Digital Photography in Practice

Welcome to the musings of The Roving Photographer. My name is Theodore, but please call me Ted.

While many pages of ImproveYourDP take an objective, instructional tone, I have been enlisted to provide a more personal, off-the-cuff perspective on our favorite hobby.

We read so much about the technical aspects of photography that we often forget about the more elusive qualities of spontaneity and serendipity. To be sure, it is important to master compositional guidelines and the mechanical craft of photography.

But, what gets me excited are the unforeseen events that make me drop whatever I am doing to go find my camera. After all, it is ultimately the subjects we photograph that give the hobby meaning.

With the The Roving Photographer, I hope to complement the formulas of CSE with stories that arise from being in the right place at the right time. With luck, I'll help you discover photo opportunities that you may not have recognized in the past.

Let's begin with an example, an adventure series that I'll call...

The Roving Photographer's Clouds of Serendipity

"Adventure" may be a bit of an overstatement, but to a guy with a steady job - not in photography - any chance to pursue something new with a camera is truly an adventure.

That one chance encounter led to many different photo ops, with subjects ranging from wildflowers to wild fowl, from pipes to waterfalls, from ferris wheels to General George A. Custer. Five trips alone were made in pursuit of lotus blossoms.

And, of course, there were people. Gardeners, to be precise. Two of them.

Which takes me back to the woman in the field. She was a volunteer gardener helping out at a local hospice. She asked, "Would I take pictures of the volunteers who tended one of the gardens every Sunday morning?" She wanted to use the pictures in the garden club newsletter. I saw a chance to brush up on my people photo skills with relatively little risk.

I showed up the next Sunday, camera in hand, to see what I could learn.

Follow me, The Roving Photographer, through that initial photo shoot and into the other spontaneous adventures that originated on that cloudy day.

(I will add a new photo op diary every few weeks or so. If you subscribe to my Roving Photographer's blog, you'll know when to check out the next episode.)