Learn Giving Up

Lens flare is a well understood problem.  When something gets on the front element, it causes a point light source that softens the image, and can cause other aberrations.  So put your camera in an underwater case, cover the front lens with salt water and let it dry in the sun for a while.  The lens flare is massive and the water drops actually bend the image.

Any image with this much flare should be garbage, but in this case it gives you a sense of just how warm it was to be out on the water - it makes you want to reach for your sun glasses.

Lets face it, the ocean in Northern BC is not normally cyan.  Good pictures aren't supposed to have vignetting at all - especially in just two corners.  And who puts jellyfish and clouds together?

That said, it does convey the emotion of watching jellyfish from a Kayak on a warm summer afternoon.

It was awfully greedy of photographers to go from monochrome to three channel color in one step - lets catch up the missing step.  For that matter, who really needs three dimension lighting?  The sun has been our point light source since time eternal.

If you look at the image large enough to see what's actually there, it's actually sharp, in focus and follows most of the standard composition rules (eyes on a third, catch light etc).  It's just the color space (there is zero blue light coming from the heat lamp and the heat lamp is effectively the only light source) is weird.  Must be pretty weird for these chickens to go outside and discover a whole new color they have never seen before.

Most people like something sharp to look at - it gives them the sense that their eyes work correctly.  Try watching a whale flirt with your bow and leave because you are going to slow, and then express that on film.

A camera's ability to freeze a precise instant of time is unnatural.  For me, this image is representative of the experience - there is sharpness in the water splashes, but not in the boat or the whale.  For you, it's a reason to type something else in your browser bar.

Just because your camera is firmly mounted to the tripod doesn't mean the tripod is firmly connected to anything.  In this particular example I was taking photos at night when a couple walking down the path were about to step on my camera.  The camera was taking a 15 second exposure and I had to pick the camera up before the shutter closed or it would get stepped on.

Even sharp, this image is abstract.  (Those are tea lights in cut sections of bamboo)  With motion, the abstract really becomes disconnected from reality and you get to see what you want to see.

Panning works best when you are shooting something moving in a relatively straight direction in a relatively predictable way for a relatively short period of time.  I was trying to take photos of deer in low light (1 second exposures) with a long lens and the deer were having nothing of it.

Unfortunately, the contrast isn't quite up to standard.  The black background and well lit grass take the panning well and provide a good canvas to paint the deer, but the deer is moving just a bit too fast - where he dwelled you can see a ghost.

Lenses fail in a number of ways.  Ghosting occurs when light reflects inside the lens.  This reflection occurs for a number of reasons - uncoated lenses are more likely to flare and bright spots (unpainted internal surfaces) add brightness.  Sadly, the most common reason for flares and ghosts is dirt on the lens surfaces - preventable by a little bit of cleaning.  If the scene has uniform brightness (like your sunny family photo on the grass) ghosting is in a the noise floor.  If your scene is painfully contrasty (like fire against the night sky) ghosts gets bright enough that you can see them.

Motion Blur takes on a number of different forms.  Minor motion blur (perhaps 2 / focal length) is an annoyance - a reminder that you really should have used a tripod.  When your shutter speed gets down to the near second range, your images take on another quality - convolution.  The trace of the motion of your hand becomes a significant part of the image.

In this case you can pretty clearly see what I was trying to take a photo of, but because of the motion blur you can't see any single detail with clarity.  The water was moving quite quickly and the glints of the sunset provided detail not integrated in the hand motion.  Total freak image, but satisfying.

In general, I'm a big fan of looking through the viewfinder before you take the photo.  In this case I held the camera up in roughly the right direction and took a photo.  The resulting photo is terribly from a classical compisition point of view - any of the meaningful content is out of the 1/3rds and the thing the eye is meant to focus on (the bird cage) is mostly out of the frame.

I think this photo works for a number of reasons.  First, the cage is shiny which makes it high contrast which attracts your eye to it, more so that the tiny bird in the cage (which you can't see) would.  Second, the woman is rendered strangely - looking small, tucked into the bottom corner - that you want to know what she is looking at.  Beyond the camera being unaturally high (2+ meters in the air), we are on a ramp which has forshortened the scene and given her a forced perspective.

I didn't look through the viewfinder before taking the photo so I really can't claim credit.