The thread that wouldn’t die! Muhahahahaha!
Sorry I didn’t get back to @Bonnie_Lampley , @Igor_Doncov or @Diane_Miller before now. I feel badly about that since this is a conversation not an echo chamber.
Totally true. I like the idea of printing and putting them in a place where you will see them and rotating them frequently so you will see them and not pass them by. Similarly I go back to review “picks” from previous outings that didn’t make it through the edit process. Sometimes they didn’t for good reasons, other times I see something, maybe the original something that made me shoot the scene, and I dredge it from the depths. Otherwise they stay down there or even get the boot.
I wouldn’t say it’s an empty experience, but it’s one I don’t want to share since it isn’t likely to be a productive conversation or a positive one for the person who took it. Mostly when the photo is technically good, but just not my cuppa. Telling a person my taste differs from theirs won’t get me very far and will probably prove frustrating. So I get where you’re coming from. But I also think that I’m more apt to encounter “like minds” here on NPN than a lot of other places.
Maybe I need to take a page out of your playbook and go for the odd. It’s what makes your work interesting, unpredictable and kind of a palate cleanser if that doesn’t come off as insulting, which isn’t my intent.
Ah, maybe I should have instead of going for balance, which I was. The trouble with kayak landscape photography is getting the boat still. This means I’m at the mercy of something to ground the boat on whether it’s the bank itself, a rock, thick vegetation or a log. If you look at my weekly challenge photo with the cypress trees, you can tell I was in open water with nothing holding the boat still. So sometimes it’s impossible to change compositions or at least change them quickly. That sounds like laziness and in some ways it is, but mostly it’s just reality. But maybe I should work a scene more thoroughly before paddling away.
Oh and I’m rarely bothered by mosquitoes when I’m kayaking. They stick to the woods on the shorelines mostly. It’s flies that are usually the problem, they don’t bite me, just whip around my head and make me nuts!!
Thanks for adding your ideas. And yes, I agree, but early morning and kayaking don’t agree with me most of the time. And staying until sunset is usually problematic, too. This location might work since the launch site is big, open and has a dock. Then I could paddle with a headlamp and hope I could find whatever I stuck the boat on. Or if the water level rose a lot, I might not be able to. It’s tricky in a boat, but maybe I should be less lazy. Especially since I can just dump the boat in the backyard and paddle down to this -
Thanks @andronik - I don’t go out on crappy days so full sun is usually the prevailing condition. Clouds, too if I’m lucky, but not always. Yes, I’m a photographer so light is important to me, but I’m not a light snob and I’ve learned the hard way that you can’t force your vision of the best conditions onto the ones you get. Sometimes you have to work with what the rest of the world considers less than ideal or you don’t get to shoot. In this case I thought I could make it work and I’m glad you think I did.
Thanks @Steve_Kennedy - as I said up a ways, the comp isn’t always up to me, it’s up to the landscape to let me get the boat still. Or as still as I can, which depending on the wind or current or both, is sometimes a hopeless situation. And working in bright sunlight isn’t always a bummer - bright sunny days speak to us in ways that moodier landscapes don’t and frankly I find a portfolio of images all taken at the same times and in the same situations pretty boring. For me the near ecstatic quality of this scene - the blue sky, the green lily pads, the stretch of water narrowing between the points of land, pretty engaging and satisfying to look at. Clearly that’s just me, but that’s who I photograph for in the first place - me.
Which sounds pretty assholish - OMG. But I think we all serve ourselves first if we’re not shooting for a client. And I paddle for me, too. 99% of the time I’m alone and get to pick from a long list of gorgeous waterbodies. Yesterday I was on the Spirit river and I’ll probably hit it again today, albeit much farther downstream and with another person. Kayaking is my love and one of the reasons I can’t leave Northern Wisconsin. It’s a paddlers paradise, but maybe not every photographer’s.