Aamir Zakaria Photography

DO NOT let your photography go stale

I’d been veg­e­tat­ing at my Dad’s for way too long, so I fig­ured I’d get my ass off the bed and do a pho­tog­ra­phy shoot (and get a lit­tle exer­cise at the same time). After some delib­er­a­tion, I decid­ed on the West Hart­ford Reser­voir.  My recent­ly-deceased Mom (may she rest in peace) used to walk there, so it has some nos­tal­gic value.

I’ve got­ten into a bit of “pho­tog­ra­pher’s block” late­ly.  Part of it is I’ve just been so busy with my daugh­ter vis­it­ing and oth­er fam­i­ly issues, as well as get­ting some pho­tog­ra­phy-relat­ed work done, i.e. get­ting every­thing ready for my recent gallery show­ing and putting the fin­ish­ing touch­es on a com­mis­sioned piece (which is still not quite fin­ished!). Any­way, it was a nice trail and all, but I can’t say that I found a whole lot that was pho­to­graph­i­cal­ly com­pelling.  That’s the prob­lem I’ve been run­ning into.  I mean, how do you out­do your­self?   Are there new and inter­est­ing ways of see­ing the same old things you see on a reg­u­lar basis?  I mean, I’ve walked a gazil­lion forest­ed trails before — what could there pos­si­bly be to photograph?

After my Dad sent me on my way with a warn­ing to “not argue with any­one if they attack you for your cam­era” (ok, Dad, I’m not 9 years old), I was off.  After sev­er­al rather bor­ing min­utes, I end­ed up play­ing with some new pho­to­graph­ic tech­niques.  (I actu­al­ly want­ed to say “tricks”, but that cheap­ens it a bit.  I guess they are tricks, but “tricks” does­n’t sound art­sy enough.)  Any­way, I won’t give away my “tech­niques”, as I often do, but any pho­tog­ra­ph­er worth his/her salt with a zoom lens can fig­ure out what I did here. The prob­lem with some of these “trick” shots is you nev­er know how well they are going to be received.  This isn’t your tra­di­tion­al aes­thet­ic.   It’s not like look­ing at Half Dome or anything.

You’re prob­a­bly won­der­ing what the “DO NOT” shot has to do with walk­ing in the woods.    It was actu­al­ly tak­en as I was walk­ing back to the park­ing lot.

Here are a cou­ple more “trick” shots I took while I was in the woods:

I have sev­er­al oth­ers, but I won’t bore you with them.  The point was, I was able to keep it fresh and inter­est­ing.  These are images you won’t find any­where.  I like the last one the most.  I think I’ll post it on Flickr, since “DO NOT” did­n’t gen­er­ate much interest.

As a fol­lowup to my last post, I men­tioned post­ing more pic­tures of Mika.  How­ev­er, since  my blog posts are auto­mat­i­cal­ly post­ing on Face­book as well, I can’t post my best shots of Mika which are nude.  I’ll need to fig­ure a work-around so I can post those on the blog only.

Two more days and I’m off to France…!!!