One of my favorite lines in the film La La Land (2016) comes when Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) gets fired from his gig as a restaurant pianist. Not wanting to accept his dismissal, Seb tells his boss, "I hear what you're saying, but I don't think you're saying what you mean . " It made me think about one of the most ubiquitous pieces of advice currently being given to photographers and others in the communications fields: "Engage your audience with compelling content." The buzz phrase "Content Driven" is bandied across the Internet, and from the rooftops of skyscrapers by everyone who communicates a message, image, or concept to an audience of any kind. We are admonished to "...Tell a story to draw your audience in," and "reach them on a deeper level." While I would agree that these ideas are very true , I would also say that - left without any other qualifiers - they are vague. Let me put it this way, if you had a driv
Due to events that would take far too long to explain here, I now find myself working with a camera that I have not used for more than half a decade. Granted, it will largely be used only as a back-up at this point, but the question of why anyone would 'go back' to using such "antiquated" technology as a 10-year old (at the time of this writing) digital camera that is only 12.3 megapixels and has a max ISO of 3200 has an interesting series of answers. Let me cite the method to my madness. The camera in question is a Nikon D-90 with a vertical grip. At the time it was released it was considered a top-shelf pro-sumer model, and it was the definitive purchase that pushed me from film into digital. At 12.3MP, it was quite the heavy hitter for it's time, considering it was not all that many iterations down the line from the days of the "5MP cieling", where even high end DSLRs were still climbing out of the 3.2 range. To show you just how far things have co