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[OM] [OT] And for Your Next Assignment

Subject: [OM] [OT] And for Your Next Assignment
From: "John A. Lind" <jlind@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 22 Jul 2000 00:21:09 +0000
Read an interesting article in the newspaper yesterday morning.  It was one
of the "filler" types provided by the wire services for those tabloids that
have "all the news that print to fit."

-------------------
The gist of it was many (?? I think it's only some) amateur photographers
spend a lot of time and money traveling to exotic far-away places to take
photographs of exotic far-away places.  These include "photo safaris" that
take their tour crowd of "wanna-be the next Ansel Adams" to the exotic
location at the right time of day, tell them exactly where to stand, which
direction to point the lens, and when to fire the shutter release.  There
are special wild game farms with exotic wild animals to photograph in
pseudo-natural settings also.

The toughest and least photographed area by most amateurs is in their own
home town.  People, places and other things are so familiar that the
interesting is all too easily missed by those that have lived there for a
long time.  Your next assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to
shoot the sights within about 10 miles of your home:  people, animals,
landmarks, historical objects or markers, or interesting architecture and
scenery.  It's a *great* exercise for developing the "mind's eye" or
creating a "vision" for a photograph and makes finding these things in
unfamiliar places that much easier.
--------------

An amazing coincidence, I did this last Sunday, a few days before the
article hit the newspaper.  Shot a 36 frame roll of Kodachrome as part of a
project to build up a small stock of photographs from the city and county.
The author was right.  It's not easy.  Just picked up last weekend's slides
this evening and put a few of them out on the light table to ensure they
were my roll of chromes.  A lady standing next to me remarked that I must
have gone on vacation to some exotic island.  "Nope," I said, "These were
shot at the Kokomo Reservoir last Sunday."  Looking at me in disbelief, she
said "I've lived here for 30 years, no more than a mile from the reservoir,
and I don't ever remember seeing anything there that looked like that!"
"Yep," I replied, "mid-morning, about 10 AM, north side, about half-way
down the reservoir looking west toward the earthen dam in the distance."
The exercise last Sunday was well worth it.  I have a few more chromes for
my slowly growing stock, found a few more things I want to shoot that I
didn't have time for last Sunday, and a few places to visit at a different
time of day (different lighting).

Token OM content:
I used the OM-4 and nearly every Zuiko in the arsenal.  The 35/2.8 shift
got a good workout, but everything from the 18/3.5 super-wide through the
200/4 telephoto got used too.  Some scenes were done with both a wide and a
tele from the same vantage point and using the same view.  Until you
closely examine them and compare a few objects in them, they appear to be
done at completely different locations.

-- John

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