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Posts Tagged ‘Holding’

Sony to transform its Electronics Products & Solutions segment into new holding company

26 Mar

Sony has announced it is transforming its Electronics Products & Solutions (EP&S) segment into an intermediate holding company. Starting April 1, 2020, Sony’s Imaging Products & Solutions, Home Entertainment & Sound and Mobile Communications divisions, which made up its EP&S segment, will be known as Sony Electronics Corporation.

In a short statement on its public relations website, Sony Corporation says the creation of this new company ‘will not only accelerate the integrated operation of the EP&S businesses, but also aim to optimize its organizational structure, talent and business portfolio, while further enhancing competitiveness and creating new business.’

Sony has done multiple restructures in the past with little to no effect on consumers. It would appear that will be the case with this transition as well.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Artistic Versus Technical Photography Skills – What is Holding You Back?

24 Apr

Eiffel tower at dusk - How to overcome your technical or artistic shortcomings and improve your photography

In my work as a teacher – and as an artist – I have noticed something that might sound very obvious but is rarely talked about in our journey to become better photographers. That is, how we live our day-to-day lives will show us where we are going wrong in our photography. Figuring out your shortcomings is the only way to overcome them.

Let me explain.

“Creativity takes courage.” – Henri Matisse

How to overcome your technical or artistic shortcomings and improve your photography - night shot of Paris

Photography is an inner game. Everything about who we are is expressed in our photos. You can ask 100 photographers to photograph the same scene and they will all pick out different elements, they will all work on different parts of the scene and they will all end up with different images.

“There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.” – Ernst Haas

What we respond to as a human being is filtered through our experiences and thoughts and for a huge part, through our personalities.

Paris monument - How to overcome your technical or artistic shortcomings and improve your photography

So if you are unhappy with the photos you are taking, as well as looking at all the usual suspects – technique, composition, etc. – I would take a close look at how you do things in your life and what that says about your personality.

Look at the strengths and weaknesses in yourself – you can then work to balance them and become the very best photographer you can be. Let’s take a look at a few (stereotypical) examples:

Person A – technically proficient, creativity lacking

This first stereotype is of someone whom I have met several times on my workshops. There are many of these people about. Let’s call them Person A.

night shot of a city - How to overcome your technical or artistic shortcomings and improve your photography

Person A lives very much in their left brain – the home of the analytical mind. Person A is great with detail-oriented, academic tasks.

I am going to bet that because Person A is so strong in this area of analysis, they have lived in that side of their brain for a long time, and become better and better at tasks associated with that. But they have neglected their right brain, their more creative side.

Your right brain is the home of creativity, of ideas, of inspiration even. At least that is what science is saying at this point…

Person A is often amazing with their camera – they either know or are working on knowing, a lot of camera techniques. Technically their photos are excellent, which sounds great, right?

night shot in Paris - How to overcome your technical or artistic shortcomings and improve your photography

But their photos are boring! Their photos lack feeling. They can see it themselves. They look at their photos and wonder why they lack that certain “Je ne sais quoi” – that certain something – that takes a photo from good to wow!

Their photos are decent, they work technically and/or compositionally. But they aren’t memorable, or particularly unique looking. People don’t look at them and feel something deep in their souls, they don’t feel stirred by them. Worst of all, they don’t remember them.

What’s the problem? And what is the solution? My number one diagnosis is that this person finds it very difficult to be present, to live in the present moment and to just “be”. They find it very hard to daydream, to drift, to explore and get lost. They have lost touch with their imagination.

Blue hour mosque Istanbul - How to overcome your technical or artistic shortcomings and improve your photography

Person A is drawn to interesting looking subjects but they don’t feel much when they are taking photos – so their images end up looking a bit cold or soulless.

Person B – highly creative, technically challenged

Now person B is very different. They are very good at inhabiting emotional states, they are drawn to mood, feeling, and atmosphere. Capturing subjects that move them and fill them with wonder and awe is their forte.

They have so much passion for photography, and constantly seek out locations and subjects that really excite them. The process of being creative is exciting, inspiring, and gives them so much joy.

Hagia Sofia Istanbul - How to overcome your technical or artistic shortcomings and improve your photography

The problem here, though, is when they look at their photos they are rarely, if ever, what they pictured in their head. They may see the feeling and atmosphere but in reality, if they are being honest, they don’t capture the feeling or mood of the subject in their images. The images don’t ooze with atmosphere in the way they want them to.

Person B is thinking – why aren’t my photos better!

Finding your solution

Now the creative solution for these two people would be completely different from each other – right? What person A has to do to create better photos is not what person B needs to do to create better photos.

night scene on the river - How to overcome your technical or artistic shortcomings and improve your photography

This is why you need to know what your strengths and weaknesses are so you can work to balance them out. Learning is not a one-size-fits-all journey.

I have students who pick up using Manual Mode in 2 weeks and some who take two years to master it. Others take two years to feel comfortable shooting strangers, whereas some are relaxed and confident after one afternoon’s instruction and shooting.

But it’s not how long it takes – it’s the fact that you are working on improving all aspects of your photography.

“It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.” – Confucius

man in a workshop - How to overcome your technical or artistic shortcomings and improve your photography

In fact, it’s more impressive to me that someone continues and perseveres than just focuses on what is easy for them. That’s how you improve.

Now back to our example people. I wonder if you can imagine what solutions I’m about to suggest for each to help them develop their photography.

The solution for those lacking creativity (A)

If this sounds like you, what you are doing, for the most part, is focusing on the technical execution of the image, not the real feeling behind it. And if you can’t feel anything when looking at an image – then what’s the point? You might as well as just stare at cereal boxes.

night shot of city - How to overcome your technical or artistic shortcomings and improve your photographySo you need to work on inhabiting states of emotion, wonder, and awe whilst shooting. To notice atmosphere and to then translate that into your images.

The solution if you lack technical abilities (B)

For Person B: There is a definite lack of technical skills – and this translates as not being able to capture the vision in your head. You could see a life-changing sunset, but pointing your camera at it will not capture the real vision of what it looks and feels like to be there. You have not learned to translate emotion via the technical.

cat on a street scene - How to overcome your technical or artistic shortcomings and improve your photography

If this sounds like you, then you need to get a better understanding of your camera and the technical possibilities. An understanding of composition is also helpful. By learning and utilizing the potential of the camera you will be able to create the photos within that you so desire.

Can you see that I have taken two extremes and that in an ideal world they would both get a little of the other’s natural tendencies? By doing that we can then create balance. And nature thrives on balance and harmony. Not too much of this, not too much of that.

Salt is essential to bring out the flavor in cooking, but if you add too much it’s gross…you get what I’m saying.

Haman sign Turkey - How to overcome your technical or artistic shortcomings and improve your photography

These examples may seem extreme but I do teach many people who fall into either one of these camps.

So instead of just focusing on learning more, I encourage you to take a long, long look at what your personality is like – and work out where you need to focus.

The way that I have thought about it for myself is that I am very good at being in the moment. It’s a skill I’ve developed over 30 years of shooting. I also love the technical part of photography (never met a user manual I didn’t want to read).

So what’s the personality issue that affects my photography?

Blue mosque Instanbul - How to overcome your technical or artistic shortcomings and improve your photography

Well, I am so in the moment, so wrapped up in light and mood and atmosphere that the big challenge I’ve had in my career is to not get stuck into taking singular great images. One of this, one of that.

My weakness has been the inability to create and sustain a varied collection of photographs. It took me several years to realize that I was reacting to the world, rather than going out and seeking what I wanted.

I would just wander and drift, and see where my interest and attention led me. I had to work hard on becoming much more proactive – instead of I’ll wait for the shot, I had to become open to the idea of I’m going to find the shot.

sunset over a city scene - How to overcome your technical or artistic shortcomings and improve your photography

Now, keep in mind that I don’t always do that. Again the key here is finding a balance. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater; build on your areas of weakness, but still, celebrate your areas of strength.

I am now a much more proactive photographer – I don’t confine myself to singular, wicked shots. I build projects, and I sustain them over time, and I work hard to make incredible images that work together as part of a story.

All the photos in this article are from a series of projects I’ve been working on for several years of cities at dawn. I love photographing the beauty of dawn light, the emptiness of the streets and the odd snippet of early morning life. The cities in these photos are Paris, London, and Istanbul.

tulips - How to overcome your technical or artistic shortcomings and improve your photography

Some tips to help you

How do we overcome our weaknesses?

To start – you need to know the strengths and weaknesses of your personality. If you don’t already know then ask your family or friends, I’m sure they would be more than happy to tell you!

You might think of concerns like:

Issue: You’re very shy and you find yourself holding back when you really want to grab a shot.

Solution: Do the thing that you fear! Perhaps it’s some street photography or portrait work to build your confidence with people. Or wandering off up that cool looking mountain.

flag in Turkey - How to overcome your technical or artistic shortcomings and improve your photography

If you don’t overcome your fears, you will always be holding yourself back from what you love to photograph. Great images rely on jumping into the process with your whole being, your whole heart.

Issue: You are better at talking about what you’re going to do than actually doing it. You alternate between perfectionism and procrastination.

Solution: Focus lots and lots of effort on getting started and work on producing a project. Don’t worry about it being perfect, or waiting for exactly the right time, because as someone with procrastinator to perfectionist tendencies, this could mean that the perfect time will never happen.

For this issue, start to work on producing something, anything, just so you can move through that block of never doing something. Then once you’ve got some work under your belt, you can then start working on making the photos or project you are involved in, better. Getting started and staying with something is the thing to focus on initially, though.

blue hour image - How to overcome your technical or artistic shortcomings and improve your photography

Once you know where your weaknesses lie, then you can start to look for ways to overcome those issues. There are always solutions. When you are not afraid to look at the weaknesses in your creativity and to work on them, then you create so much more freedom in your photography practice.

If you feel like you can go anywhere and do anything, then your photography will grow exponentially.

Do things differently

Shake things up a little. For example, if you’re a big planner in your “real life” – maybe you want to begin by not planning. Go out, drift around, get lost, and just explore. Move away from all the planning.

night street scene - How to overcome your technical or artistic shortcomings and improve your photography

Or if you are like me – doing more planning has been essential to being a better photographer. I am so used to exploring with my senses rather than doing lots of research. While that is great and has served me well, a little planning has made me much more effective on my shoots.

Develop an “open awareness”

We tend to live our lives going from one fixed activity to the next. Whether that is at work, driving home, shopping, cooking, emailing or sorting out the myriad of problems, issues, and conflicts that pop up every day.

We end up flitting from one thing to the next, mostly concentrating in a narrow focus on one thing at a time – which is obviously very helpful when we want to get things done.

If, though, you want to develop new ideas and get good insights about yourself or your photography, then having an open – rather than focused – awareness is key.

Open awareness is being aware of your thoughts, but not paying too much attention to them. Allow for some space to enter and open up to the world around you. So you are letting thoughts drift through but you are still noticing other things – the weather, the clouds, the birds – but not letting your attention focus on any one thing in particular.

This brings tremendous space to your mind, space you need for new ideas and insights. If you are always thinking, thinking, doing, doing; you won’t have space for inspired ideas or amazing insights.

London at sunset - How to overcome your technical or artistic shortcomings and improve your photography

When you develop open awareness you have the ability to see your thoughts, your ideas, but also allow space for other things. You start to observe the world around you, to pay attention to your thoughts and habits and tendencies without getting locked into them.

Believe that you can change and develop yourself

“We are what we believe we are.” – C. S. Lewis

I know so many people who are scared of their cameras. They are intimidated by learning the technical aspects of photography. They tell me it’s impossible to learn!

Yet I know that as humans it’s possible to learn anything if the desire is strong enough.

You don’t have to confine yourself with your photography just because you can’t do something. As Picasso said:

I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.” – Pablo Picasso

Science is also telling us now that what we previously thought about the brain – that it was a set, fixed entity that stops developing as we become adults – is in fact not the case.

We can develop our brains at any point by having new experiences and learning new things. We can cultivate new skills, we don’t have to stay in this fixed idea of what we are good at and what we aren’t good at.

“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” – Pablo Picasso

I cannot stress the importance of this idea enough. If you feel the urge to create in your life – with photography or any other medium – it’s a beautiful calling.

In my life, there is nothing more important than taking photographs. I know what it brings to my life, to ideas about photography and how I’m able to light little fires of inspiration in other people.

When you are being creative you are putting down your smartphone, the to-do lists, the emails and the shopping lists. Instead of looking inwards at your life – you are looking outwards at the world. You are committing yourself to the deeper, more interesting, more beautiful parts of life.

You are connecting to other people and to the world around you. Surely, paying more attention and creating connections to others is an incredibly important thing to promote in this day and age.

“Photography in our time leaves us with a grave responsibility. While we are playing in our studios with broken flower pots, oranges, nude studies and still lifes, one day we know that we will be brought to account: life is passing before our eyes without our ever having seen a thing.” – Brassai

Photography is such an exciting way to be creative, I hope I’ve given you some ideas on how to challenge yourself to keep improving and growing as a photographer.

We all have it in us to create memorable, unique, and interesting images. I’d love to know what you think of these ideas – please comment below.

The post Artistic Versus Technical Photography Skills – What is Holding You Back? appeared first on Digital Photography School.


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Holding Centered on Your Resolutions

14 Mar

It certainly is time of yr once more just after all of us start off building New Year’s resolutions Trinity selt. Likelihood is high you have bought formerly produced them and providing up on them, inspite of the fact that January won’t be all around even so. Probably it really is time for you to rethink this system, get a pen and genuinely strategise the resolution, to unravel it. The best 10 resolutions on the planet contain such things as, learning a point new (i.e. a language), much more actual physical exercise and with that, residing a more healthy lifestyle, finding out to paying out price range, expending a lot more time with mates and spouse and children also to reasonably smoking cigarettes. Nearly all of these are typically great illustrations of resolutions, that could be realized. The 1st trick with creating resolutions won’t be to check and entry for your stars.

Accomplishing further sporting activities and work out are inexpensive aims. Acquiring reported that, intending to deal with Mount Everest every time it is possible to barely walk up a flight of stairs is attaining rather substantially. Deliver down ideas which you just visualize you’ll entire, taking into account time constraints, which includes do the job, as well as your have constraints. There is a sense of finalising factors any time you compose them down. Genuinely really don’t protect against at just developing a listing of resolutions, have on and generate a prepare. Get out your diary or calendar and make down reminders. Give by yourself ambitions to succeed in all calendar year lengthy. In this manner, you make sure that you can expect to continue being centered all year long.

Definitely one among the more standard issues with New Year’s resolutions is forgetting about them. You start off with significantly enthusiasm and electrical power, but by the point an individual quarter inside the calendar yr is about, you have got work of steam. Alternatively tempo your ambitions. Give time in between each individual to boost. Under no circumstances really feel which you’ll get rid of 10kg in a single seven times. Should you continue to keep the resolution, reward by oneself. In the event you arrive at your intention thanks to the conclude within the calendar 12 months, then possess a really significant reward to rejoice. One particular example is, for many who wished to study a very new language, for example French, then obtain a holiday getaway in France to check your capabilities. For exercising, enter an affordable competitors, one example is a 10km operate.

The essential ingredient attributes in trying to keep your resolution contain guaranteeing you could get to it, natural environment a restrict, constructing extra compact aims, scheduling as opposed to forgetting or supplying up. For people who never attain a focus on, change the software. You hardly at any time decide what is about to transpire during the yr, so make certain your resolution has put for regulate. Resolutions are all about strengthening your lifetime and getting going to carrying out things which you pick out to generally say you may do. Maybe your 1st resolution along with your document need to get to accomplish your New Year’s Resolutions. Make 2008 a calendar year of finishing up your aspiration, or in the quite the very least executing the main step.

The post Holding Centered on Your Resolutions appeared first on Photonovice.

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UltraPod II: Saving Space and Holding Cameras Still

26 Sep

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This is the story behind that tragic, viral photo of a seahorse holding a Q-tip

20 Sep
Photo by Justin Hofman

When photographer Justin Hofman snapped this photo while snorkeling off the coast of the Indonesian island of Sumbawa in 2016, he couldn’t have guessed the environmental impact the snapshot would have. A year later, the photograph is a finalist in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, and has been dubbed “the poster child for today’s marine trash crisis.”

Hofman is based out of California, but he travels all over the world leading wildlife expeditions. This photo was captured on one-such expedition in Indonesia.

He was gleefully watching this seahorse bounce from natural object to natural object, hitching rides on the current, when something changed. Here’s a piece of the official image caption:

“As the tide started to come in, the mood changed. The water contained more and more decidedly unnatural objects—mainly bits of plastic—and a film of sewage sludge covered the surface. The seahorse let go of a piece of seagrass and seized a long, wispy piece of clear plastic. As a brisk wind at the surface picked up, making conditions bumpier, the seahorse took advantage of something that offered a more stable raft: a waterlogged plastic cotton swab.”

When Hofman shared the photo on his Instagram account last week, it received over 17K likes and 1,100 comments, but it’s a photo he wishes didn’t exist. “This sea horse drifts along with the trash day in and day out as it rides the currents that flow along the Indonesian archipelago,” he wrote on IG. “This photo serves as an allegory for the current and future state of our oceans.”

A post shared by Justin Hofman (@justinhofman) on

As for capturing the photo itself, we asked Hofman if he would like to share anything with our audience of photographers directly. This is what he had to say:

The thing I would really like to tell photographers is to a) Listen to your gut and b) Don’t worry so much about gear.

If you look at this encounter, on paper it doesn’t really make that much sense: I captured a photo of a 1 inch sea horse using a 35mm lens (16-35mm). Most people, if you had told them of the scenario would say to bring a macro lens. But I never have a macro lens on my camera. I am always afraid that a whale will swim by while I have a 105mm on, which would make it worthless. If I am unsure or just goofing off, I will always bring with me the most flexible lens I can. This ensures that whatever comes by, I have given myself the best opportunity possible to capture the moment.

Of course there will always be sacrifices, but the flexibility is key. If I had had a macro lens, I can 100% assure you that this photo would not have been possible because we were both bobbing around too much to make a sharp macro shot possible. Even with a 35mm, I only have a handful of photos that are actually in focus.

And in case you are curious about gear, he also shared that the photo was taken with an A7R II and Sony 16-35mm F4 lens in a Nauticam housing with a Sea and Sea 240mm dome and two Sea and Sea ys-d1 strobes.

To see more of Hofman’s work, be sure to visit his website or give his account a follow on Instagram. And if you’d like to learn more about ocean conservation, Justin suggests you visit SeaLegacy.org.


Photo by Justin Hofman and used with permission.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Holding onto Light

03 Dec

Holding onto Light, originally uploaded by hitkaiser.


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Holding Your Digital Camera Properly Like It’s Your Baby

10 Jan

When you own a digital camera, you’ve got to treat it right, almost as if it were your very own baby. Wait…just a second there! It IS your very own baby, so you had better hold it gently and carefully. If that’s not convincing enough for you, then maybe a practical reason will affect you better: To avoid buying a Continue Reading

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Holding onto Light

18 Aug

Holding onto Light, originally uploaded by hitkaiser.



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Holding onto Light

18 Aug

Holding onto Light, originally uploaded by hitkaiser.



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Daniel The Photographer-The Art of Holding Hands

19 Oct

So this is Daniel The Photographer. This is what I’m going to call part of his old collection of powerpop. He has moved in a more indie, electro christian genre. *so expect change* myspace.com/danielphotopants
Video Rating: 4 / 5