35mm, f/2.8, 1/15 second, ISO 640

We had a great time in Montreal, but I still love Quebec City.  Gianna loved traveling around in the baby backpack.  She falls asleep in it constantly.  I was able to use my new to me Nexus One to record some video of us at the Quebec Aquarium.  Gianna slept through most of it, but there is much more to it than I could have imagined.  I can’t wait to go back when she’s old enough to enjoy it.

Ok this has been stagnating for a few weeks in my queue, so I’ll finish this off, since I have a couple more photos to share!

I realized that I have been slacking lately.  I haven’t even been shooting every day.  I have to work harder on establishing a better routine.  I’ve essentially finished de-cluttering my house, so I have less on my mind now.  It’s the perfect time for me to get back on the Project365 horse.

Changes to my current routine

Start taking different ways to and from work.  I’m bored with what I see daily.  I walk a total of a two miles on the way to and from work.  But those two miles are old hat to me now.  I’ve been walking those same bits of street for coming up on three years now.  I know I need to force myself to find beauty in everyday items, but I also need to jumpstart my return to my project365.  Making my commute a little different won’t hurt at all.  At some point I’d like to get a flash, which will also help spice things up.  I also want to travel a bit more, even if it’s just weekend trips in the car out into the western parts of Massachusetts.  I forget where I read it, but the quote goes something like this: “Want to take more interesting photographs?  Put yourself in front of more interesting things.”  There is definite truth to that.

You should shoot what you are passionate about, and I’m passionate about Italy.  My goal is to get there in the spring, and spend at least 3 weeks there.  I am going to aim for the end of May, because the weather will be awesome, and the flights won’t be so bad at that point.   Maybe the beginning of May.  Sadly I can’t afford to be there 24/7/365.  That being said, I could make better use of the car that I now own and head out to more rural and beautiful parts of Massachusetts and up to New Hampshire and Maine.  In fact, this weekend I’m heading up to Acadia Nationa Park in Maine for a week of vacation.  I hope to have some good photographs to show off from the trip!

Other ways to stay motivated

Since reading the article by Alexandre Buisse I have been brainstorming ways to stay motivated for my Project365.  I’ve come up with a couple of ideas, but I need more!  (any suggestions are welcome!)

• Seek out new locations – On my way to and from work I can take different streets, and different ways home.  There is nothing stopping me from this small change
• Spend some time trying out different equipment and techniques – I could give myself a “theme” for the week.  Say “night photography” or “tripod based photography” or “only shoot with a flash” or “only shoot with your 55-200mm lens”.  By giving myself 7 day themes, I might be less bored.
• Emulate the photographers I admire – I can take the time one day a week to attempt some photography in the style of photographers I admire.  David DuChemin, Ansel Adams, and more!
• Read/review and try the techniques in various ebooks – There are many ebooks out there containing many techniques for photography that I don’t know.  I want to spend some time reading various ebooks, reviewing them on this site, and trying out the techniques.  This could become a weekly post.

If anyone has any suggestions of other methods to keep motivated, I would LOVE to hear them.  I need all the help I can get!

Todays photo was shot in the morning on my way to work:  36mm, f/5, 1/640 second, ISO 200

The end is near!

The end of my quest to remove clutter from my house is near.  For the last few weeks I’ve been trying to remove clutter from my house.  I started with the low hanging fruit, the items I haven’t used in over a year.  I haven’t brewed beer in a year, so I sold my beer brewing equipment to my brother for $70.  I have dropped off books at a charity.  I have donated clothes to charity.  Now I’m getting to the tougher decisions.  I have golf clubs, that I haven’t used in over a year, but I do enjoy playing, and when I do play, it’s pretty expensive to rent clubs, plus they are never very good.  Mostly however, I’ve only played pitch and putt for the last couple of years, so maybe I should just keep the pitching wedge and the putter and sell the rest?  Or is it just simpler to sell the full set and rent the 2 clubs when going to play pitch and putt.  In the past I would keep the clubs in the trunk of my car, but for the last two years I didn’t have a car so they sat in my house.  Now, I have a car again, but the trunk has a stroller in it most of the time, and we’ve added a baby backpack to the trunk as well.  I also have a bit of camping equipment stored underneath my bed.  I have a 2 person tent, a sleeping bag, a Thermarest, and an internal frame backpack.  Most of this stuff I use maybe once a year, so I think it is worth keeping, although with the addition of my daughter, it might be best to sell the 2 person tent, and get a bigger, more “family” sized tent next time we go camping, unless I can borrow one.  I’m very conflicted about what to do about these last few items.  But the good news is, these are the last couple of decisions i have to make.  The house is much much cleaner now, and there is just less crap lying around.  Removing the clutter has felt like removing a weight from my shoulders.  In the future, we might move to a smaller apartment, but I think we’re relatively well prepared now.

Can minimalism and photography mix?

From what I can tell, most professional photographers have a large set of equipment.  Most have one or two camera bodies, many lenses, many flashes, stands, tripods, and a bunch of other gadgets.  So, can someone be a successful photographer and not have a huge assortment of equipment?  I’ve been thinking about what would be my optimal set of equipment.  What would it contain?  I think for the most part, a photographer could get by with:

• One quality camera body
• One quality wide angle zoom lens (around 12-20mm, something fast, sharp)
• One quality standard zoom lens (in the 35-85mm range, fast, sharp)
• One quality telephoto zoom lens ( 85-200mm, fast, sharp)
• One light, stable, and compact tripod
• One or two good flashes, as they are relatively small
• One great bag to store all that equipment

I don’t think this is such a big set of equipment.  I have most of those pieces already and most of them fit in my Crumpler camera bag.  I don’t have the highest quality lenses or camera by any means, but they are a good starting point. Now of course, acquiring all of that quality equipment will take a LOT of cash.  But I think you can build the set out over time.  Pick up one piece at a time.  Start with a decent body, then buy one nice lens at a time.  For me, I think my next step is to pick up a flash since I don’t have anything other than the on-camera flash.  I need to have one to play with, and experiment with. After that, I’d like to pick up that quality wide angle lens.

I think it can.

I think this is a fairly limited set of equipment for a professional photographer.  I understand the desire to have backup equipment in case something breaks.  For the most part, I think you’re better off with just the one camera body.  Maybe if you are doing a shoot with a model, and a rented location, and things of that nature, you might need backups on hand.  If your only camera was to break everyone would be left sitting there, and you’d be out a lot of cash.  That’s not at all the type of photography I want to do.  I prefer being out in nature and traveling.   I’ve seen some photographers use two camera bodies so they can quickly switch between wide angle and telephoto.  I do admit this is by far faster, and keeps you from having to switch lenses so much.  In my mind, minimalism requires you to make trade-offs like this.  If you don’t have a car, you have to walk more places, or take public transportation, or ride a bike.  You make the trade-off between convenience and saving money.  This is the trade-off between convenience and compactness.  Sure it would be convenient to carry all that in the case that you might need it, but it also limits the places you can go.  If you are carrying twice as much stuff, how far do you really want to hike?  Can you quickly carry your equipment onto the plane? Or do you need your assistant to help you out?  I’m willing to make those sacrifices.

Todays picture is of my mother, and my daughter.  It was taken with my kit lens, the 18-55mm that came with my D5000.

42mm, f5.3, 2/5 second, ISO 200

Not as well as I had hoped.

As you can see in the picture to the left, there are plenty of items cluttering up my living room.  Luckily they are mostly baby items.  An awesome Kidco Peapod travel bed behind Gianna on the right, and a nice baby chair on the left. Also in the background is a closet with a set of plastic shelving in it, a cardboard cat scratching pad, and on the right behind the travel bed, is the TV stand.  Well and truly crowded in this room.

The good news: I donated a bunch of books to charity that I haven’t read in years, and didn’t plan on reading again.  I also cleaned a bunch of clutter out of the kitchen.  A spice rack that I never used that was filled with expired spices was tossed.  Some more progress was made on removing unused pots and pans from my house.

The bad news: Despite listing my beer brewing kit on craigslist for $100, I only got a few emails and calls, and no one came by to buy it.  It’s sad that I’ll probably have to re-list it for less money this time.  A few people just wanted the carboy, but I want the full set gone.  For now I have put the brewing stuff in the back hallway, which is at least out of the way, and closed off from the rest of the house.  Ideally I’d like it gone.

Another bad and good thing.  I picked up a new blender.  I put it right in the spot where the spice rack used to sit.  Now, at least this has more than one function, and for the foreseeable future I’ll be using this thing regularly, because we are going to be making our own baby food.  Gianna is a bit over 4 months old now, and we’ve just started her on solids!

I’m reading the book Super Baby Food by Ruth Yaron which was suggested to me by my friend Amber.  So far, it’s pretty good, it’s packed with very useful information.  It’s a bit heavy on the whole vegetarianism thing, but otherwise is pretty good.  This book has all the info we need to make Giannas food for her.  After just having watched Food, Inc. I am happy to have a better handle on where my baby’s food comes from.

Photography

I’ve not done as much picture taking in the last week or so as I’d like.  After work has been filled with Gianna, uncluttering, and appointments.  I had italian tutoring last wednesday, and a doctors appointment the night before that.  Now this last weekend.  I have no excuse.  I felt run down, and just exhausted, so I ended up doing absolutely nothing this last weekend.  Saturday was a fantastic day, Sunday less so.  My parents came down on Sunday to see Gianna and we all went out to dinner.  So bottom line, it was a little busy, and a little lazy.

Burned out

I’m feeling burned out still.  I think I’m going to have to take a vacation sooner rather than later.  I need some time to relax.  I think once I get the house cleaned up, it will help.

Todays picture is with my 35mm lens, f/1.8, 1/5 second, ISO 200

Upgrade

As you can see I’ve updated my website.  It’s now running wordpress on the backend, rather than drupal.  This is because drupal is rather a pain in the ass to upgrade, and wordpress is drop dead simple.  As I would rather spend more time doing fun things than upgrading drupal, I decided it was time to move.  However there are no tools to transfer all my drupal posts to wordpress, so I’ve been manually copying and pasting things over from my old drupal instance to the new wordpress one.  Finally I’ve finished!

Overextended

I’ve been feeling overextended lately.  I’m trying to do too much stuff with too little time.  And as a consequence I’ve been getting nothing done very well at all.  So I’ve decided I have to focus on things one at a time.  Or at least not 5 or 6 at a time.

1. Taking care of my daughter.  This is my top priority.  Making sure she’s well cared for, growing well, developing well, etc etc.
2. For now, my number 2 priority is cleaning the clutter out of my house.  I’ve been doing this for a long time, but I haven’t dedicated myself to this much.  I’ve been listing things on craigslist off and on for months, and I’ve done really well at clearing out the major amounts of clutter.  But there is still MUCH to do.  This shouldn’t take too much time per night anymore, as I’m nearing the end, but I do need to make a dedicated push to finish up.  With a newborn daughter, I’m acquiring many things just for her, and so something has to give!
3. Save money for a european vacation in the fall.  Back to italy again probably.  I’d like to do a 3 week trip this time, so I have to be stingy on my vacation as well.  This one doesn’t require too much effort on my part, other than eating at home, and not spending wildly.
4. Continue with learning italian.  I am meeting with a tutor for 2 hours once every 2 weeks.  But I really need to work on this at least an hour a day.  I need to do flashcards, and play with rosetta stone, and livemocha.com and such, so that I can keep progressing with my knowledge.  I would someday love to be fluent.  That will take as they all say about 10000 hours of practice.  I have a long way to go
5. Get better at photography.  I really feel that I have made huge strides in this lately, and I attribute that to the project365 that I had been working on.  This is the biggest thing that has to give right now.  I’m stopping my project365 for now.  The process of seeking out and finding pictures every day and postprocessing, and uploading, writing blogs posts and all that just takes up too much time.  What I want to do now is take pictures all the time still, but condense the project into a picture a week.  I have more free time on the weekends, so i will probably be posting on weekends.  I may change it so that I write the posts on the weekend but they are published on monday when more people are around.

So, the bottom line is, for the activities I have a choice in, I’m going to focus on cleaning out my clutter first, then italian, and following closely behind, is photography.  I still want to progress, and I would still love to make a living with photography, so this order may change again in the future.  I still carry my camera with me almost everywhere, so I’m ready when inspiration strikes.

Todays photo was taken down on main street in my town, on my way home from work one day. I love the light coming through the flowerpetals.

35mm, 1/800 second, f/2.8, ISO 200

We took advantage of the nice weather today to take a walk up to the nice little park behind my house.

I had no idea there were so many people who liked fishing there. I hadn’t really been there since the winter ended, so I had no idea. The place was filled with fishers, and people in general.

Sadly, this picture was just taken halfway up the hill behind my house. It was a nice shot of this super wide open tulip in someones front yard.

35mm, 1/4000 second, f/2.8, ISO 200

35mm, 1/200 second, f/22, ISO 800

35mm, 1/4000 second, f/2.8 ISO 200

This shot was taken this afternoon just before our appointment. Merri wanted a few good shots of her and Gianna. So we spent a little time taking some shots. I like the lighting here, for some reason. I think it’s because its all reflecting off of a blanket to the side. Whatever the reason, i like the result.

I tried to capture a few moments between mother and daughter. You can clearly see the happiness on Merri’s face here, but in this shot you can’t see Gianna’s reactions. I have others where she’s super smiley, but not Merri.

This one is my favorite still.

35mm, 1/60 second, f/2.8, ISO 200