e-510 50mm 1/400 f/9 iso 100

i like this photo. but of course, it came from the same series as the california poppies i made two posts about last month, and there were many just like it and the others from the shoot. i rediscovered it the other day when i used it to help explain depth of field, bokeh, and why i adore the particular lens i used to a couple of people i informally tutor in the more basic aspects of photography. the photograph got enthusiastic nods of approval from them, and so i have decided upon an experiment.

i've always maintained the obvious: that this site is really just my personal vanity site and not any sort of portfolio. most of my readership, if i'm not much mistaken, are fellow photographers of various levels, and, mostly, when i choose photographs to head up these pages it is with them, you, in mind - i try to keep up a certain standard of quality and a reasonable frequency of posting, and i always hope to at least once a month or so to wow at least some of my target audience with something i am myself thrilled with. to that end, i exercise a lot of self-censorship when it comes to what appears on this site, and the photograph above, largely because i liked other, similar ones from the same shoot and posted them here, didn't make the cut.

again, i like this photo. had i taken it 10 or even five years ago, it would have blown my mind, i would have regarded it as by far the best photograph i'd ever taken. but these days, especially for my imagined photog readership, well, given a good lens and camera and pretty normal early autumn light and a bit of experience, it's wasn't a hard photograph to make at all. if you knew i used a 1:1 macro prime for the shot on a four-thirds mount, you could easily guess within a stop which aperture i used.

i was reading just last week that fine art photography is about making quality photographs for sure, but once those are in the bag it's all about marketing. and especially in fine art, its not at all about what it looks like on a webpage but rather how someone, almost always a non-photographer, envisions that image in print on a wall in their home or office. fine art isn't necessarily about winning photo contests, though that's always nice, it's about appealing to and becoming part of someone's lifestyle.

so anyway, getting back to the gist, i got those nods from those people from what to my mind is a technically stunning but easy to make photograph. i think it's well-composed but hardly novel in that (or any) respect. i think it's nice to look at, and then i thought back to those reflections on marketing mentioned above. so today, since i was doing a print run of other photos to fulfill orders today, i took the above image, straight off the card (it was shot regular quality jpeg and not raw), did an 11x14 aspect crop and took it just like that to the lab with the others. aside from the crop, i did no post-production at all, not even sharpening for print, not even upping the res from the native 72dpi.

the prints have come back from the lab, and they look really good, and it's been matted and put up in the public space where i often share my prints. and while i still feel the same way about it as i always have, it's already generated a very positive response; the lay-public, it seems, unlike we photographers, don't see such a picture as an everyday shot. who knows, i might even sell a few. and that's the nature of the experiment. let you know how it goes.