Photowalk and Photo insights.

This morning after I dropped Eva off at school I decided to go and shoot for an hour. I had no subject in mind except that I would be in Torreon and probably downtown. Yesterday, I bought an article called, "10 ways to improve your craft without buying gear" by David duChemin. I've been following his blog called the pixelated image and like his approach. I have to admit my photography style is kind of spray and pray. Shoot a bunch of images and pray one is good. So today I put my camera on one shot mode and tried (kind of failed) to be more thoughtful in my approach.

I started right at the entrance to our Colonia. Here is a guy selling some brooms off of the front of his bike in front of the big box store Staples. I asked him how business was and if this was a good area to sell. He told me that sales were slow but he likes this corner. Good on him. I saw him later in the day sitting on a box in the shade still with no customers. It's hard to compete with the big box stores.
Back to the photography. It's a pretty bad shot. Why? Because I felt rushed because traffic was heavy and I thought everyone was looking at me. I was feeling self-conscious and wanted to get this one great image and get out. This is what you end up with when you rush. There are so many things I could do to improve this image. The good thing is that I'm sure I'll get my chance since that man will probably be there every morning on my way to work.



Next stop was a street downtown that I had earmarked for a photo shoot last week when I was buying medicine for Joshua and Dana. I'm not sure what happened here but probably with all the rain lately, part of the road got messed up. So here it is, a chair in a hole, with a stick and a flag and a burning can of Nestea alerting people of danger. I was in the middle of the road just in front of this make-shift street sign while cars were whizzing by me. Probably not totally safe but I wanted to get a good image. Not bad, I put some thought into this but the image lacks pop. Still, I like it because it tells a story.



I got back into the van and drove a few more blocks until I came upon this neat wall. I really like this image. I used a Topaz Adjust effect on the image to get it to pop. This was a better attempt at composition.


This is a photo of a tree on the adjacent corner of the previous shot. It's a tree fort. I noticed there were a bunch of pallets, boxes and pieces of plywood in this tree. As I got closer I saw the "tire" swing. I've never seen a tire swing using a BMX tire. I love the imagination of the kids in the area and I'm sure it's a great place to hang out with for the boys of the neighbourhood. On the photography side, I overexposed the tree trunk and really had a difficult time capturing the fort. I felt like I couldn't find the right angle to shoot.



This old truck had seen better days. I tried a couple of different angles but liked this one the best.


The next two shots were taken from my van window and were not intended to be great shots by any means. I took these next two images only to document the lighter side of Torreon. Maybe this place is a "snake" bar. However, I'm willing to guess that's a typo...I guess google translator didn't really work so well for the owner of this restaurant.


Next week is Independence Day in Mexico. I suppose one of the things to do is to buy a bigote or mustache so that you can look like Pancho Villa. Naturally, I had to make this image and buy a bigote. (Guess what I'll be bringing to the next Nerdfest? A box of these badboys)


Eva and Micah were very excited about trying out their new toy. I even added a little old school B&W to enhance the Pancho Villa feel.





The original quest this morning was to be more thoughtful in my approach to photography. For the most part I did this. Did I come back with awesome images? Not really, but I did learn more about photography.