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Posts Tagged ‘family’

Personal, Photography | 0 comment

Happy 2014!

Family Photos

2014 has arrived! For me, that has meant staying up until midnight with my family after a good evening of eating and visiting with friends. It started as a celebration of my parents wedding a few years before I was born, and it has continued as a family tradition since then. This year, we had lots of good food, and lots of stories to tell.

A selfie I found on my camera
A selfie I found on my camera

This year, we passed around an iPad with the old slide scans. There were so many laughs at the fashions, the hair styles, and the familiar faces. We also used cutting edge streaming video to meet faces for the first time this year.

NYE-skype

It was a great year, and I am looking forward to 2014. Not planning and big changes, but liking the progress I have been making in business, and image making. Maybe I’ll throw try some new tricks! Things are changing fast, and it is fun trying to keep up with technology, and what other great photographers are doing. It is such an inspiring time to be a photographer, and I am blessed to have the opportunity to do this job. I will always be working to make better images every time I go out to shoot.

I am so thankful for my family. It is a privilege to belong to such a caring group of people. My wife is an idea-generating machine and manager, injecting new ideas to support the photos keeps the thinking cap on, and makes sure that the work is never stale. We keep getting better every year, and I’m sure that will continue this year. I hope that more readers will stop by the blog this year as we make more photos. The challenge to make the images and the stories interesting, can only make the photos better. Happy New Year!

Washington Monument at sunrise from the Lincoln Memorial - ©TimeLine Media
Washington Monument at sunrise from the Lincoln Memorial – ©TimeLine Media

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Personal, Photography | 0 comment

New Camera – Rule of Thirds

Rule of Thirds - ©TimeLine Media

Composition Rules

Have you taken a few hundred photos with your new camera yet? Well it has been almost three days since Christmas – what are you waiting for? Keep taking all the photos you can with it to get more comfortable with how it works. You want to be able to pick it up and have it fire off a photograph quickly so you do not miss anything unexpected that may come along. But as you it becomes apparent that everything works, you may start think how to make your photos better. I still would not even change any of the settings on the camera. I would first concentrate on composition. This is something I have to do at every shoot, and it changes with each subject, each scenario, and each scene. No matter how good you are technically at making photographs, if the composition of the image is poor, then you do not have an image that you will like, or that other people will want to view and share.

Restaurant portrait - ©TimeLine Media
Restaurant portrait – ©TimeLine Media

Rule of Thirds

One of the first composition rules that photography students study is the “Rule of Thirds”. Using the viewfinder camera as your boundary, divide the frame into 3 parts both horizontally and vertically. You end up with a grid that looks like this:

Rule of Thirds grid on a 4x6 frame
Rule of Thirds grid on a 4×6 frame

According to the Rule of Thirds, objects of interest should be placed along the lines that divide the frame into three parts. This includes horizon lines, faces of people, or other objects of interest. Usually they are the main subject of the photograph. You can see here in this photo that I did not follow this rule, and put my main subject right in the middle of the frame. This is one of the reasons that this photo looks more like a snap shot from vacation rather than a professionally setup image.

Restaurant portrait with grid - ©TimeLine Media
Restaurant portrait with grid – ©TimeLine Media

You can see the rule of thirds in many professional photographed still and video images. The news anchors on television may start in the middle of the screen, but they are quickly moved to the left or right third of the screen. This makes for a more pleasing image to the eye – giving the subject more room to breathe in the frame, and more room for your eye to travel in the frame putting your subject in context. These are with people images, but it can work with images of inanimate objects, or in landscape photography as well.

Rule of Thirds - ©TimeLine Media
Rule of Thirds – ©TimeLine Media

TimeLine Media – www.timelinedc.com
703-864-8208

Family, Personal, Photography, Technology | 0 comment

Best Gifts

I am so thankful for another great Christmas spent with family. There was so much good food to eat, and many gifts to exchange! Some of the best gifts are still related to photography. A new camera, or a new camera bag to hold all my stuff! Actually, I am enjoying going through some old photos. I sent a few of our old family slides out to be scanned. It takes a long time to do the scanning right, and the equipment can be hard to master.

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Luckily, there are lots of places that you can outsource this. Luckily they were able to complete the job in time before Christmas. It was nice to share the digitized images with family while we had some time to relax and go through them. These old images definitely have more meaning as time passes. This makes me appreciate even more the job of being a photographer to help preserve even better images for people if I have the gear and the knowledge to do so.

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I have plenty of personal images to go through after the scanning. These were all taken on slide film, so we did not see them as often as those that were taken with negative film, and then printed. These always stayed as slides and would only come out when my parents setup the projector, loaded them into trays, and displayed them on a projector screen. Sometimes we would look at them on a small slide viewer, but it was still rarer than looking through the prints. It has been fun to look at them again especially during the holidays.

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TimeLine Media – www.timelinedc.com
703-864-8208

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