A Half Hour a Day

So, I was doing some organizing over at Flickr…went into my Flowers set, and the whole “snapshot” vs. “photograph” discussion hit me square in the face while looking through my set.  I think it comes down to deliberateness.  If that isn’t a word, it should be.  I looked at some of my older photos.  I distinctly remember taking most of them.  “Oooh, pretty!” *SNAP*  “Ooooh, that’s pretty too!” *SNAP*  “Oooo!  I like that color!” *SNAP*  The change has been gradual, but now I look at something and I think, “Oooh, pretty!  How can I best capture the beauty of this?”  And I look, and go around the subject once or twice, and I look through my viewfinder, and I change my framing, and I go in closer, and I move back farther, and I go down low, and I climb up high.  Most of all, I pay attention to my background,  literally moving anything out of the way that is distracting, or I move the subject itself if that’s possible.  Deliberateness.

You tell me, which are snapshots, and which are photographs?

 

Even this photo, though deliberate, had a distracting background that just bugged me.

Thus the crop…

If nothing else, I am learning to be deliberate in my “snapping.”  I take fewer photos, but the ones I do take are intentionally taken the way they were taken.  Biggest lesson, watch those backgrounds, or a beautiful flower looks like this:

I could have easily bent this flower over a bit and changed my position in order to use the sky as a background.  All I see when I look at this is a missed opportunity.  Dang it.