Shutterbugs

Featuring Mike Baird

In this monthly feature some of our best local photographers share their passion for capturing beautiful and fascinating images. You will find more of their work on various photo sites, like Flickr, and in our own Great Shots section. This month Mike Baird has been invited to talk about his interest in photography and to share some tips with you.

Photography, for me, is mostly an excuse to get outside, socialize with others, and document and better appreciate nature in my role as a State Park docent.  For people like me with almost no artistic ability to paint or sketch, photography is an opportunity to accidentally make an image that may greatly entertain myself or others.  A photo taken but not shared might just as well have never been taken.  

Creation of such intellectual property for single instance use, which is not propagated or otherwise preserved, may be largely a wasted effort when seen in the grander scheme of things.  It is human nature to want to share our experiences with others. Photo sharing using a Flickr group and a Yahoo! Group like mine—Photo Morro Bay and Yahoo Group Photo Morro Bay—for discussion and event scheduling, has become a "Facebook equivalent" social outlet for over 300 local SLO County photographers.  

These diverse individuals collaborate via Photo Morro Bay, which is a social network I opportunistically put together in 2006 while collecting information for an article ("San Luis Obispo County California Nature Photographers -- Their Works and Techniques: Interviews With Local Nature Photographers About How They Take Such Great Photos") for the Central Coast Natural History Association's Nature Notes Newsletter. By the time you finish this article, you too may begin to better "get it" as to why photo sharing has become such a powerful social instrument worldwide.  

Working with Your Images

Taking good photos is part luck, part practiced technique, and skilled limited computer postprocessing.  No matter how good a photo you take, it can be improved and be made closer to reality (or into an artistic distortion of reality, if that is your pleasure), through the use of proper photo enhancement and normalization techniques.  In fact, if you shoot in RAW format, you have to make a JPG conversion decision, if nothing more than to poke "auto" in Lightroom to yield more-or-less what your camera would do if you had set it to record in a lossy JPG format.  

Shoot using the highest resolution and image quality settings your camera supports (RAW if you have it).  Good basic equipment (camera body/sensor, lenses, tripod, etc.) does make a difference.  Good equipment does not make a professional, but a professional photographer needs reasonably good equipment.  My basic set-up is all Canon -- but Nikon users love their equipment just as well.  Buy the brand that the people you will be shooting with use, to best be able to learn from each other.

Every serious photographer should acquire Lightroom or Photoshop and learn how to do cropping, basic image contrast and levels enhancement, and sharpening.   Adobe Lightroom is my software of choice for preparing my RAW photos for publication on Flickr.  Computer post-processing techniques complement photographic skills, and the sum of the two bests either approach used alone.  

 Improving your technique minimizes the need for such enhancements.  However, many handheld shots are not going to be perfectly parallel to the horizon; a shot perfectly focused on the eye of your moving subject may, by necessity, be poorly composed by being in the exact geometric center of the frame (versus the more pleasing rule of "thirds") , but such defects are often easily corrected in Lightroom, Photoshop or similar software.

Etiquette dictates that photos, "excessively manipulated" beyond say what could have been done in a chemical darkroom of the past, are best annotated accordingly.

Share Your Work

I encourage you to freely share your photos.  It's the best way to promote your skills and end up selling more of your images than you might do otherwise.  I say in my Flickr profile that "Life is short, and I get a kick out of seeing others enjoy my images in a responsible way. My motivation for freely sharing almost all of my photographs without compensation, and for almost any purpose, comes from my interest in contributing to a legacy, which I define as the bits one leaves behind on the internet."

To emphasize how Flickr facilitates collaboration, a popular photo on my Flickr photostream will have over 100,000 views, be favorited by 400 people, receive 150 comments, and will be invited to 60 groups.  If you Google Images "mike baird 'morro bay,' '' you get 27,400 hits, most of which will be authorized re-uses of my photos under the Creative Commons Attribution license associated with most of my images at Flickr.  If you hit Wikipedia and type in the name of any local bird or mammal, it is highly likely that one of my photos is featured on the related description page.  I didn't put any of them there, others did.  The related Wikimedia resource page has 244 of my photos utilized Wikimedia-Mike Baird.  

I throw these numbers out not to impress you, but to encourage you to start taking and sharing your photos.  It opens up conversations from around the world, from editors, scientists, and students interested in your impressions of the world.  

I was a computer scientist, author of a best-selling startup business book eysu, and an entrepreneur at Ask.com during the insane Internet IPO days in Silicon Valley ten years ago. Now I enjoy sharing my passion for photography here on the Central Coast.  You are welcome to email me or join our Photo Morro Bay Yahoo! and Flickr Groups.

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Monarch Butterfly on Banner by Mike Baird