The world of digital photography draws in the technically minded. Often times these people are the type who love to have a rule for everything.

The most commonly toted rule is “Whatever you do, don’t blast out the highlights.” The corollary to this axiom is don’t allow your shadows to block up.

Okay. I’ll submit this is a noble goal and should be followed in most circumstances. But their are times to blast the highlights–maybe to provide negative space for future design work, maybe so that we can see the expression of a face in the shadows. And their are times to block up your shadows–add emotion to the photo, remove a distraction.

What gets me is when these tech, rule following nazis immediately discount a photo because the it wasn’t “properly exposed.”

I say if it was intentional, let’s actually look at the the photo. Recently on a TWIP Podcast the hosts discussed how John Rooney’s photo of Muhammad Ali standing over Sonny Liston would be ripped to pieces on online photo forums like Flickr or Fred Miranda. Give me a break! If I get one photo like the Ali photo in my life–a photo expressing that much emotion–I’ll be ecstatic.

At the same time, I am tired of seeing lazy photography in the name of art. Come on, at least get it in focus. And if the situation calls for a tripod, use one goddamit! No more of this shaky urban edge photography that has come en vogue recently.

So can we all go out their and shoot some intentional and beautiful photos.

I have a rule of thumb: if more than 10 people are taking pictures of something, it isn’t worth photographing.

Maybe it’s just my aversion to crowds in general but I get really frustrated in crowds where everyone has their camera out. Chase Jarvis has said that if you are intimidated by the twelve year old next to you with an SLR, then this probably isn’t the business for you.

But, it isn’t intimidation I feel. It’s annoyance. It’s that your shot is not going to be unique. You aren’t capturing a moment that would go unnoticed otherwise.

I tried my best to get over my aversion to crowds of photographers this weekend at Walla Walla’s annual Balloon Stampede. I had been romanticizing this event in my head for the past couple weeks–morning light, big, bright objects, and on Saturday Night a balloon glow. I had pictured in my mind’s eye a small gathering of balloon pilots lighting up their balloons for a few hundred people at dusk.
Was I ever wrong.

It was a shitshow to put it mildly. Imagine a few thousand people and a announcer over a PA system telling people how great their pictures would be. Seriously, he was telling the crowd to take photos. I was standing on the rail with amateur photographers to my left and right with their SLRs and just about everyone else was firing off their P&S.

I was sick. I didn’t even get out my camera. I left it on my shoulder the whole time. It was a great show and I am sure that a bunch out people got some great shots. AND THEY ALL LOOKED THE SAME.

I want something unique in my photos. I want my photo show people something they don’t see everyday. I want to show people a different world. But from my angle, it simply wasn’t possible.

I guess this desire for uniqueness is why I became so frustrated by newspaper photography. Almost by definition as a news photog you must go to highly attended events and represent them accurately (read uncreatively).

I fled news photography to the production side of newspapers at the first chance I got–Sophomore year of highschool. I haven’t looked back since.

Give me the remote location. The mountainside. The backcountry ski trip. The splitter crack. The empty landscape. For god’s sake even a city street. But, I’ll leave the shitshows to the pros.

You know that image that you have been imagining for weeks, maybe years. It isn’t that it is too terribly difficult to capture, but life has just gotten in the way.

As graduation draws near signaling the end of my time in the Walla Walla Valley, I wanted to capture the wheat fields that are so striking in the spring.

The first image has (believe it or not) very little in the way of post-processing. Most of the deep blue sky effect comes from a healthy amount of polarization at the end of my lens.

The second image is highly processed. It is my first attempt at High Dynamic Range photography. This one has a 8 stop dynamic range.