Help me narrow down my photos

Everyone likes to express his opinion, so here’s your chance.

I am attempting to whittle down some of the last three years of photos to prepare a selection for my potfolio. This is not easy, because I have a lot of photos.

Here’s your chance to tell me what you think sucks and what you think rocks. You don’t need to be a professional photographer, because professional photographers are usually not hiring photographers. I am looking for man-on-the-street feedback.

However, I do have a few guidelines. Selections should be interesting, or should have some impact. Don’t simply pick pretty colors, and don’t be caught up in HDR where it is used. Especially if a picture uses HDR (such as those in my HDR set), consider whether the use of HDR really makes it a better picture.

You can look through what I shortlisted at www.flickr.com/photos/dsobodash/sets/72157614832630128/.

Please select 10 to 20 photos you like. You can either reply to the photos on Flickr, or send me a list of Flickr photo IDs. If you look in your URL bar while viewing a photo, you will see:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dsobodash/3021835268/

That number in bold is the photo’s ID number. Please submit only that piece. If you give the photo names or try to describe them, it could be difficult to find. You can either reply to this post with your list or mail it to derrick (at) cinnamonpirate (circle thingy) com.

Thank you for your time and effort.

Photo series on hutong demolition finished

We went out the last week of April to a chain of old neighborhoods east of Qianmen that are scheduled for demolition. Some of the homes are just common homes; some of them were the residence of relatives of Qing Dynasty nobles; all of them are coming down.

It took several days to pick through the 4GB of shots, clean them up and get them up on deviantART, but I finished the effort on Monday. I am pretty happy with the series, an it is the first time I have primarily photographed city life, and also the first time I have done so much free-hand work with my new Nikon.

Thumbnails of the series follow the jump. For full resolution photos, check the gallery on Flickr.

New lens is a Sigma

After considerable trials, I finally have a new lens for my Nikon. This gets me past the limits of the Nikkor 18-55mm kit lens it came with and puts me up to the 210mm range, meaning it almost equals the 10x optical zoom of my old Sony Mavica CD-1000.

The Mavica’s optical zoom was near legendary as point-and-shoot cameras go, and I’m glad to have something that can get me into that range again since I enjoy dabbling in macro photography.

Endless thanks go out to scorpio5361, the best Taobao seller ever and a really good guy in general. It’s hard to imagine a seller going to the lengths this guy did to make us happy.

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Retiring the old Mavica

I retired my Sony Mavica CD-1000 this month — just in case I had not told you already. The Mavica was my camera from 2000 to early this year, and it was really showing its age.

While it did take some great pictures over the years, it was very limited. Manual focus did not really work, and auto-focus always chose the wrong subject for every image. My first three years with the camera were spent learning how to trick it into doing what it should have been smart enough to do.

Still, it had some incredible mileage. I filled more than 40 CDs with its images, and still have a spindle of an extra 30 Mavica CDs left over. Unfortunately, since the advent of SD and CF cards, those CDs are increasingly difficult to find, and lugging around a camera with a built-in CD burner just shows what a relic the device was.

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Prints now available from DeviantArt

Several people have commented on the photos randomly displayed at the top of this page, and on those indexed in my Photography page.

I’ve decided to release them for print ordering on DeviantArt, so if you are interested in purchasing prints of any of my photos, you can browse through my DeviantArt prints gallery.

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