Drink-and-Click in Gothenburg

Akram Ahmet posed in front of the camera, while I held the flash and clicked.

I was at my first Drink-and-Click yesterday. Drink-and-Click is a kind of super relaxed photo walk, where you walk from one watering hole to another, taking pictures in-between watering holes. Or, sometimes, in the watering hole.

I should point out that the "drink" part of the name does not refer to alcohol. I stuck to Coca-cola and Ginger Ale. Drink-and-Click is about meeting socially, taking pictures together, and talking about photography. And that we did.

The Gothenburg Drink-and-Click group maintains pages on Facebook and Google+. The event I went to has a G+ event page with some beautiful pictures.

My leading line contribution.

The evening had two themes:

Leading lines was the official Drink-and-Click theme. The second theme was long exposure photography.

One of the greatest features of the evening, was a pit stop at a restaurant. We had a nice dinner, and talked long exposure photography.

As it turned out, while several of us shot pictures with leading lines, the topic we talked most about was long exposure photography.

I went for light painting as an added extra. If you follow this blog, you already know I use the Cheng/Ch'i principle in my photography. Cheng/Ch'i (orthodox/unorthodox) is a military principle, from Sun Tzu's The Art of War, that says victory comes from a mixture of orthodox and unorthodox maneuvers.

Translated into photography, Cheng/Ch'i means a good picture should surprise you a bit. Or, if you have a collection of "orthodox" pictures, add one or two with a bit of extra oomph.

One interesting topic that came up, is how to select the pictures you want to show. For example, during the evening, I shot about 100-200 pictures. Out of those, I selected twenty-six that I transferred from my camera to my computer. Of those twenty-six, I selected eight that I like. From those, I chose three for this article.

That is pretty heavy culling. There are two more pictures that are good enough for publishing, but the style is different from the pictures you have seen here, so I am saving them for another blog post. And, there is one picture I like a lot, except there is way too much noise in it.

As a photographer, culling like this is difficult to do, but it does improve the end result, a lot. It is also technically easy: You do not have to know anything about image editing in order to not show an image. technically is even easier and more effective than cropping. Emotionally, it is darn difficult.

Why not have a look at your own pictures. What if, out of a hundred pictures, you showed only the five best ones? Think about it. How much better would your pictures look?