Coastal Images & Recycling

There’s a point where repetition improves the technique. Repeat a successful process, over and over, refining and honing the skill. One buddy suggested there is no such thing as too much repetition. If it’s good once, then work on it.

I’d like to think about it as refining a process. From cursory studies, turns out a lot of the great painters did just this, paint the same thing, over and over, until was correct. As a writer, I keep bumping words together — sharpening the effects.

Last time at the coast, and time before that, I kept catching images of adolescent sand pipers. I kept thinking, “Sand pipers at the gates of dawn,” an obvious — if dated — reference and play on words. I always love referencing music from before my time.

Still, some images I never tire of.

See also kramerwetzel.com —

Just toying with stuff, really, musing and amusing myself. I fear I’m turning into another digital artist who can’t survive without PhotoShop or some equivalent image manipulation program. Aperture from Apple is my current “go to” for that. But I use a variety of iPad and iPhone apps, as well. Tease out texture and such.

I kept taking pictures of the small sand pipers, on the beach, and the images don’t catch the feeling I want. The little birds scurry in the surf as the last bit of the wave washes ashore. The long bills occasionally darting into the sand to peck at a morsel of food. Other shore birds, gulls especially, frequent the place where the water, sky and ground meet, but most of the time, what I wanted?

The little sand pipers. Skittish, colt-like, darting hither and yon, carefully, warily avoiding the humans, but gracefully sharing the beach with us.

There were serval other shorebirds, at last one or two rare ones, but the limits of technology, and it’s a set of images I haven’t negotiated yet. I’m working on it. Repeat the process until I figure it out.

Because of both the way I work, and the totally — pointedly — decidedly amateurish nature of the photos, there’s a sense that I like.

No formal training in photography. I don’t hang around with a photo group.

For me, one of the benefits is that there is no pressure, but therein is also the problem.

The little inner-critic suggests the images captured so far? Not any good. Or not catching that element — the prompt for me to take the picture in the first place.

The current setting is an 8 gig chip,maybe half-full, and the point-and-click is set for 5 mega-pixels per image, although it is capable of much higher resolution. That might be the trick, and on the next trip, I can bump the capture settings, see if more pixel data per square whatever helps withe birds’ details.

The real question? Does more data mean better?

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