House-warming party - prep and post
I'm still recovering from massive busy-ness, so therefore no/few photos are being posted these days. However, Matt has been taking photos from my digital point-and-shoot and posting them on his site.
We've been having crazy fun times with my friends and housemates here. Yesterday was our house-warming party (which was a bit of a photo exhibition for me, too). We did a bunch of prep on Saturday, after a long night out on Friday, which followed hijinks from Thursday.
The photo exhibit part of house-warming party was very well-received by people. It feels gratifying to know that people really liked the photographs that were hanging on the walls. There was so much more I could have improved, however - from the technical aspects of taking the photos (most of them were done on my Canon S30 point-and-shoot - which goes to prove a point that one doesn't need a super fancy camera - like the Canon 10D which I also have - to make good photography), the post-processing (30 minutes on Friday night for some 40 photos reproduced at A3 and larger sizes - which is 10x15 and 12x18), and the layout of the photos on the walls (I have really no experience with that, so Xia guided us through that).
Several of our guests were photographers of some esteem, and they had some great things to say. After we had cleaned up, we sat around doing a further critique of my photographs. It was really refreshing to hear his and Xia's comments. There were some deficiencies I knew about, but also some issues I hadn't thought about.
Some issues include: being careful of what is at/near the edges of the frame/viewfinder, cropping (Matt is interested in my idea of crop bracketing - taking photos that are "tight" and then "environmental" or loose), showing photos "as is" (on the wall, without captions, where the viewer must dig out context from the photos themselves) versus photos used for, say, photo essays.
So, if you want to have a good look of these photos, the best thing is to visit me - like what Craig did (although he hasn't seen the photos on prints) and what Matt is doing.
Well, ok, I'll be posting up photos of the party, and they'll have some snippets of the photos decorating our living spaces.