All the things that are worth doing, take time. (I’d like to credit someone for this quote, but too many people said it.) Photography for me is a part-time pursuit, so finding time to do it seriously has not been trivial. However, it hasn’t been particularly difficult either. How can this be? Actually, photography is naturally integrated in most of my activities, both within and outside work.
The main part of my work is academic research in fluid mechanics. In my lab, we use flow visualization (photography of fluid flows). While the goals are far from artistic (we measure forces on submerged objects, etc.) and the techniques are highly specialized (we use lasers as light sources, for example), the basic concepts are the same as in conventional photography. So there is considerable cross-pollination between my interests in experimental fluid mechanics and taking pictures.
Family activities are even more easily connected to picture-taking. Photography gives focus to our vacation trips. It keeps us closer to our families and friends all over the World. Sharing my photography skills with friends feels good, because there are not many other options to give something as a gift, without buying it. Photographs are something of value that I can create myself. Hopefully, this makes them more personal as a gift. So doing photography while spending time with family and friends does not take away from personal time, but enhances it.
It is the same with my practice of kendo. Taking pictures of matches and practices is not only interesting from photography point of view, but also allows me to study kendo more deeply. In fact, I wrote about balancing these perspectives in this post.
I believe that if we look at our activities closely enough, we find that there is no such thing as multitasking. Having said this, we do variety of things in our lives, and sometimes certain activities, skills or interests enhance our experiences in other areas.
lens wide open), the distracting colours are still there. Converting the photos to B&W makes the background colours uniform, which enhances apparent subject isolation.
lens on a 
camera body. I set it to a manual mode with f/1.4, 1/200 sec and auto ISO. I found that our daughter moves sufficiently fast, and the camera with the 
, 
) at some point in the editing process. Having said this, time is a very precious resource, and while I am doing fine tweaks, which might not be noticed by anyone, except myself, I am not doing something else, for example, shooting more photos or learning new techniques. In my experience, the “optimal” stopping point in post-processing is actually not a true optimum, in the optimization theory sense of the word. Rather, it is a bit of a moving target. Finding the balance between under- and over-processed image is like riding a bicycle: sometimes, I lean more one way, sometimes – the other. The important thing is doing it consistently and avoiding extremes.
by Richard M. Reis. He describes that people, who are productive academically (read: publish many research papers) trend to work in brief, regular sessions. There is nothing surprising in this (it’s kind of eating an elephant one bite at a time), but in Reis’ observation, both words “brief” and “regular” are important. Brief work periods help avoiding burnout, and regular sessions ensure that progress is being made (otherwise, lots of time would be wasted to re-start the project at the beginning of every session).
lens to shoot the action through transparent plastic panels that surrounded the rink for safety of the fans. The panels were covered with scuff marks from the puck hits, which did not interfere with focussing, since the lens hood was, practically, touching the panels. However, the resulting photos showed significant loss of contrast.
by moving “Blacks” slider to the left until the black levels are clipped (around -75 in most of my images). To compensate for the large amount of light reflected from the ice surface, the “Highlights” slider also has be moved to the left (my typical values were around -50).
(with a crop sensor), which gave him more flexibility of a range of focal lengths without sacrificing the reach at the long end of the zoom range.
– a retouching software that can be called as an add-on from 
, because it can be made grey, by limiting the amount of light shining on it, or any other colour by illuminating it with a spot light with a coloured gel on it. On the other hand, black paper is not as good as fabric for 
are slightly more expensive than paper. They can be changed very easily, and are more durable than paper, but it’s not recommended to stand on them.
is needed for any type of background, and in case of fabric, some 
are very handy.
that brings together variety of styles, subjects and software tools use by some of the best artists in this field.