FotoGeekTerri's photostream

What do software, college fees/tuition, and my photos have in common? THEY'RE NOT FREE!

In other words, don't just snatch my photos off here ok. I'm a broke college student. I can make arrangements with you if you want a file or print. I'm not watermarking these photos due to the fact that I'm using this site for the vast majority of my printing needs, so be cool and make arrangements with me if you want something.

Moving right along now that all that's settled.

I'm a photojournalist, with a huge interest in sports photography. Alas, my internship doesn't pay the bills (it doesn't pay at all actually), so I do little side projects and such to make a little cash to do the stuff I actually want to do.

On Flickr in general:
Owning a camera (or especially a cell phone) does not make you a photographer. If you post on flickr poorly composed or blurry shots, don't be suprised if you get comments saying you suck. Usually I don't comment on such photos, but when I do I try to be somewhat constructive.

By the way, I'm dead serious about that first sentence. Don't be an asshole and ruin the photography industry.

On Photoshop/editing:
I use Photoshop CS3 to make any adjustments to my photos. For the most part, I try to keep the editing to things that could also be achieved by hand in a darkroom. Generally the only things I do to my photos are: crop/resize, darken/lighten (via levels or exposure usually depending on what needs to be done), contrast adjustment, and spot removal. Unless something gets on my lens or filter that comes up in the file, I usually don’t have to do much of the spot removal.

Very rarely do I remove odd foreign objects (distracting electrical lines, odd birds in flight in the far off distance, etc). If I ever do, it’s always the artsy stuff I do for myself or for the side stuff I do for other people. When it comes to the photojournalism stuff, I never do.

Otherwise, if it’s obviously something that can’t be done in camera (part color and part black and white or weird giant fruit coming out of the sky comes to mind) then yeah of course it was done in Photoshop. The painting with light stuff, no that’s all camera.

On color versus black and white:
Any time I spend a good amount of time around a photography class at Sac City, the color vs. black and white debate seems to come up at some point. In the end, there’s one question: What side are you on?

Somehow picking sides is supposed to make you more who-knows-what as a photographer. I don’t know, and I really don’t care. I can go on and on with the arguments for both, but really what does it matter? I say it depends on the shot. What is the shot intended for? Who is it intended for? With grayscale (or whatever method used to convert into black and white), why not have a version of both?

If it matters, I almost always shoot in color and switch it or make a copy later if I want something in black and white. The only exceptions to that being most of the Found in Transition stuff or when I’m in the mood to shoot in black and white.

On the order of my photostream
Welcome to the most irrelevant portion of this profile.

I get the idea of Flickr not giving people the ability to edit the order of their photostream. I really don’t want to go to someone’s page and try to figure out where the new stuff is, so I generally like the concept of the newest stuff being towards the front.

The only problem is that I’m somewhat disorganized in my photo editing and posting. I’ll get an assignment for my internship, and I’ll have a lot of shots from that. I’ll work on editing that stuff, upload a few and things are going great as far as getting that stuff done…for a while. Next thing you know another assignment will come up or a major side project will come up that puts the stuff I was working on in the back seat.

Just keep in mind that the first few pages might not always be the newest shots. If your looking for something in particular, your safest bet is looking through my collections.