Welcome!

6FPS V0#0

This isn't officially the first issue of 6FPS, but I wanted to drop a note to those of who've subscribed to say thank you, and to give you a bit of an update on how things are progressing.

I have, after chatting with a number of you, decided to set up my discussion/feedback area as a mailing list. It's called 6fps-chat and you're to join it or not: completely optional, but it'll be the most direct way to contact me and I hope to see some of you there.

My decision came down to either that or a slack room, and I decided that a discussion mailing list was a bit retro, but then so is moving back to mailing lists as a way to best connect to people, no? If your experience with mailing lists is Yahoo (shudder) or Google Groups (smaller shudder), note that it's hosted on groups.io, which has some nice modern features including an RSS feed if you want that, and it's run by the person who wrote the original Yahoo groups software before Yahoo bought it and then ignored it and let it rot.

Schedules

My current plan is to release the first official issue around the first of August. I have some more behind the scenes work to do this week, and next week I'm in New Orleans no a business trip and don't expect to have time for much else. I still have design work on this newsletter itself, but also a rewrite of the front page of the web site, and my smugmug site is about to get scraped to the bare walls and redone from scratch in a project I've long been thinking of doing.

Bonuses!

For those of you reading this, a bit of a future bonus: I'm going to capture the names of the first 100 subscribers as the early adopter club, and I plan on doing a few nice things exclusively for that group. I don't exactly know what it'll be yet, but stay tuned. I really appreciate those who are signing on without actually seeing what I'm doing, and I want to say thank you for doing that.

One thing

I'm going to keep this short, but before I go, one of the items I plan on doing every issue is called One Thing, and it is the one thing I feel is worth your time even if you're super busy and don't have time to read the rest of the issue. My goal is to try to curate a shorter list of things so that you can spend more time exploring content and less time searching through the piles of mediocre stuff for the interesting bits.

This non-issue's one thing is the 2018 Audubon Photography Awards. None of my photos made the cut, which is fine, because I look at the photos that did and feel both intimidated and inspired; sometimes, in all honesty, I look at the photos that win a contest and think "Oh, okay", but this collection blew me away with a consistently high quality and some stunning action work.

And if you're curious how the winners get chosen, Alan Murabayashi was one of the judges, and he wrote about the process on Petapixel. There's some fascinating insight into some of the subtle details that went into making decisions, and I'll specifically call out the discussion on how a hummingbird picture could stand out from the crowd of zillions of perfectly framed, highly saturated and mostly interchangeable images you see out on the internet -- and then look at the image they chose. Stunning piece.

I was talking about that a bit with other photographers this week in terms of Sunset photos: too many photographers think that stunning color makes for a stunning image, when in fact these days it's simply table stakes. What makes a great sunset photo is not the sunset, but the image the sunset takes to the next level.

Does the photo work without the color? Shift the image to black and white and study the composition and tonality. If the image fails as a black and white image, then all the saturation in the world isn't going to save it.

See you in a couple of weeks

And with that, I'll see you around the first of August once I get the construction dust settled down a bit more. I'd love you feedback on the new 6fps landing page and please let me know if you run into errors or other problems. And please consider subscribing to 6fps-chat so we can turn this into a conversation instead of a lecture....

Take care, and have fun.

Chuq

Copyright © 2018 Chuq Von Rospach, All rights reserved.