On failure

Drop view, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

This morning I went through several essays at Alain Briot's Beautiful Landscape, and browsed his Print of the month collection. I have looked at his work every once in a while, but never really viewed so many works of his in a single web browsing session. The style of the photographs is quite unique, although not a style I find especially close to my personal vision, but there is power in many of his photos.

After this fine art photography experience this morning, I went for a walk outside with the family, planning to do some nice photography. But today was a day with a lot of failure, thanks to there being little light even at noon. I wanted to use ISO 100, but even with aperture f/2.0 the exposure time was between 1/4 and 1/30 seconds. So, I got a lot of motion blur in the photos, and this time it was unwanted.

Another problem was the flat quality of the light, which didn't provide much inspiration. And besides I was really tired from the previous week, so I was doing routine things without original thoughts. A couple of times I got an idea which perhaps could have worked, but either motion blur or grayness spoiled the images.

So, not much progress today, if you don't count the time spent at Briot's site. One of the good things there was an essay by Ralph Nordstrom, which contained this item among others: "It all starts with the light." So, perhaps I can put some blame on the failure today on the bad light. Or at least hope for better light during the next days.