Mischievous Technology

I was just reading an older blog post over at Strobist which reminded me just how much 'other' fun you can have with some of the technology we have in our hands these days.

I must admit, on a number of occasions I have travelled down a similar path to the story David Hobby describes in his post, using technology for a bit of self indulgent fun at someone else's expense (only ever in a way that causes minimal stress/carnage ie. I wouldn't mess with an actual shoot in progress or damage someone's reputation). Other than fooling with the wireless technology to randomly trigger someone else's strobes, you can also have some awesome fun hiding flash units in concealed areas and then popping of a burst of light with a wireless trigger at an appropriate moment... works great when combined with recordings of storm audio played just loud enough to get people wondering what's going on outside - especially when it's blue sky & cloudless. Hey, who ever said immature behaviour and photography didn't go hand-in-hand?

One thing to bear in mind with all this fun is that the universe will balance the ledger at some point...  what goes around comes around. So have fun, be mindful of the situation you are about to mess with, and keep your sense of humour on hand for the day the tables may be turned.

Fresh Eyes & New Ideas

Recently I was going through a lot of my old images -  primarily to update my filing system, or rather to bring the older stuff in line with the way I have settled on doing things now.

I didn't get very far. As often seems to happen, I go for a trip down memory lane instead of getting on with the sorting and filing. And inevitably, I end up 'playing' with a number of the images too, as I've found that with the time that's passed between the shooting of a lot of these older images, my post processing skills & tastes have changed, and I often end up getting different or better results. Sometimes I find images that I had completely forgotten about or overlooked initially too, which now suddenly grab my attention and ask to be given another chance. New software, improved skills, better understanding of my 'style' - all these things keep me from the initial job at hand - but for the better.

Coincidentally, another great photographer and trainer I follow, Scott Kelby, has posted similar thoughts on a recent blog of his here which you may want to have a read of.