Hens and Chickens. Found out in the dooryard- I just love the textures. Canon 100mm 2.8L IS USM Macro at f/4.0. 1/200 sec at iso 1250 handheld. For handheld macro you've gotta breathe like a sniper and shoot between heartbeats.

So I was thinking the other day about style in photography, and the way I see it is: content aside, ones style has to do with your individualistic representations of three things (3.) which are one (1.) Contrast- how hard are your gradations from blacks to whites, do you like shadow detail and how much. Two (2.) edge definition and sharpening: are you the halo master or are you the subtle soft spoken type? Do want crunchy goth sharp beard stubble and razor edged leaves or are you more of the romantic seeing through a gauze veil sexy with frankincense burning and John Tesh rhapsodizing kind? and three (3.) blacks and whites- how black do you want to go, how dark are your dayshots? and how white is too white. If your idea of a beautiful day is a cold front churning dynamic sunrise to thick fog til noon then a nice downpour around 1-2:30 that will get the waterfalls flowing and there is a proper nap time, then more high clouds keeping the glare off the late afternoon and making some nice underlight for sunset then you probably like your images a tad darker like I do. And I know of some imagineers who hardly ever pop near whites into their images- their face of the sun will still be 18 percent gray, so, you can't just say they are wrong- it's just their style. Here's an aside by the way: fog has no true whites or true blacks, but that's just a technicality. You all know what I mean: when you look at a thing you think right off "do I like it" and then if you like it enough you look closer and fall into the image- if you don't like it then something is obvious. When something sticks out and exposes the process as being "the process" you aren't seeing the thing anymore- you're distracted by the process. There's a bunch of anecdotes that could be made here resembling that remark how bout- look at fine dining and gourmet amazing foods: you don't want to hear "oh the supple virgin boar was maimed on these freekin precious cherry wrought grates or whatever" you just want your delicious sopressata. How bout super cars: you don't want to hear about how the NASA engineer who designed the airfoil that keeps your $250.000.00 car on the road while going 130 miles an hour around a corner was raised with 4 sisters and no brother and was forced to put on makeup and wear high heels too many times in elementary school and now lives in a too expensive penthouse apartment in the city and is suspiciously unreachable for 128 hours of the week. Or this little gem: where's your Ipad come from, or your cell phone, etc. See: nobody wants to think about the process. The process can be our little shop talk thing but we should hope the potential customer just and only thinks: "they like it".

 All I need to do now is create a scale that factors in these three qualities of a photographers vision and make a multiple choice questionaire so that you too can see where you end up compared to the average, etc. But you already know who you are. Whattaya need me for? Have a good one- N8.

Stand by, stay tuned, and keep on comin back for the sometime this week: FREE Print Giveaway! Because it's there!!