Rasmus Rasmussen dot com

Confessions of a Photographer…


Blogpost from the shade

I was supposed to go to a lecture with Alice Wheeler, talking about photojournalism. She is well known for her many photographs of Nirvana, all the way up through their career, from relatively unknown to superstars. The lecture was open to members of the Seattle Flickr Meetup Group, and would have been interesting for sure.

But life is what happens, when you’re busy making other plans, and a combination of three factors, made it so I never got there. First up was traffic. It was almost rush-hour bad, which meant our car was crawling along. Second was the sun. Today has got to be one of the hottest days so far this year. Third, our car has a problem with overheating when idling or moving slow. So, combine all these three. Half-way there, the car was so hot, we had to pull over, and when it was finally cool enough to get back on the road, the lecture had begun forty minutes ago.

So, instead of getting some tips and inspiration, the better half and I went out and got new chairs for the office. If all else fails: Go shopping!

I have an Opinion

One of the things that’s so wonderful about the internet, is the fact that if you have an opinion on something, you can get it out there for the world to see. For as long as I have blogged, I have tried to be conscious about this, mainly using my little corner to recommend books, movies and products, that I find recommendable.

Lately, I have started going the opposite direction as well. If something sucks, I will not hesitate to put it online, hoping that someone will google this very thing, and maybe find me. And I’m not doing that simply to get noticed; there are far easier ways to do that. I do it, because I’ve found negative comments to be just as helpful as positive ones, when searching for information online.

Most recently, I have added a few comments in my set of pictures on flickr from our recent roadtrip to California. We dined out a lot, which is a perfect opportunity for me to write notes about those places. We also drove a brand new car over 2100 miles, so naturally I have an opinion on that too. There’s a story about a café, where you can check the locals out and a art supply store that offers shitty service. And the list goes on. They say that opinions are like assholes, because everybody’s got one. Well, I’m proud to be putting one of the two out there.

Testing and retouching

I’m testing flickr’s “blog this” feature, and (hopefully) posting this to my blog directly from flickr. Neat.

The image here is one from my archives. I just processed today. When the better half and I recently did a one-day seminar in stock photography, I preached the virtues of even simple photo retouching, saying that photographers should try to make their digital images pop a little, if they wanted to sell them as stock.

This is a before and after of at “popped” image. The editing is really fairly light, but it has the desired effect, to make the main subject stand out and have the lighting heighten the theme of the image. You can read more about what I actually did to it, by clicking on the image here.

Update: Well, I had to edit the code generated by flickr to make it look right and obviously, flickr does not add any tags to my post. But other than that, the feature works. For the amount of post-post editing though, I might as well just blog straight from my WordPress installation.

Extra update: I just noticed that blogging through flickr also doesn’t send a ping out to my usual sources. Not good.

Illustrating an introduction

Check out this introduction to the whole journaling thing, posted over at moleskinerie.com. The image used to illustrate this article was taken by yours truly, just like the sketch that is depicted in the photo was drawn by me.

See all my images tagged Moleskine over on flickr.