What is extraordinary?

What makes anything extraordinary? Good question, I am taking Chinese 1, and English 1; nothing to be excited about over Chinese...Bo Po Mo Fo De Te Ne Le... The English professor asked a pretty good question. What makes a good writer? My answer will have to be practice, and some common sense.

So... I just posted a picture of my toys, and then wrote about my two classes I attend. Yeah, I can see where my blog is heading. Boring senseless piece of crap.

All joking aside. When you think about a famous writer, you would not think that he would write anything crappy. You might think, he wrote a best seller, he must be damn good all the time! There is a reason why great writers can only release so many books over their lifetime. The simple fact that... they are just regular writers who practiced a lot and with a little common sense, publishes only their best work. What does a writer have to do with a picture of camera and equipment? Read on, you will find out soon enough.

I've notice many individuals are purchasing expensive camera equipment... but produce nothing but less than stellar results. Most of the work out there with $800.00 plus in cost of equipment can be reproduced by my Konica KD-500z featured in this photograph. Yes, the camera is well over seven years old, and yes, it was one hell of an expensive toy seven years ago. Actually, sometimes I produce better work than some less than knowledgeable individuals. Am I that good? No, I am just an amateur with some common sense! If I take 200 pictures, I usually end up with 10 presentable pictures, and that is all I would present to people if they asked me, "So what kind of pictures did you take?" Why do I do this? COMMON SENSE. If you see dazzling results the first time around, even if I later produce some half-ass work, it will still look outstanding. This is because my work is more or less associated with quality. Why on earth would you want to carry about 3 lbs to 7 lbs worth of camera and lenses to produce SNAP SHOTS? Try not posting pictures with NOTHING in focus, unless its intended for art, which I highly doubt, if there are 2 people standing there smiling but out of focus and shows camera shake! That is piss poor photography. It ruins the name of photography. No one cares about that picture of your box standing up against a wall with normal room lighting and shitty white balance because you didn't adjust your white balance. I was there once, I learned my lesson real fast. No boring subjects unless its for personal viewing. No crapshoot photography and uploading it on the internet. And god damn it people, use autofocus, your slow inaccurate manual focus is slow and crappy! You paid almost a grand to shoot manual? What the hell is wrong with you people, go get a film camera and shoot manual for 200 dollars! Might as well shoot film if you want that much quality in your work that you don't even trust your high tech expensive camera to do!

Yes, manual focus can be handy, but it should be used to fine adjust your autofocus if it seems to be consistently off! It can be useful for tripod macro work... hell if I can make my camera zoom for me without twisting that stupid ring, I would. Then comes the "you get lazy" argument, no.. "you miss a shot" is the counter point. Why drive an automatic Mercedes C63? Because that god damn gear box can out shift your pathetically physically limited kick-the-clutch-pull-out-of-gear-put-into-gear-release-clutch movement. For the records all my cars are manual... Unless I can afford to drive high end automatic.

Why am I acting as if I am aggravated? Well... I paid good money for my gear, and worked hard to get some half decent results... to see a bunch of people spend more money than me on gear and make crapshoots! Hell, I will trade you my less than new equipment for your new equipment and I will teach you how to use it better than you can learn yourself in 2 months! If you want to learn manual, go shoot film! I got two film camera all manual waiting for you! Let me use your high end autofocus digital gear, and you can use my manual film gear. Don't pay for what you don't use.

Now if you are going to buy the latest and greatest, at least learn how to use it. And stop posting crap up because your work will be associated with crap, even if you gain "experience" you will still be seen as a joke by many. Example: HYUNDAI. They made crap, and seriously they make some pretty decent cars now... but in my mind... once crap, always crap. If it took you so long to learn something or improve, how long would it take you to step up to the next level?

Get with the game guys. I am not even good at photography, I lack creativity but I know all of my outdated gear posted above can make better photographs than most of you out there with the expensive stuff. Again, this is because I only show 2% of my work... the only 2% that is good.