A few nice cool car pictures with girls images I found:
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Image by andyi
Yes, the first image…in every sense of the word!
This is the photo that kicked off a lifetime interest in photography. It was taken during our big 7th or 8th-grade class trip to New York City…specifically on the ferry to the Statue of Liberty.
I’d always had fun taking snapshots. So much fun that for Christmas that year, my folks gave me a Kodak 110 camera with fold-out flash and variable-focus. It wasn’t much, really, but it was definitely a cut above the hand-me-down cartridge cameras i’d been playing with up to that point.
The ferry was loaded with kids from all sorts of classes and from all sorts of places. I think the boat was still too far away to get any good shots of the Statue, so I was fiddling with the settings, loading a new film cartridge…something that apparently called attention to the fact that I had a camera.
My focus on my camera was pulled away by a gaggle of girls.
"Oooooh! they pealed. "Take our picture! Take our picture!" they urged.
In the field of dog training, this is what is known as a Positive Reinforcement Experience. To summarize:
1) Four cute girls were very, very pleased to see me and were eagerly interacting with me. A career first.
2) Amazingly, I got them to do stuff. Another career first. In my previous semesters in junior high, even the straightforward and sensible request "Please stop sqwooshing tater tots into my locker through the ventilation slots every day after lunch" would fall on deaf ears.
3) First instance of "camera as means of initiating a conversation." It’s not that I rely on this, but I’m still amazed at how easy it is to get into conversation with people if you’re taking pictures.
4) Very cute girls. For the love of God…must I spell it out to you?
I mean, seriously. I had no idea who they were; they could have lived one town away or clear off in California as far as I knew. I think (and this photo tends to bear out) that they were even a couple of years older than me at the time. They look to be 14 or 15.
5) When I got my prints back, the envelope contained the usual snapshotty images. Hey, it’s the Statue of Liberty. Hey, it’s a bunch of cars in the street. Hey, it’s a big ivory thing at the UN. The sort of shot where anybody could have held a camera in the air and squeezed the shutter and gotten it.
(Nowadays, as I’m triaging my latest shots I look at that sort of image and think "this is a picture of nothing." I still come home with way too many of these. It’s not a picture of anything unless there’s a noun, a verb, and an object.)
But this one was way different. Even apart from the Very Cute Girls angle, it really stood out. It was compelling; it had an energy and an "eye" that I couldn’t remember seeing before. It reminded me of a lot of my favorite photographs. Not in the sense that it was as well-shot, but because it really justified its existence.
If I ever heal the planet through the art of photography and a movie is made of my life, the screenwriter will put me at the photo counter of Lechmere’s thrusting this print in the air and (like young Bruce Wayne at the feet of his murdered parents) swearing that my life now had meaning and focus.
In truth, I just took away the lesson that some photos simply work better than others…and there are reasons why. Even twenty years later, this shot is a super example of fundamental photographic lessons that I wouldn’t explicitly learn for another year or two. Get in close; fill the whole damned frame; people should be filled with energy, not just waiting for you to snap the picture; don’t just pose people…talk to them, interact, be an active part of the shot.
It also possibly demonstrated the most important lesson of all: don’t knock dumb luck. I didn’t know those lessons at the time. It’s just that the ferry was really crowded and I couldn’t move back and I wanted to take the picture before these wonderful girls came to their senses.
(Too bad I hadn’t learned the lesson "a camera’s built-in flash isn’t just for indoor shots".)
Tonight I was testing out a new, cheap scanner that can also handle film and slides. Just the other day I was cleaning up my office and came across my very first photo album…and hey, cool, it contained this print and an envelope containing a bunch of negatives…including this one.
I could have scanned the photo, or I could have cleaned up the nicks on the negative, but I like it as is. And it’s actually way better than the print.
I wonder how that junior high student would react if I told him what photography would be like these days. Even leaving digital SLRs out of it…he knew a world where you’d fill out a form and put it in an envelope with a negative and hand it to someone across the counter and then wait a week. And you got whatever you got.
Today, I slap the negative in a very affordable machine. Five minutes later, I’m adjusting exposure points, manipulating colors, adjusting contrast, saturation, tint, and a bunch of other curves…and ten minutes later, merely on a whim, I’ve published it so that the world can see it.
Cool.
063/365
Image by overseastom
Another quick edit for my post tonight cos I don’t have much much time – I’m about watch a film with my bro 
Tags:Cool, girls, images, pictures, today
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