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This photo was a total accident, but I've really found myself drawn to it.  I was zeroing in on an exposure -- my biggest takeaway from the Maine workshop was that one reason I hated digital images I'd made was that I'd been letting the camera call the shots on the exposure, so now I do everything manually.  Which means, sometimes, I miss wildly on my first few frames and they're crazy dark or way blown out.  I took successfully exposed images after this one, but this is the one I keep going back to.  Sometimes our accidents turn out better than our intended efforts....

36

Thanks, everyone, for the well-wishing and supportive messages I got wishing me luck on this photo assignment.  It was a feature story for the Baltimore CityPaper, about a once-beloved local beer -- National Premium -- that disappeared 15 years ago and is now being resurrected by a local businessman.  My job was to meet the businessman at the brewery and get a variety of shots to illustrate this.  Once upon a time I would have been apprehensive about taking this job because I have struggled so mightily to make pictures I like, using digital cameras.  For the past few years I've ended up hating the results of  pretty much every assignment I've shot. 

I left feeling pretty good about this one, though.  In Maine I'd made some peace with digital, and felt more like this would work, that I would make some photos I actually like.  It was a good experience -- the guy was friendly and, although he would pretty much just woodenly stand there waiting for me to take his picture, he would stand anywhere I asked.  After Andrea's class this time around I felt much more comfortable being very directive -- stand here, hold your head this way.  So instead of just photographing whatever happened to happen, I made some things happen, and that felt good.

So what might be funny about that experience is that the picture I like best is this one, a grab shot at the very end when he was walking out.  Which is exactly how I've always worked.