And now, a Photo. (#1)

I want to start integrating my explorations of photography into this newsletter, so to that end I will start a semi-regular (or quasi-regular?) feature here, to go along with Albums of My Life. This feature, which I am calling And now, a Photo, will feature a single photograph of mine each week (or however often I manage to post one of these...my goal is to be way more frequent than usual to this point!), and a few brief thoughts on that photo...what it is, why I took it the way I did, how it figures into my "photographic journey", and so on. With that in mind, let's begin!

And now, a photo:

In this photo are the grain silos along the shores of the Buffalo River, in Buffalo, NY. I took this photo from the drawbridge on Ohio Street in October 2023 while on a photo walk of the city of Buffalo.

It was my first photowalk in downtown and the First Ward. It was one of my first photowalks anywhere with the camera I had bought earlier that year, the Lumix FZ1000ii that I have dubbed "Miranda". At this point in my "photography journey" (three years in, I still have not worked out how I feel about that term...but I'm leaning toward, "Enh, it's fine"), I was still feeling the novelty of walking around with, well, a chonky pro-style camera. I know, I know, as good as bridge cameras are, they're not professional cameras. Just go with it!

I wasn't shooting in RAW format yet at this point, and I'm not even sure if I was out of Auto mode yet, either. I had been watching a lot of "Photography 101" stuff on YouTube, and I had read a book called Understanding Exposure (which is really good), in which the author came right out and said something along the lines of, "My goal is to get you off shooting anything in any automatic mode whatsoever." But I read another book that basically said "Just stay in Auto mode at first, the point is to get used to being out and shooting and you can learn all the settings and Manual Mode stuff later." So I took that advice.

On this particular day, in October of 2023, we were just back from our annual trip to Ithaca, and this was my first solo photo walk in the City of Buffalo. I had already been to a lot of local parks, but I had also become fascinated by a genre called "street photography", so this was my first real foray into that genre at all. I'll have more thoughts about street photography in general, and in Buffalo in particular, sometime down the road, but for now, I was looking through my Flickr album of photos from that walk, and I see quite a few photos where I can see what I might have done differently now...but I also see photos like this one that I still like a great deal to this day.

I did the shift to monochrome in an edit, I'm pretty sure...though honestly, I might have switched to a monochrome "Scene" mode in-camera to get this shot. I remember being struck, as I walked across that drawbridge, how still and flat the surface of the Buffalo River was, how perfect the reflections of the silos were on the water. By this time it was around 11:00am, well past the time (or well before it) when the light for such a scene would be flattering; I give myself credit for even then acknowledging monochrome as a good way for dealing with very harsh light.

What don't I like about the photo? I'm not in love with the perspective on the left-hand silo, and if I was shooting this now, I would try to get the camera lower. Now, obviously I'm limited as to how low I can get when I'm shooting from the deck of a bridge. Honestly, the shot might work best from the water on a boat than a bridge above it...but I wasn't on a boat, was I? You work with the shot that's in front of you.

And that is Photo No. 1 in this new exploration. See you next time!

Exeunt,
--K.

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