within the clouds that made me really excited! Being the creative genius that I am (sarcasm), I decided to try re-uploading a pic through Instagram's autocorrection filter to see what happened.....
I was hooked! I started taking walks and snapping pics wherever I could! I'd look for especially cloudy days, but I'd also play with sunlight through the Instagram filters. The following pic may have been originally taken by Laura while I was driving, but it also could've been taken by me while I parked on a small bridge. I honestly can't recall. But I ran it through Instagram, and got some really cool coloring to come out!
During all of this, Melatonin was making me go to bed earlier and earlier each night and wake up earlier and earlier each morning. Before you knew it, I was waking up naturally each morning before dawn. In a town the size of Marion, nobody's out on the streets before dawn in late April. I had the town to myself, and could photograph to my hearts content!
This has started to reach obsession territory. It's definitely a hobby, I'm not contemplating a career as a photographer. These photos were taken with an iPhone 4 and filtered through Instagram. Nuff said. But being a believer that it's not the gear, it's the engineer (or in this case the photographer....), I'm focusing on shot composition and trying to find the shot before I take it. I've found myself on recent mornings wishing I had a better camera with a nice zoom so I could get this photo, or that photo would look awesome through this lense, or this that and the other.......but all I have is my iPhone and Instagram. So because I'm starting to wish I had better camera equipment, I think I've definitely been bitten by the hobbyist photography bug.
Last night, we had the "super moon". It was all over facebook. I drove out into the country hoping to capture some really cool pics of it, and I like what I got, but I wished I'd had a better camera so that I could capture it the way I wanted to.
I saw in the weather forecast that it was supposed to be clear skies all night. So I actually set an alarm for 5 am so that I could try to capture some really cool sunrise pics again. I didn't get enough sleep. I'm interrupting my sleep patterns so that I can walk for an hour around Marion and take photos of the same old crap that I keep taking photos of? I think it's definitely reached an obsession.
I'm finding myself growing bored with photographing Marion over and over again. I'm glad I'm moving out of this town in a few weeks finally, as my new surroundings will give me new subject matter to photograph. That'll keep me going for a bit. But I feel that the styles of photographs I've been taking are already boring me. I've taken sunrise pics and filtered them through blah blah blah. I'm wanting something new to photograph. I'm wanting better equipment to photograph it with. I'm wanting to learn how to do it right. I mean, I always kinda thought I had an eye for shot composition.....
.....but I never really had the desire to push this as a hobby until now. So one thing's certain. I'll be continuing to photograph, and hopefully one day will have a nicer camera than my iPhone to do it with. But even if all I ever get is my iPhone......that will be the camera I use.
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