Lawrence Ripsher's Photo Journal

Fear

#3 in a series

“Courage is not the absence of fear but the judgment that something else is more important than fear. The brave may not live forever but the cautious do not live at all.”

Meg Cabot, author of The Princess Diaries

Getting Older

 

A wise man once said that he counted his age not in years, but by the number of dogs he had shared his life with. By this measure, I will never tire of getting old.

A new series...

Projects are what took my photography from being just 'nice' to something more personal and meaningful. I make no secret about how Chuck Inglefield (a fellow member of Lost in Focus whose personal blog is here) got me started down this track. The difference is fairly subtle from just every day shooting - a project is a more an idea, a concept or theme that binds together images. Although that idea can be a simple one, the difference can be dramatic.

Urban Melancholy, Chuck's social narrative photo project which he started on Pbase back in 2005 was the first time I ran into this idea. After a few discussions on email, we quickly became friends and I found myself craving to find something I could be similarly immersed in.

My first project was "negative space" - for a month I mounted a 60mm prime lens to my DSLR and only shot images that fit that theme. I went from having average composition skills to being able to capture images I never would have even noticed. After that I started on more ambitious ideas. One of my projects yielded just 16 images I shared online, although it was the result of weeks of shooting, a dozen models and thousands of images.

Since I got to the US, I've been shooting the kind of photography that I love, but it's been been a long time since I started a personal project. A recent thread on facebook gave me an idea and this weekend I shot the first two images for it.

This project doesn't have a name yet. Maybe I'll just call it "25 things". This is #1 in a series.

 

When I was a child, all I wanted to be was happy.

As I got older, I learned about pride and by the time I was a teenager, I found myself saying “I’d rather be proud than happy”.

It was a long time before that changed. Now I realise that I’ll take happiness any day.

I guess I was right all along.

My images in the Contender Season 4

If you didn't catch the Contender Season 4, one of the big moments for me was after the 8th fight. This was the end of the first round and the only competitors left in were about to begin the quarter finals. As a reward, we took my best shots of the winners from all the fights that had taken place so far and printed them up in 20"x30" or so size. These were then placed in the main room and bedrooms of the Contender house. The fighters had no idea this was being done (they'd seen no pictures at all up to that point) and the reaction when they walked back into the house and saw themselves frozen in time was priceless. I managed to find a youtube version of that episode here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KpKUhdZ_3s - the scene takes place at around 1:29.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KpKUhdZ_3s

Exploring the Area

Since I moved to Seattle, there's been very little time to explore the surrounding areas. First there was the snow, and then the general lack of time as we moved into a new house. In fact, this weekend was the first day where we didn’t need to get up and buy furniture, get stuff arranged for the house, or any number of things that have eaten up previous saturdays etc. So we took a drive out with the dogs instead and started to explore the area. As there’s so much water around here, you often find yourself needing to get a ferry so we drove onto the Richmond - > Kingston ferry and just headed for the coast. I gotta say, when the sun shines, the views are just breathtaking. I have no aspirations to become a landscape / nature photographer but it’s going to be hard to see how I’m going to be able to resist photographing things like this in 2009.

All images were shot with the 5D Mark II on Canon 50mm f/1.8, Canon 24mm f/1.4 or Canon L 200mm f/2.8

 

 

 

Canon 5D Mark II Review – The Series

An entry point for my ongoing write up on the Canon 5d Mark II. More a diary than a formal review... I'll add to the list below as new sections / entries become available:

• Part 1 – First impressions and Resolution / Cropping
• Part 2 – RAW and exposure latitude in post processing
• Part 3 – Autofocus
• Part 4 – Depth of Field
• Part 5 – Image Quality and the First One Thousand Clicks
• Part 6 – High ISO Performance

Enjoy…