I take a lot of pictures. In fact, taking pictures is probably the most consistent thing I’ve done for the past 20 years. I’ve realized that the goal of my photography is to document my life (it’s easier than writing), and lately, to explore the alterations of perception that occur by looking through a technological “window”.
Burning Man 2004
All my pictures are here: http://public.fotki.com/gpvillamil/ (or subscribe to the RSS feed to keep up with what’s new)
I started with simple film cameras, including two waterproof ones, and then have gone through every generation of digital camera. If you’re just getting started, which camera do you need? This is a difficult question to answer with all the options that are out there so put the time in to research them all online. Two that I remember fondly are the Canon S45 and the Panasonic FZ10. Right now I’m using a Nikon D80 DSLR camera. Just upgraded to a Nikon D300, which trumps the D80 handily. It represents a dramatic jump in quality compared to the previous compact cameras that I’ve used. 90% of the time I use the excellent and much sought-after 18-200mm VR zoom lens from Nikon. I also use a 12-24mm Tokina wide zoom, useful for apartment hunting. It makes rooms look bigger.
I have other lens, but they are nowhere near as useful for day-to-day situtations. All are special purpose: 10.5mm fisheye, 35mm tilt/shift, 35mm f2 for low-light, and 30mm f1.4 for even lower light.
Ukrainian tilt-shift lens on Nikon
I am especially interested in techniques for achieving unusual photographic effects: I have experimented with panoramic stitching, HDR imaging and a number of other retouching techniques, and of course, the special purpose lenses. When it comes to editing software, Photoshop is often the software of choice as there are so many handy features such as the photoshop color wheel that you can download which allows you to be really specific with color retouching.
My living room in psychedelic color
In the realm of digital photography, software replaces the darkroom. I find the following packages indispensable:
- Thumbsplus by Cerious Software, for organization
- Photoshop CS2 by Adobe, for general editing
- NeatImage for noise reduction
- PTLens for correcting lens distortion
- PTGui for assembling large panoramas (Example)
- QTPfsGUI for assembling HDR (high dynamic range) images (Example)
- Qimage for very high quality printing
- Fisheye Hemi for natural-looking correction of fisheye images
