Poking Badgers With Spoons

Relic of the Past – A photo by tanuki_green on Flickr
© Ryan Nutick – 2013

Prints of this photo are available for sale at Tanuki Photography on A Rising Tide.

Lark in the Dark, a photo by tanuki_green on Flickr.

I guess you could say I’m a musical person–I used to play the trumpet and the french horn. I sang in a choir and performed in musical theater. I am a Rock Band god. But when it comes down to it, I’m not a musician.

I perform what’s given to me, I can even add my own spin to it, but I can’t just create music. I’ve tried. The best I could come up with is cliched lyrics and extremely derivative melodies. I’ve tried poetry and writing short stories; I’m just not that particular brand of creative. What I can do, though, is take pictures. I love photography and the process I go through that gives me freedom to explore images and present them in a way you might not have seen before.

I may not be a musician, but I’m making music now…it’s just with photography.

The Locks and the Garden, a photo by tanuki_green on Flickr.

Walls. Barriers. Limitations. Whether they are imposed upon us by an external force or by ourselves they are there. Whether they are keeping something out or keeping something in, they are there. The trick is using these to our advantage. Learn from them.

In my case, I’ll impose a limitation on myself for during a photo shoot to help me be more creative. I was doing a shoot last night where I imposed the limitation of only using one specific lens. By doing this it really forced me to think about they way I compose the shot in the camera, how I use the light around me, etc. It made me think more about the shot I wanted to get and how to best get it.

And I couldn’t be more happy with both the photos from that shoot and with the lessons learned from doing this. It’s a valuable technique from the toolkit.

Moonlight, a photo by tanuki_green on Flickr.

Here in the Pacific Northwest we have well earned reputation for bad weather and grey skies. We often hear about amazing astronomical things like eclipses, auroras, and meteor showers but because we’re all too often shrouded in layers of thick, grey clouds, we rarely have the opportunity to see what Nature is showing off.

Back in 2008 I heard there would be a full lunar eclipse in the month of February–one of those dark, grey months. I was certain it would be another cloudy night where I’d miss out on one of those rare and beautiful events that I have heard so many people speak of with awe and wonder; when it turned out to be a clear, cloudless night I jumped at the opportunity to break into a new category of photography and try my hand at night shots of the moon. Armed with my Canon PowerShot S3IS in one hand and a tripod in the other I set up and took some nice, long exposure shots.

This one is of the moon nearing its full eclipse.

One of the lessons I took away from this night is to take every opportunity as it is presented. To be honest, that wasn’t the first time I’d learnt that lesson, but that time it stuck and it’s one I keep close to the heart these days.

Seanan’s Dolls, a photo by tanuki_green on Flickr.

Happy Monday, everyone. Here’s hoping you had as wonderful a weekend as I did. Today’s photo comes from a collection of photos I took back in February of this last year when I went to visit Seanan McGuire.

This is just one of the many dolls in her collection that I had the privilege of shooting. There’s a haunting beauty about these dolls and I look forward to, at some point, doing another round of these pics.

This shot was taken with my Canon EOS Rebel T2i. The lens info is not listed in the EXIF data, but I’m fairly certain this was taken with my Series E 50mm 1:1.8 lens.