Saturday, June 7, 2008

Coffee 7

Coffee 7

Out of focus coffee beans, on out of focus brocade.


Argh!

I knew it wold happen some time. I knew this one-shot thing was going to be a challenge. I knew someday I wouldn't just take the mediocre photos I've been taking all week; I'd take something unsalvagebly terrible. And this is it.

This was meant to be a shot of coffee beans falling from my hand onto puddled brocade. It was lovely in my mind - pale cream skin, rich brown coffee beans, against a royal blue and silver-gold brocade. Since I couldn't look through the viewfinder, I knew my aim might be a little off, and I might have to work around a partial shot of coffee beans on brocade. I didn't realise that my camera mightn't focus on anything at all, leaving me with only a blurry nothing to post.

I've cropped it so you only see the badly focused coffee beans, rather than the expanse of even worse brocade around it. I then spent a long time in photoshop trying to salvage what I could... which wasn't much. And I've carefully exported a very small version, to concentrate the few pixels I have and make the most of the viewing distance. Still... arrrgh!

It was so tempting not to post this - I do have my pride, after all. But in the end, pride made me go ahead. I made the rules, and I'll live with them - I said I'd take one shot only, so that's what I've done.

But I really, really hope I improve fast - this is so annoying!

What do you lot think, oh long-suffering readers? Would you rather watch the process of learning to reliably take good pictures, or would you prefer I put us all out of our misery and went back to the way things were previously? Me, I still think the learning curve is worth it... but I'm not the one having to look at the results.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

I'd prefer photos/posts less often, but taken with more care.

Arwen said...

You mean posting a once a week carefully crafted type thing? That's a good idea - once I'm convinced I've learned what I need to from the one shot rule, I'll seriously consider moving to that.

The shots you see are taking with a lot of care. It's teaching me a lot of things I wouldn't necessarily learn otherwise - this shot is the way it is because the autofocus didn't focus. If the camera is on autofocus it normally doesn't fire at all if it can't get a focus point, so I've learned something new about the lens.

That being said, now that I've had one craptastic shot that I had to put up, I might go easy on myself and everyone else and discard any absolutely unusable shots.

marcus said...

i still kinda like this photo

Arwen said...

Thanks, you.