quarterto.tomorrow's photostream

Hot Damn, it's Photography, or A Brief History of Stuff, by Matt Brennan.

Cameras. I use them. I have for a while. My first digital isn't worth mentioning. It was a 2 megapixel Olympus C three hundred and something. That was 2002. My current phone's better, and that's crap.

Skip to '06, and I get a Mustek DV video camera for Christmas. It also does 5mp photos. It... let's say it had its faults. One of them being an aversion to light, in any form. Take it out in anything less than overcast, it'd be like, "WOAH, PHOTONS! YOU LIKE HIGHLIGHTS? SCREW YOU!" and the screen'd go white. Well, I say white; the sensor was... let's say colourful. As in literally colourful, moving from purple on the left through red to mint green. Somehow, I managed with this camera 'til '09.

Which happened to be when I was subject to a hand-me-down-style operation, albeit accidentally. My mum lent me her old Sony for a trip to Valencia; I still have it. It's rather awesome for a 5-year-old camera. It even did exposure bracketing. Most of my HDRs for '09 are shot with this camera.

The rest are with my Nikon D5000. In stark contrast to the old Mustek, it's a camera that also does video. It just so happens that said video is much better that the Mustek's. Also, it takes [superlative] photos, much [comparative] than any camera I've owned. They're so [adjective] your eyes bleed (DISCLAIMER: your eyes will not bleed). See for yourself.

Photos. I take them. Usually this involves making photons pass through a series of tubes pieces of curved glass to hit some kind of light-sensitive surface, but not always.

I rather like light and colour and how they fool about behind the bike sheds and get caught by Shannon, who takes a picture on her phone, bringing me back from my metaphor-related digression. Unfortunately, all it brings me back to is a digression on the digression; a metadigression, if you will.

Let's just hope I don't go off on a tangent to discuss metadigression.


Wait, what?


Light. Colour. Stuff.

Many of my photos are enhanced in post production; unlike eyelashes in a mascara advert, however, it is an attempt to try and insert realism, to capture a scene as it was, there and then. The human eye has a dynamic range of roughly 1,000,000:1, and since no device can capture this, many are left with black shadows and white highlights. An oft-touted method of solving this is HDR, but this is usually abused to create hyperreal or surreal images. If I ever do use HDR, don't expect crazy colours and luminescent skies, just a more real image.

Most of the time, I just bump down the blacks, notch up the highlight recovery, add some vibrance and turn the clarity up to eleven.

If you're still reading this, seek help. And enjoy the pixels.

\Matt