“Lucky" Photographer...

I’ll never be a professional photographer. I just don’t have it in me to walk up to total strangers and ask if I can take pictures. It’s even more unnerving when that stranger is a St. Petersburg Police Officer outside of the headquarters in downtown. But that’s what I did. “Hi. I have a photo assignment, can I take some pictures of your car?” "Do you have a class assignment?” Well, not really for a class, but it was an assignment, if only from myself.  

That’s how I found myself in the dirt parking lot with all the off duty police cruisers on Tuesday morning.

Honestly, the officer was very nice, and since she needed to test her lights anyway, she turned them on for me. “It works better at night,” she said. Makes me think she’d had this request before. 

I still did everything wrong. My camera was still set up for the previous shoot. Wrong shutter, wrong aperture. Bad light, bad exposure, really nervous. All my classic mistakes. And trying to capture flashing lights is harder then it looks. I think I only got one shot with both lights lit. But that’s what I had. Maybe a little post-processing could save it.

Make that a lot of post-processing. I cropped the picture a little, changed the exposure level some. Then started playing with filters. I settled on one called “Oil Paint”. Oil Paint smoothed a lot of the gritty dirt on the car roof, as well as the mount for the light bar. The trees in the background warped a little becoming somewhat surreal. The picture is for Edward’s poem Remember.  The quality is somewhat dream like, the way memories sometimes are. The only other adjustment was to tone down some blown out spots in the red light. Not the best way to do it, but in this case I was able to take a bad shot and turn it into something kind cool.

I consider myself to be more of a “lucky" photographer. I’m trying to change that. I’m trying to be more prepared when I go out for a shoot. Trying to get the angles and framing right the first time, as well as the lighting. But I don’t think I’ll ever get past the part where I have to ask people about taking pictures. I’m just not that extroverted. Maybe that, too, will come with practice, but I don’t think so.

Read Edward's poem "Remember" here.