Monday, March 19, 2012 - LoW-HI RV Ranch, Deming NM

Another Reject, City of Rocks State Park, Faywood NM, March 7, 2012

Find the light first

I stumbled on Scott Bourne's article at PhotoFocus.com, Seven Things I Wish I'd Have Known When I First Became a Photographer, and his 4th point, find the light first, hit home. That may not be my first failing as I go about snapping bad pictures but if not it's a close second to my annoying tendency to focus on the subject and ignore the composition.

4. Find the light first, the background second and the subject third. This statement will be controversial to many of you – some of you will yell at me because I said it. That’s because you haven’t made the 10,000 mistakes I had to make to understand it so go ahead and yell, but once you stop yelling pay attention and you’ll save yourself some pain. EVERYTHING starts with light. I can have the prettiest subject in ugly light and get no shot. And if the background is distracting, nobody notices the subject. So start with great light. Seek it out. Know it. Search for and yearn for it. Love it. Bathe in it. Dream about it. Then go find it in front of a nice clean background and THEN put your subject right there. You’ll win every time you do that.

Scott Bourne / PhotoFocus.com http://photofocus.com/2012/03/19/seven-things-i-wish-id-have-known-when-i-first-became-a-photographer/

Night camp

Boondocked - LoW-HI RV Ranch, Deming NM

This is a spacious 65 site campground with most sites offering full hookups.
Locate LoW-HI RV Ranch on my Night Camps map
Verizon cell phone - strong signal
Verizon Broadband - strong signal but often slow
Check the weather in Deming NM

Skepticism is Helpful

If you want to notice things that seem wrong, you'll find a degree of skepticism helpful. I take it as an axiom that we're only achieving 1% of what we could. This helps counteract the rule that gets beaten into our heads as children: that things are the way they are because that is how things have to be. For example, everyone I've talked to while writing this essay felt the same about English classes-- that the whole process seemed pointless. But none of us had the balls at the time to hypothesize that it was, in fact, all a mistake. We all thought there was just something we weren't getting.

The Age of the Essay, Paul Graham, September 2004

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