#i put a lot of effort into the last frame. i like it picasso

[retrobr]

NO BUT WHY DOES THIS ALWAYS HAPPEN TO ME 😭😭

[unpack-my-heart]

Sometimes I Have Everything (Yet I Wish I Felt Something)

Eddie Kaspbrak, pick-pocket turned international art thief and self-diagnosed lone wolf meets Richie Tozier, eager amateur, who just can't seem to catch a break

Read on AO3 HERE

@constantreaderfool @xandertheundead @eds-trashmouth @tinyarmedtrex @violetreddie @moonlightrichie @fuzzylogik

“You’ve got exactly four minutes before security will be able to get the camera back online, Eddie”

“Got it”

“Are you sure? Because it certainly doesn’t seem like you’ve got it. You should have been out of there five minutes –”

“I said I’ve fuckin’ got it, so I’ve fuckin’ got it, lay off”

The painting was heavier than he’d anticipated. He had done all the calculations, had sat up well into the night, eyelids drooping, plugging numbers into his dusty calculator, making sure that he would be able to wrench Ophelia from her golden frame without the need for anyone else to enter the gallery.

But he was wrong. The painting was at least two kilograms heavier than his calculations had suggested, and he knew that the excess weight would throw his balance off when Mike finally set the crankshaft off, and he and the painting would begin to ascend through the skylight attached to nothing but two snaking cables.

Not that he’d admit it to Stan, who was now gnashing his teeth in Eddie’s ear, hissing something about how four minutes had now become three minutes which was now two minutes, and Jesus Christ, Eddie, hurry the fuck up, but he had started to panic. His knife was too blunt to cut through the thick material of the canvas on the first try, and it whined and squeaked as he jabbed it into the matte material. A rookie mistake. He resorted to sawing instead of slicing, jerky aborted movements instead of one elegant flick of the wrist. His heart hammered against his ribcage, a brutal thumping that echoed in his ears, drowning out the suspicious silence of the gallery. Suddenly, half way through a particularly aggressive sawing motion, Eddie’s knife slipped, and instead of letting it gore a hole in the flesh of the painting, Eddie instinctively jammed his thumb in the way. The blade bit into the soft flesh, and blood immediately started oozing out of the neat gash.

"Motherfucker!"

He’d only ever sliced through one painting before. It was a Seurat. La Mer à Grandcamp, Bill had told him, The Sea at Grandcamp. Eddie remembers the tiny little sea-boats bobbing on the murky water, masts reaching out towards the sky, disappearing into the cloud, and he’d sliced right through the center of one of them when Stan had made him jump, voice static in his earpiece. In his panic, he’d wrenched the painting from its frame, turning the small slash into a gaping open wound, before he shoved the injured painting into his bag, crumpled and unsellable. Bill had yelled at him, and Eddie had stood and taken it, tail between his legs.

“Eddie, Eddie seriously, you gotta move, you really gotta move, Mike’s gonna start the winch in 30 seconds whether you’ve got the damn painting or not,” Stan demanded, voice cutting through the silence, dragging Eddie out of his introspection and back into the present.

One cautious tug later, and the canvas came away from the frame. Eddie screwed up his face in anticipation of the alarm that never rings but always could. It didn't ring. He held the painting at arm’s length, eyes dancing along the swooping lines, following the flow of the river, before finally landing on Ophelia’s face.

“She’s beautiful”

“Yeah, yeah, she’s a real peach. Mike’s gonna start the winch, are you ready?”

“Ready”

Silently, like a heron taking flight, Eddie’s feet floated up off the floor. The canvas sat leaden and heavy in the vice-grip of his arms, and, as predicted, Mike’s voice filtered through his ear-piece.

“There’s too much weight”

“That’s not a very nice thing to say, Mikey”

“The painting, I mean. It’s too heavy, your calculations must have been wrong. I don’t know if this configuration is gonna hold you”

“We’ll soon find out”

A metallic whining sound filtered down from the skylight, and Eddie braced himself for a fifty foot fall.

The fall never came. What came instead were strong arms, the tell-tale sound of the winch clicking off, and Eddie and the canvas were dragged onto the roof by a vaguely sweaty and very panicked looking Mike.

“I honestly thought I’d be scraping you off the gallery floor,” Mike laughed, but his voice was laced with something serious.

He’d only done a few runs with Mike. He normally worked with Bill, who took risks and was almost always on the receiving end of Stan’s wrath for something or other. Mike didn’t take risks. Mike was methodical, Mike was reliable. Mike never left Eddie stranded in the middle of a strangers house in Iceland, two paintings under each arm and unable to open the door to escape, whilst he pillaged the wine cellar for a particular vintage red he’d been hankering for. Eddie much preferred working with Mike.

“Bev’s already sent over the details of the next job. It’s in a small downtown gallery, and you’re going in through the door and not the ceiling so it should be an easier run than this one,” Mike said, busying himself with dismantling the winch.

Eddie sighed, scrubbing a hand over his face, before pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes hard enough that he saw constellations whirling in the dark behind his eyelids.

“When?”

“Tuesday”

“Today is Monday”

“… So tomorrow, then”

“For fucks sake!”

Everything Eddie Kaspbrak knew about art, he’d learnt from stealing it. He knew how to recognise where the layers of paint were the thinnest, how to cut into thick, chalky canvas, how he could slough the painting from its frame without damaging either, and how he should store a painting properly, so that it didn’t get marked by the sun or covered in a thin layer of dust. His own artistic talent extended to stick figures and no further, but he was now able to identify a Monet from a mile away, and he was able to pick a genuine Pollock from a pile of fakes.

He’d been head-hunted for this job. A petty thief from downtown New York, Eddie hadn’t expected to ascend to the lofty heights of international art thief before the age of thirty, but when he’d run into Stan on the corner of Canal Street, pocket bulging, full of stolen wallets, Stan had taken one look at him and dragged him into his jeep. Eddie had put up a fight, punching and kicking and swearing at the stern faced man he’d assumed was a cop, but Stan had locked the car doors and turned in his seat to face Eddie.

“You stole five wallets in less than ten minutes”

“No I didn’t”

“You did. I was watching you. You practically took that last one out of that man’s hand and he didn’t see you. You were right in front of his face, and he all but let you take it,” Stan had said, voice almost reverent, impressed.

“What can I say, I’m an artist,” Eddie had spat, hackles up and snarling.

“Do you just steal wallets, then?” Stan had said, voice light, light enough to almost be a laugh and it nurtured rage in Eddie’s stomach.

“Look, I haven’t got time for this cat and mouse shit. Either arrest me, charge me, take me downtown or whatever the fuck it is you need to do, or let me go. I’m not gonna suck your dick or anything”

“Feisty little street urchin aren’t we. I’m not a cop. Far from it, actually. I’m … I relieve art galleries and private collectors of their surplus inventory,” Stan had announced, smiling as if he’d told a joke that he expected Eddie to understand.

“So you’re an art thief?” Eddie supplied after a long pause. Stan nodded, raising his eyebrows at Eddie, almost impressed.

“Sort of. I don’t do the stealing. We have a guy for that, but he’s no good. He makes too many mistakes, and he’s not quick enough. We need someone else”

“… Me?”

“I hope so”

“So lemme get this straight, I’ve just been headhunted for a formidable career as an art thief?” Eddie said, incredulous.

“You could put it like that. We offer a great salary and some truly excellent perks”

“Do art thieves get a pension?” Eddie asked sardonically, but Stan didn’t take the bait.

“But of course!”

“This is fucking insane. I don’t even know your name and you’re asking me to steal art for you. How can I be sure you’re not a cop?”

“I’ve got a Picasso in the trunk of my car,” Stan said, grinning knowingly as if that’d explain everything. It explained nothing.

“Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

Stan sighed, and waved dismissively at Eddie, “it should mean something to you. It will mean something to you, soon. That is, if you take me up on my very lucrative offer. You’ve got thirty seconds before I turf you out of my car and send you back to your sad little life stealing pocket-change from people no richer than yourself”

Eddie stared at Stan, holding eye-contact for longer than necessary, challenging him to look away, to look towards the ceiling or the floor, but he didn’t. Stan held Eddie’s gaze steadily, and bared his teeth in a wolfish grin.

“Fine, but I know fuckin’ nothing about art”

The Tuesday job certainly seems easier than the Monday job, at least on paper. The gallery was small, much smaller than the ones they usually hit. It only had one entrance, which also doubled up as its only exit. There was a fire-escape, and several wall to ceiling windows, but other than that, the building was entirely secure with no other entry points. Ben composed a digital blueprint of the building, and managed to take control of the security system without much effort. He watched the security tapes of the night before every morning for a week, and plotted out the lone security guards monitoring route. The guard seemed follow the same route, like clock-work, each night, which made their job a whole lot easier. Bill reasoned that it shouldn’t be too hard to evade him, and began plotting their route through the gallery to the object of their desires.

The painting they’re going after was called Ignis. It’s a mass of orange and red, different hues and shades bleeding into each other, an abstract mess that gave Eddie a headache. Bev seemed to like it, though, and she told them all with a smug smile that the artist, a young German man, was anticipated to become one of the best-selling artists of the decade.

They made a plan. Stan, Ben and Bev were to stay behind, as usual. They were useless on the floor, and readily admit as much. Ben stayed behind to remotely monitor the security system, and Stan stayed behind to act as surveillance, to stay connected to Eddie constantly through his earpiece. Eddie, Bill and Mike set off in the blacked out van, arriving at the gallery at ten minutes past three in the morning. There was another van in the parking lot, white and unmarked. They all clambered out of the van, and wordlessly split up. Ben had remotely deactivated the security shutters on the fire escape, so Eddie managed to slip through the door silently and undetected. He went in alone, as he always did, having refused from day one to work with anyone else, despite Stan's initial protests. Bill stayed with the van, and Mike hovered around the exit, connected to Eddie via their earpieces. He’d be ready to rush in if he had to, if Eddie found himself in trouble, but thus far, he'd never had to.

The gallery was silent, and security lights flashed red and foreboding in the darkness. Pulling his balaclava over his face, Eddie began to tip-toe towards the rear exhibition suite.

He had taken three cautious steps into the room before he spotted the other person in the room.

There was a figure, clad in dark green camouflage, tugging hopelessly at the very painting that Eddie had come to liberate (Stan’s word). The figure didn't hear Eddie stalk into the room, didn't hear Eddie as he strafed along the wall, didn't hear Eddie sidle up next to him. It took a full forty-five seconds for the stranger to notice Eddie standing next to him, and when he did, he screamed.

“FUCK!”

Eddie slammed a palm over the mouth of the screaming stranger.

“Shut the fuck up or you’ll get us both caught,” Eddie hissed, hand still clamped over the strangers mouth.

The stranger looked up at him with eyes as wide as dinner plates from behind thick rimmed red glasses. Once Eddie’s sure that they won't make any more noise, he let the stranger go.

“Dude, that fuckin’ hurt,” The stranger moaned, and rubbed a hand over his chin. Eddie rolled his eyes.

“What are you doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

“Stealing the painting,” Eddie says, plainly.

“Not just a pretty face then,” the stranger drawled, and it takes every bit of Eddie’s self-control not to sock him in the arm.

Eddie sighed instead. “You can’t see my face”

“Naw, but I can see your eyes”

Stupidly, Eddie chokes on his tongue, caught off-guard. He splutters, just wordless noise, and the stranger laughs at him.

“Cat got your tongue?”

“Fuck off. Why are you stealing this painting?”

The stranger shrugged, “I was told to. Boss wants it, and what the boss wants the boss gets”

“Who’s your boss?” Eddie asked, as he pushed past the stranger before he stepped over the velvet rope cordoning off the painting from the rest of the room. The stranger followed, forcing himself between Eddie and the painting.

“No can do. That information’s classified. What are you doing here? You’re not a cop, are you?”

“Do I look like a cop?” Eddie deadpanned, gesturing to himself. He was wearing his black neoprene bodysuit, the very same bodysuit that Bev affectionately called his catsuit.

“No, you look like you’re going surfing, what is that? A wetsuit? It doesn’t leave much to the imagination, if you know what I’m saying”

“Fuck off, at least I blend into the darkness. Camouflage doesn’t work when you’re not in the jungle, moron”

The strangers face turned pink under Eddie’s scrutiny, and he turned around, and continued trying to wrench the painting off the wall without another word. Eddie tried to grab his bicep, but the stranger shrugged him off.

“Stop, fucking stop! You’re pulling at it too hard, you’re going to set off the –”

As if on cue, the alarm roared to life, screaming into the silence.

“… fucking SHIT!” Eddie yelled, not tempering his voice, before he scrambled straight towards the back window, the one that Ben had identified as his emergency escape route. He’d never had to use his pre-planned emergency escape route before, and he internally cursed this stranger for breaking his streak of good fortune.

Before he could throw himself through the window, glass be damned, Eddie glanced back over his shoulder. The stranger hadn’t moved. He was still standing with his hands on the painting, face white as a sheet of marble. He was shaking so violently that Eddie could see his knees knock together, a sight that would have been funny if Eddie hadn't have been sure that any second now the police would have charged through the door to arrest them both. He made the decision instantly, almost passively.

“YOU!”

The stranger looked up at him, wide eyed and terrified.

“Fucking follow me, MOVE!”

The stranger sprung into action instantly, abandoning the painting that was now hanging onto the wall by only one corner, and scrambled over to the window where Eddie was standing.

“Cover your face,” Eddie demanded, before he kicked the window with all of his might, sending shards of glass raining down on them like snowflakes, twinkling in the moonlight.

Eddie crawled through the window, wincing as a jagged piece of glass caught his hand, and briefly debated sprinting off in the direction of the van, before extending an arm back through the window.

“Take my hand!”

The stranger grabbed Eddie’s hand, pulling himself through the shallow tunnel of jagged glass. They both took off in a sprint, Eddie’s heart beating a brutal rhythm in his ear. Eddie lead them in the direction of the alleyway that they had previously agreed Bill would move the van to if any alarms sounded, and as soon as they had rounded the corner, Mike threw the backdoor open, and both Eddie and the stranger all but fell into the back of the van.

“DRIVE!” Mike yelled, and, with Bill at the wheel, the van skidded out of the alleyway, tires screeching violently.

For the first time in over an hour, Eddie closed his eyes, and let himself breathe. The illusion of calm only lasted for three seconds, however, because Mike almost immediately jabbed him in the shoulder.

“Eddie, who the fuck is this?!” Mike said, gesturing wildly at the stranger, who was sat hunched in the corner of the van, head between his hands. Eddie watched him, vaguely concerned that he was going to be sick everywhere. He nudged a discarded bucket closer with his foot, as discretely as he could manage.

“It’s a crazy fuckin’ story, Mikey, you ready?”

“Just tell me, Eddie, Jesus”

“He was trying to steal Ignis”

“… No way”

“Yes way. I walked in, stealthy as a fuckin’ cat, and there he was, all dressed up in camo like he’s off hunting or something, trying to haul the canvas out of the frame without having cut it first”

“Who does he work for?” Mike asked, sending the stranger a concerned look. The stranger either didn't notice or didn't care, head still between his hands, face still suspiciously pale.

“He won’t tell me. Says he’s got a boss, though, so we know it isn’t just him.”

Mike shifted in the van, clambering over the center console to sit shotgun next to Bill, who was practically red in the face. Eddie carefully decided not to engage him in conversation, and instead crawled across the van so he was sat next to the stranger.

“What’s your name? I’m Eddie, that’s Mike and Bill’s driving”

“Richie,” the stranger – Richie – supplied, in a voice that was much steadier and more even than Eddie had anticipated.

“So, Richie, where are we dropping you?”

“52 Portland Street. Do you know it?”

“I’m sure Bill can get us there, right Bill?”

“Sure,” Bill supplied in a curt, snippy tone but Eddie counted it as a win that he spoke at all.

“I can’t believe I almost got caught” Richie said, and Eddie laughed.

“Yeah, you were giving that frame a real good tug. Have you done this before?”

“Would you believe me if I said yes?”

“No”

Richie doesn’t say anything, but he looks up at Eddie and winks.

Now they’re not in the gallery, and Richie’s face is bathed in the soft glow of the torch they rigged up in the van to serve as a light source, Eddie felt something mimicking attraction stir in the pit of his stomach. Richie’s face was angular, sharp lines and pointed tips, and his hair was swept off his face with a bandana that should have looked absurd but somehow didn't. Eddie thought idly that he’d seen this face before, in a portrait perhaps, or painted in the sunset when the sun hung heavy and bloated just above the horizon.

Richie’s looked back at him, eyes softer than they’d been before, and maybe they were also a little damp, because they were shining in the torchlight, and Eddie forced himself to look away.

Richie huffed, an annoyed little noise that Eddie is sure he wasn’t supposed to hear, but he did. He realised three beats too late that his body was entirely angled towards Richie, toes to shoulders. He tried not to think about what that might mean.

Then they were pulling into Portland Street, and it was too soon, Eddie told himself that it’s because he wants to quiz Richie about his boss, but he knew it was a lie.

“I have actually done this before, you know. I’m just – that one threw me off. I’ve never done paintings before, I’ve always been on sculptures and small paraphernalia, you know. Jugs and vases and shit. The painting guy got … well, he quit. So that’s me now. The new painting guy”

“He quit?” Eddie parrots back, shooting Richie a sceptical look, but Richie just shrugs.

“S’what I was told. So are you guys a team or something?”

“Or something,” Bill said before Eddie can speak, and then he’s pulling the van into park, and switching off the engine. “Portland street”

“Thanks, Big Bill!” Richie beamed, earning a scowl from Bill for his trouble.

Swinging the door of the van open, Richie hopped out. “Care to walk me to my door, Eddie?”

“Naw, too comfy,” Eddie joked, but he hopped out of the van anyway.

They walked slowly up the path to Richie’s door, in a bizarrely comfortable silence.

“Are you really not going to tell me who your boss is?” Eddie asks, pushing his luck.

“Nope. I would, but I can’t. Don’t wanna wake up with a horse’s head in my bed or some shit”

“You are joking, right?”

“Honestly? I have no idea. Wouldn’t put it past him, I suppose”

“Richie … are you safe?” Eddie faltered, after several seconds of silence.

“Safe? Uh... How safe are any of us, Eds? You do realise that we break the law on a regular fuckin’ basis right?”

“You know what I mean, jack-ass. Serves me right for giving a damn about you, I suppose”

“You give a damn about me?”

“About as much as someone can give a damn about a dumbass stranger,” Eddie shot back, but he was smiling, and Richie was smiling too, a dorky sort of grin that reminded Eddie of the sun.

“I’m touched, Eddie, truly. I’m safe. I’m safe enough. I won’t be doing this forever, anyway. Not exactly a career with long-term progression goals,” Richie said, as he leant against his front door with one shoulder.

“I’m gonna head off, then," Eddie said, and gestured to the van over his shoulder with his thumb, "next time, use a damn knife and cut the canvas out of the frame”

“You got it, chief!”

“Eddie! Hurry the fuck up” Bill yelled from the van, and Eddie groaned.

“See you, Richie. Stay out of trouble!”

Eddie jogged back to the van, hopping inside the open back door.

“So who’s your new best friend?” Bill asked bluntly.

“It’s not like that, I was just trying to get information about his boss,” Eddie replied, defensively, “and anyway, I didn’t manage to convince him to tell me anything so it doesn’t matter now”

“You were looking awful chummy walking up to his house is all I’m saying”

“Well maybe your visions clouded with all the steam rising from your very red face”

“Stop being so fucking childish –”

“Look, we’re all pissed that tonight didn’t work out,” Mike interjected, “but shall we try and not bite each other’s heads off before we arrive back at base?”

Bill put the van in gear, and drove away from Richie’s house without another word.

[pendesvoyage]

Paint with all the Colors

The coffee cup was white, that much he knew. His fingers were wrapped around it like it was a vaccine to this frigid, winter day. It didn’t do much to soothe his shaking hands or his curiosity. He’d seen the color of this cup almost every day, and he has decided that white wasn’t that stunning of a color. When he reached into his pocket for his wallet, the denim bled dark blue before he pulled out his money and it faded back to grey. The wallet was black now that he was holding it, but now he had to put down his coffee to slip a few bills from the folds, and it turned back to grey as well. The money was a faded green, the barista’s fingertips were mocha colored, and the receipt had red lettering scrawled across the top, but they all turned to grey as soon as he wasn’t touching them anymore.        He used to, when he was younger, go around trying to touch everything in sight. Now, though, he has realized it a bit of a fruitless task. Even if he could hold on to the color of the things he held forever, they wouldn’t be nearly as brilliant as they would be after he met his painter, so aptly named for the way they paint your life with color permanently. From what he’s heard- stories passed down from his parents and grandparents- your painter will crash into your life when you least expect it. One touch, and suddenly the world would be splashed with every shade you could imagine, a Picasso right before your eyes. Not that he’d ever gotten to touch a Picasso so he wouldn’t know.        Waiting was the hardest part. He swore that he’d find his painter in high school. That was when his mom met his dad, when their worlds bled into rainbow. Then, he swore he’d find them in college. Where else would he meet the person of his dreams, the one to spend the rest of his days seeing color with? Two degrees and a stressful job as a marketing analyst later, and he was no closer to knowing what color the sky actually was.        It wasn’t really fair. No one could touch the sky, not even pilots. How was he supposed to know what color it was? Blue, apparently, but what kind of blue? The blue of the swimming pool on Memorial Day. The blue of the Royals jersey his dad got for him when they went on that family trip to the stadium as a kid. The blue of his cousin’s hair when she'd turned seventeen. He felt like he’d never know.        Even the color of his own skin, hair, and eyes were a mystery to him. The universe was a jerk in that regard. You couldn’t know your own true colors until someone came along and painted the picture for you. A bit overly dependent for Garret’s taste, but he was willing to deal with it if he got to see what his mom meant by sort of a goldeny, cream color, baby. It’s very lovely. You don’t even need to worry about tanning.        “Sir?”        Garret’s head popped up from where he’d been staring at the few inches of bronze counter he could see next to his hand. “Sorry, what?”        “There’s a line,” the barista insisted cautiously. Garret looked behind himself to see that, indeed, there was a handful of people waiting for him to get himself together and move out of the way.        “Yeah, um, sorry,” he murmured and grabbed his coffee again. The white blip was the only color in his vision until the cracked wood brown of the door, and then his entire world was back to grey by the time he got to the office, coffee long trashed.        “Good morning, Mr. Plier. You’ve got a meeting with the team from TeachYoung in about fifteen minutes,” his assistant, Beverly, spouted before he could fully step out of the elevator. “Have you eaten breakfast? I left a blueberry muffin on your desk just in case. Here are the reports from the Frizzle study.” Garret was handed a decently sized manila folder that came alive with it’s weird banana pudding coloring.        “Thanks, Bev. No calls until after lunch, okay?”        “Yes, sir. Got it.” Garret gave her a thankful smile and pushed the slick, metal door to his office open and let it sink shut behind him. He shrugged off his light coat, the lapels fizzing green as he did, and went to the wall behind his desk. On it was mounted the only painting he’d ever owned in his life. Art wasn't cheap, actually it was one of the most expensive commodities in the world. They say artwork was a substitute for love to the lonely, that it was cherished cheat of what could be. Garret couldn’t find it in him to care, especially when he ran his fingers across the face of the framed panel and the trickle of colors followed him. The mountains were a faded purple, like the color of a little girl’s Easter dress. He thumbed over the winding river, the exact color of the spring back home that he and his sister used to drink from on hot summer days.        He let the art slip from under his fingers and slunk back to his desk, slumping into the large, stuffed chair. He swiveled around to face the sturdy wood surface, his hands suspended in the air. The choices were to either place them on the desk and see the same chocolate brown he saw every day, or place them on his lap and see his trouser for the dark charcoal grey they were already without touching them. None of it was satisfying. Garret always prided himself as an independent lad, but lately he’d become so desperate to know the whole world that he was tempted to go around touching everyone in the city, which, worst case scenario, would land him in a holding cell for a few hours.        A long time ago, they installed a set of rules on the proper etiquette of touching other people. Not laws exactly, but reason enough to put someone in a secluded room until they got their shit together if they went too far. Some were so desperate to see color that they would slide a hand inside other’s clothing to get that skin on skin contact that was necessary to gain the world unknown to them. Garret had never- but he was considering the insanity of it as of late. He could handle a rest in a jail cell if it meant he found his painter.        There was a knock on the door. “Come in.” After two years, his assistant still seemed skittish in his presence. He was pretty sure it had something to do with the crush she had on him. Unfortunately for her, they’ve touched many times before and…nothing.        “Your nine o’clock is waiting in the small conference room for you.”        “Thanks, Bev.” She nodded and swiftly left while he gathered his preparations from the mess atop his desk, knocking his breakfast muffin aside as he did. He almost slid his fingers along the wall like a child as he walked down the hall, just to see something other than the bland white of the papers in his hand, clipped together by a black piece of metal. He stamped that down and entered the meeting room, the grey scale of faces greeting him in various stages of excitement- that was, from nonplussed to tolerant. “Afremov, ladies and gentlemen," he greeted, "Let’s go ahead and get started.”        The meeting was tedious, to say the least. He’d over prepared and then had to catch everyone else in the room up on the plan. It was like when he tried to explain the rules of football to his sister when they were young. Turned out not to be worth the effort. They scrapped the plan at the end of the meeting, citing confusion, and wanted Garret to steer the research in another direction. Whatever, he was going out for lunch. Had to get out of that office, those same pea green walls that surrounded his daily life.       He brought the car door to life, followed by the seat belt, and then the steering wheel. The radio delivered some top 40’s pop song, and Garret couldn’t tell if it was being sung by a boy or a girl. He drove until the traffic of the city fell away and was replaced by a bland screen of tree after tree. The road turned from a four lane to a two, and he took a side road off to the right. He'd stumbled upon this place one night when he and some friends got high and heard about this really great café that was sure to cure the munchies. Now, he came here when he was antsy, jittery, and needed some place that held colors he wasn’t quite used to seeing every day. Parking just left of the door, he walked up to the diner with a content smile on his face.       “Garret!” The smile spread until he was sure the white of his teeth stood out against the grey of his face.       “Nancy,” he greeted fondly. “How are you?”        The well-rounded, middle-aged woman came around the bar to the hostess stand and took Garret’s hand. He looked down at see the milky white of her fingers wrapped around his. “Give it here,” she encouraged and brought his hand up to her face. The gesture was one of trust, not one extended often to someone you saw less than once a month, but he was glad for it. The rose of her cheeks contrasted with the pale, icy green of her eyes. He took it all in, trying to memorize every detail before she dropped his hand and asked, “Usual?”       Swallowing down the sharp loss at missing the color of her lips, he nodded. “A coffee as well. Lots of-”       “Creamer, I know, love. Take a seat, and I’ll have it right out.” Garret extended his gratitude and wandered over to his usual booth, sliding into the tacky red seat that swiped to life under his palm as he situated himself. He picked up the menu from the end of the table and let his eyes rake over it. One of his favorite things about this place was that the menu was ever-changing, which meant different pictures every time he came. Currently, they had a bright green slice of key lime on the back. He brushed his fingers over the lunch choices, a multi-layered pile of nachos pulsing with a myriad of colors under his fingertips.      “Alright, babe. The usual.” She set down a plate of chicken-fried steak with mash potatoes and corn on the cob. The coffee splashed over the edge of the mug, onto the saucer, and trickled a transparent mud over his fingers when he reached out to settle it. “Oops, sorry, love. Napkins for ya.” She reached in her apron and pulled out some extra ones, but Garret was slow to clean up the mess, loving the reprieve of color that would last as long as it stayed on his skin.       “No problem, Nancy. Thank you.” He went right in on his food, the fork and knife a shiny, scratched silver. He was a grown ass man, and he knew better than to play with his food, but if his fingers slipped lower on his silverware and swiped across the tops of his lunch, just for a glimpse, then so be it. The gravy was that brothy brown and the corn was grilled, black on the edge of some of the kernels. He licked the remnants off his finger, letting himself enjoy that one small act of indulgence.      “Nance!” The door to the small café opened with a bang, the windows rattling. Garret turned to see a thin man with dark grey hair (brunet, at least; black hair, maybe) dressed in clothing too heavy for this breezy, fall day: zipped up leather jacket, gloves, beanie. He was panting and looking around wildly for the said hostess. When she peaked around the corner of the kitchen, the man breathed out a sigh of relief and rushed to her. “Nance, help me. They’re coming.” Slightly sketchy. Garret wasn’t averse to a little adventure, but that did not sound like his type of fun.      “Honey, Marcus, slow down. What did you do?”       The man scoffed. “Why is it always me that-” He broke off when Nancy raised a knowing brow. “Right, well. I might have…stolen a little something from Mariposa’s warehouse. “Marcus!”      “A tiny something. I didn’t even think they’d notice.” Nancy slapped him across the chest and scolded, “You’ll get yourself killed one day, and for what? Huh, what was it?”       The new stranger shifted his eyes guilty around the room while he unzipped his jacket and pulled out a small framed artwork of some sort, Garret couldn’t really see from his seat. “It’s beautiful right? Tell me it’s beautiful, or I stole it for nothing.”       The older woman sighed and looked up from the art to the nervous man’s face. “It’s lovely, Marcus.” He breathed out in relief. “But,” she emphasized, “you stole it. And I’m not having stolen merch in my diner. You’ve got to go.” As she started pushing him towards the door, Marcus pleaded with her.       “No, please, Nancy. Just let me hide out here for a few hours. I just need to let them calm down a bit, so they’re not so let’s find him and skin him alive when I see them again.”       Nancy’s jaw was set, eyes stern. “No way. I’ve got a business to run, and you’re disrupting my customers.” Like he’d just been reminded of where he'd ran to for cover, he looked around the eatery and scanned over the half dozen patrons that were staring at him with everything from distaste to disbelief.        He nodded to a young lady with a high bun. “Hey, Stella.”        She rolled her eyes. “Get out, Marcus.”        The thief sighed like her greeting taxed him in some personal way. “Listen, Nance-” he tried, turning back to the woman, but she cut him off.        “I want you out in ten seconds or I call the cops.”        Garret nearly stood up at that. He felt the need to tug the man further from the door, push him under a table, and reason with Nancy to give him a chance. He was a thief, but he just wanted to hold a piece of beauty in his hands for a little bit. Garret could understand that. Just when he was about to protest Nancy’s decisive action, a company of rumbling trucks plowed through the parking lots and idled in front of the glass windows of the café.        “Oh, shit,” the thin man cursed and ducked behind the nearest booth. He tucked the painting back into his jacket, safely zipping it into place. “Pretend I’m not here,” he urged as he crept backwards, further into the diner.        “Marcus Leland, get your butt out here now,” Nancy ordered, but he shook his head frantically. He kept slowly moving backwards until his back hit an obstacle and he startled, hand flailing out to catch himself and instead caught someone else’s hand that kept him from landing on his butt. He looked up to see Garret’s worried face hovering over him.        “What’s up?” the criminal asked casually.        “Um, not your luck,” Garret answered without thinking, but the other man just laughed easily and nodded.        “Too true. Hey, uh,” he shimmied under the table and tipped his head out to talk, “would you mind not mentioning I’m under here?”        Garret’s eyebrows furrowed as he shrugged. “I guess, yeah.”        “Thanks, man. Really.” Marcus curled up into a ball and settled in, and Garret sat back up to look behind him to the door as a small gang of men in well-fitting suits entered the diner like they had something to prove. A point, most likely. They sauntered up to Nancy’s considerably smaller form and one leaned on the hostess stand.        “Hi there, Nancy. How are you?” She leveled them with a cold look. “You can just turn right back around and leave. I have no business with Mariposa.        The group exchanged glances before the supposed leader pushed off the podium and stepped up close to the middle-aged lady. “We know he’s here, Nancy. He ditched his car just a couple blocks away, and who could refuse your great cooking.”        Garret was gripping the top of his booth so hard the red seemed to burn a brighter candy apple. His eyes flicked back and forth between the large man and the small woman. Like he was some sort of beacon, the man’s eyes swept sideways to meet his, and Garret froze. “Got yourself a decent crowd for a Thursday. Enough people to make me nervous for what might happen.”        “Don’t you threaten me,” she snarled, making the man- thankfully- look back to her.        If Marcus’ opening statement a few minutes ago didn’t sound like fun, that sounded like a really bad time. Garret ducked under the booth and whispered urgently. “Do something. They’re going to hurt people unless you go out there.”        The wiry man shook his head with a disapproving tilt to his mouth. “They’d never. They talk all big and bad, but that’s all they are. Just talk,” he explained as he tugged off his beanie, the hint of dark bangs that Garret got before turning into a head full of thick, almost wild, hair, that the thief ran his hands through anxiously. “They’ll just grumble while Nancy refuses to back down, and then, leave and tear up my place as repayment.” He wiggled the gloves off and let them fall to the floor before unzipping his jacket and pulling the small frame from under it.        “Sounds like you’ve done this before.”        Marcus shrugged while his fingers grazed the art piece. “Those pricks don’t deserve to hold all of the beautiful things in the world.”        “You take what doesn’t belong to you, endanger innocent people, and get your home torn apart. For what?”        At that, Marcus turned the piece of art around so show it off to his current protector. “For this,” he reasoned. “It’s beautiful right?” Garret couldn’t see the colors of it without reaching out and brushing his fingers across it, and that didn’t seem appropriate just then. But the picture of it was really something. It was a scene of a gorgeous garden pixie wrapped up in the arms of a well-dressed man. She was laid out in his hold, head thrown back with a look of desperation etched across her face.        “It is.”       Marcus seemed relieved by Garret’s answer. “I just wish I could see all the colors at once you know. I was hoping that, if I got one small enough, I could light up the whole thing, but…” He cast his eyes down to the painting. “Still,” he nodded surely, “it’s really something.”       “Nancy, you’ve got one more chance to tell me where he’s at before we start tearing this place apart.”       Garret sat back up, turning to see that things hadn’t escalated so much as intensified. Bulky mob guy was encroaching on the lobby and Nancy had backed up a step or two towards the counter. He ducked back under the seat with a, “Do something.”      “Trust me,” Marcus urged. “Nothing is going to-” A gun shot went off and both men ducked for cover, Garret joining Marcus under the booth and curling up across from him on the floor. “Shit, no, shit. They never.”      “Marcus,” the boss man taunted. “Come out, come out. We’d hate to hurt your favorite little cook.”      “Dicks, the whole lot, I swear,” he cursed under his breath. “Now, I’ll have to…” He waved his hands around the small space and groaned quietly.      “Don’t touch me! Let me go!” Nancy’s voice rang out in the still café.     “Go find him,” the leader ordered. Marcus hung his head and sighed in resignation at the declaration. He gripped both hands around the painting in his lap, and looked up to Garret.      “Take care of it for me. Don’t let them have it,” he requested severely. The steps of the men were coming closer. Garret nodded frantically and held his hands out as Marcus regretfully passed the artwork to him. Their hands brushed and, in that moment, the waves of color actually hurt to take. It started at the connection of their hands, washing over the painting and making both men lose their breath. The technicolor spread outward from there, filling the booths and the underside of the table with realistic hue.     Marcus’ hair was black like Garret had thought, but not black like it was in grey scale. There were these highlights that reminded Garret of the way the night got lighter around the moon. And his eyes. They were like a mix of green and brown. He grit his teeth in frustration when he couldn’t remember that name of that color. He didn’t know anyone that he was close enough to to touch that had eyes that color. The thief, his painter, blinked slowly, shock obvious on his features.      “Do you?” he asked.      “Yeah,” Garret huffed out, lost for words. “Your eyes, they’re…”      “What?”      “I don’t know the word for-” He cut off when Marcus was yanked out from under the booth, the painting slipping from his fingers and into Garret’s lap.      “We found him, sir,” the man announced.      “Don’t get handsy, pal. I’m a taken man!” He sounded giddy with it, the news, and, when Garret set the painting down behind him and looked out from under the booth, Marcus was smiling down at him with sparkling white teeth and petal pink lips. His skin was tan, almost the color of the caramels Garret liked to pick up around Christmas time. He couldn’t even enjoy that he finally knew that Nancy’s hair was a dingy, dirty yellow or that the tile of the floor was dark blue speckled with random cream splatters. It all faded into the background of Marcus’ struggling.      Garret started to crawl out from underneath, had to help him, but Marcus blurted a scared No! and he froze. A sharp warning shake of his head and Garret was slinking back onto his hind legs and just watching as Marcus was dragged over to the front doors of the diner and presented to the boss. He could see the pink spread across Marcus’ cheeks feet away, from that moment of vulnerability, and it felt amazing. 

     Too bad that was overshadowed when Nancy was released and, instead, his painter was being held up by a tight hand around his throat, the pink flushing his cheeks turning into a bright red from lack of oxygen. Garret’s fingers pressed into the old tile, but he didn't even look down to see the color of his skin going pale around the tips. He was too afraid this would be the last time he’d see the one who had given him color.

     One of the sidekick’s hand padded over Marcus' body and grumbled he came up empty. “He doesn't have it, boss.”      Scary boss man tugged Marcus closer by his neck, making Marcus gasp and Garret lurch forward. That earned him another warning glare from the thief to stay right where he was. It took him a moment longer to obey, sitting back again.      “Where is it?” The brute demanded.      Marcus scoffed as best he could. “I'm not sure what you mean.”      “Don't play with me,” he warned. “I have orders to do what it takes to get that painting back.” The thief scratched at the fingers surely leaving bruises on his neck, asking for a reprieve. The grip loosened just enough for him to say,         “Why is it so important?”      Caveman mobster laughed haughtily. “You just happened to steal-”      “Allegedly stole,” Marcus interrupted, making Garret swallow his laugh, but his grin was enough to make the threatened man’s eyes light up, that mellow brown turning a bit greener.      “You stole,” scary guy insisted, “Mariposa’s two-year anniversary gift to his painter.”      “Two years?” Marcus crowed in disbelief. “If she’s dumb enough to stay with that nitwit for,” his eyes cheated to the ceiling, “730 days, she’s not going to enjoy some tiny painting that I apparently took.” The grip on his neck went tight again, and Marcus cut off with a gurgle.       “You should watch what you say, Marcy. I wasn’t told to leave you alive.”      “Excuse you?” Nancy piped up. “You’re not killing anyone in my diner.” Boss man pulled a gun from his waistband and pointed it at Nancy’s suddenly cautious face. The patrons let out collective murmurs of fear. “Sure about that?”       “Woah, now, okay,” Marcus choked out and the grip loosen the tiniest bit again. “No need to go shooting the only woman within a thirty-mile radius that knows how to make a proper pot pie. Keep the focus where it belongs, yeah?”      “Alright,” the leader agreed easily and pointed the gun at Marcus, the barrel a shining dark grey in Garret’s eyes.      If the analyst hadn’t memorized every inch of Marcus’ face, he probably would’ve missed the drain of color from his skin. As it was, Marcus’ now ghostly lips pressed firm, but Garret could see the trepidation in his eyes. Marcus had just realized he might not make it out of this alive. Garret reached for the painting sitting on the diner floor behind him, and brought it close, half-hidden under his leg, to run his fingers across the now smudged glass front. He didn’t need to touch to really see it anymore, but the connection made him feel as if he had more control over this situation than he actually did. In reality, he’d just met his painter, the one he was supposedly meant to spend the rest of his colorful life with, but today, he just might lose him.     “Why don’t you tell me where it’s at, and I won’t make a mess in your favorite lunch spot?”     Marcus looked caught, pulled between refusing to give in and sparing these people, Garret and Nancy, of what they might see. Finally, he nodded. “Yeah, alright.” Garret’s face must have been one of shock, because Marcus’ own face went soft. He held his new partner’s gaze, furiously trying to get the thief out of this while simultaneously memorizing every hitch and detail of his face just in case.      “They’re hazel, by the way,” Marcus spoke slowly, deliberately. The mob men looked confused, and so did Garret, until Marcus fluttered his lashes dramatically and Garret’s face broke into a barely contained grin. Hazel. His eyes were hazel. That was the name of that color. Hazel.      “Thank you for that piece of information, Marcus, but no one cares,” the big man with the big ego lamented.      Marcus scoffed. “Mind your business here, slick. I’m trying to be charming.” Garret was going to watch his painter die, but he couldn’t stop smiling.     “Why don’t you worry about charming me, instead?” The threat came with a shove of the gun into Marcus’ temple, reminding him of his current situation. “Right, yeah. Um, well if I stole it, I didn’t bring it in here,” he decided quickly. “If I stole it,” he repeated, “I probably put it in my car.” Garret was shaking his head. He didn’t want Marcus to leave, be taken away so he couldn’t see his midnight colored brows crinkle up in worry.      What if they didn’t bring him back? What if they never let him go? But Marcus was nodding back to him. “Yes, I think I put it way back there, in my car.”      “To your car, then,” the leader decided, and the entire cafe let out a breath of relief.      “No, no, wait,” Garret mumbled, not nearly loud enough to matter as the men started shoving Marcus towards the door. “No,” he said again, more firmly, as he stood up from under the booth. “Wait,” he finally called out, and everybody, including Marcus, froze and turned. With all eyes on him, he lost all his confidence and gripped the painting tightly in his hand.      “Don’t do-” Marcus started, voice shaky, but was cut off by the head mobster’s, “What have you got there, big man?”      “I have it,” Garret admitted, painting nearly trembling in his grip. “You can have it if you let him go.”      Marcus rolled his eyes, but then, his face melted as Garret set his jaw and rolled his shoulders back. Mob man was not nearly as impressed. “That’s not how it works, bud.” His barely-there blond lashes fell slowly into a blink, like he couldn’t be bothered to move too quickly. This was his last chance to save his new found partner.      “No, you listen to me, bud,” Garret quipped back. “Let. Him. Go, and I’ll give you the-” The gun shot off and before Garret could blink his entire world went grey again. The color didn’t drain, or melt away, just vanished. The walls were a medium grey again, the booths a deep grey. The lifeless body of his painter a bunch of different greys crumbled on the floor. The blood pooling under his head a dark, rich grey. He’d only seen the color of blood when he’d scraped a knee or cut his finger on a kitchen knife, but he knew exactly what the mass puddle of heavy liquid was. “No!” he shouted and sprinted forward, dropping the forgotten painting on the floor. He fell to his knees beside the man he’d only just met and placed careful hands on either side of his face.      Nothing. Not even the few inches around his finger were lighting up with the deep tan that Garret knew Marcus’ skin to be. He raked his hand through the thief’s hair, brushing it off his face, but the black didn’t swirl with highlights and lowlights. He couldn’t see the color he was touching anymore. He’d heard that you lost all ability for color after your painter died, but that was when you were seventy and in a nursing home and you’d had years to memorize all the colors of the world. Not now. Not just twenty minutes after gaining the privilege.      There were heavy footsteps around them, but Garret couldn’t bring himself to look away from the droop of Marcus’ mouth. Then, a low, hissing voice was right next to his ear. “Don’t feel bad, bud. I was going to off him either way. But thanks for the painting.” Then the gang of men exited out of the diner, the front door bell dinging on the way out, and Garret was left seeing the world through wet, grey eyes.

[mealha]

Six common photography mistakes to avoid

There's nothing necessarily wrong with this photo, but if you get comfortable with a certain photography style (such as portraits), it can be hard to branch out. (Harry Guinness /)

Taking great photos is hard work and it’s easy to make the same mistakes again and again. And as soon as you start overcoming one set of mistakes, you start making new ones. I’ve been at it for more than a decade and I still get things wrong all the time.

Most mistakes that photographers make, however, aren’t unique failings. They’re the same traps everyone falls into. I’ve been there, and every other professional photographer has been, too. Here are some of the most common things amateur photographers do wrong—and how to fix them.

Letting your camera do all the work

Photography is a creative art. You express your intent through the choices you make in composition and exposure. Two photos of the exact same scene, one shot at a fast shutter speed, will look completely different. It’s the same with aperture.

If you only shoot in automatic mode, you’re letting your camera make creative decisions for you. It’ll use acceptable exposure settings most of the time, but it’s almost never going to choose ones that give you a creative or interesting photo.

To really improve as a photographer, the first thing you’ll have to do is get out of automatic and start using camera modes, like aperture priority mode and manual mode. These will give you more control over your exposure settings so you’re the one making decisions, not your camera.

Slavishly following the rule of thirds (and other rules)

Relying too much on the rule of thirds makes Bing sad. You don't want to make Bing sad. (Harry Guinness/)

There are lots of articles out there with lists of rules for improving your composition. Most of them are… fine. But simply following a list of compositional rules makes for boring, uninspired shots that look too similar.

Take the rule of thirds, the most famous of these rules. The idea is that you will take better photos if you divide each shot into a three-by-three grid and place important compositional elements on the third-lines or, best of all, the points where they intersect.

Now don’t get me wrong, if you have no idea how to frame a well-composed photo, the rule of thirds will stop you from making howling mistakes where you cut off peoples’ limbs or crop your images in bonkers ways. But strictly following this rule, and only this rule, is a pretty weak way to compose your shots.

For starters, it doesn’t work for every photo. Below, I’ve followed the rule of thirds by placing both of Bing’s eyes, the most important parts of the composition, on the intersection of the third lines, and ignored it by having a center-weighted composition.

Let Bing's eyes stare through the rule of thirds grid and straight into your heart. (Harry Guinness/)

To free yourself from the rule of thirds, you’ll need to practice using your eye to balance your photos and emphasize what you want to show. Bing’s a small dog, so I don’t want an extreme close-up—you’d have no idea what he really looked like. I much prefer the following composition, which shows him with a bit more context and gives him space in the photo.

Bing is a good dog. (Harry Guinness/)

When it comes to composition, keep the rule of thirds (and other rules) in mind, but don’t follow them blindly. If it works well for the shot you’re after, great. But don’t be afraid to deviate if you think it looks better a different way.

Not working a shot

When you’re learning photography, you almost never get the shot right the first time. Your initial composition will be off in some way, you’ll fail to notice something undesirable in the frame, or your exposure settings won’t be the best. It’s a big mistake to assume you’ve got the photo just because you’ve taken one that’s OK.

Whenever you take a picture, follow up by “working the shot.” Ask yourself if different camera settings might improve it in some way. What if you took it from a few feet to your right or left? How about backing up or moving forward? You may not even be taking it at the best time, especially if you’re doing landscape photography. Maybe you’d be better off waiting an hour for the sun to get lower.

When you work a shot, you’ll make a lot of mistakes. Plenty of the things you try will be wildly off base. Most of the time, you’ll discover that by putting in a bit more time and effort and trying several options, you’ll dial in on a much stronger image than the one you shot first.

Not pushing yourself out of your comfort zone

Once you get to a certain level of skill, it’s easy to stop trying to improve. I’m a pretty competent portrait photographer. I know where to stand, what settings to use, and how to pose a model. I can reliably churn out good portraits.

That’s why I stopped shooting them.

Once you’ve found something that works for you, it can be hard to motivate yourself to try new things. I’ve hit various plateaus over my career. I had my black-and-white phase, my portrait phase, and my wide-angle phase. In each one, I’d found a way of doing things that reliably produced good results. Handy professionally, but terrible creatively.

As you improve, you’ll find yourself in similar situations. Maybe it’s pet photos, sports photos, or flower photos you nail, but whatever it is, the best way to keep improving is to try new things and push yourself out of your comfort zone. That way, you’ll keep learning.

And, even better, many of the things you learn will be transferable back to what you were already good at. Pushing myself to work with color improved my black-and-white photos. Shooting nothing but landscapes made my portraits stronger.

Getting too creative

If this photo makes you anxious and angry, it's doing its job. There's simply too much going on. (Harry Guinness/)

Being creative with your photography is great, but you can take things too far. Most photographers at least flirt with some terrible, terrible ideas as they develop their style. Some of the common ones (most of which I’ve been guilty of) are over-saturating photos, selectively de-saturating photos except for one single color, “artistically” missing focus, slapping a heavy vignette on everything, using “Dutch angles” (where you frame a photo at an off-kilter angle), and going all-in on high dynamic range photography, or at least the look associated with it.

These sins tend to become particularly tempting around the time photographers start experimenting with Photoshop and other photo-editing programs and realize how “epic” they can make their photos look with a bit of post-production. And I get it, high contrast, super-saturated images can look great. But most of the time they look like the fever dreams of someone who’s seen a Picasso painting—once.

This is one of the hardest mistakes to fix because pushing yourself and trying new things isn’t a problem—until it is. Then, you have to rein yourself in, but first you need to realize you’ve taken things too far

Which brings us to the worst mistake you can make as a photographer.

Not assessing your work

It’s impossible to improve as a photographer if you don’t regularly critique your own work. You need to look over your photos and consider what worked and what didn’t, so you don’t keep making the same mistakes every time you shoot.

Every so often, take some time to go through all the photos you’ve shot over the last few months, as well as some from a year or two ago. With fresh eyes, you’ll see little ways you could have improved your shots—and places where you went wildly wrong. It’s normal to be embarrassed by some of the photos you shot a while back that you thought were great. I know I am.

Once you spot a problem or a pattern you keep falling into, make a conscious effort to avoid it the next time you’re shooting. When I noticed I was relying heavily on black-and-white images, I banned myself from shooting them for a few months. Learning how to use color made me a much better photographer.

The best thing is that as soon as you start evaluating your photos regularly and trying to improve, you’ll get much better—and see your progress in every review session. Even if this section is the only bit you remember from this article, you’ll eventually fix pretty much every other mistake you’re making.

from Popular Photography | RSS https://ift.tt/3hlKrzc

[kristablogs]

Six common photography mistakes to avoid for better pictures

There's nothing necessarily wrong with this photo, but if you get comfortable with a certain photography style (such as portraits), it can be hard to branch out. (Harry Guinness /)

Taking great photos is hard work and it’s easy to make the same mistakes again and again. And as soon as you start overcoming one set of mistakes, you start making new ones. I’ve been at it for more than a decade and I still get things wrong all the time.

Most mistakes that photographers make, however, aren’t unique failings. They’re the same traps everyone falls into. I’ve been there, and every other professional photographer has been, too. Here are some of the most common things amateur photographers do wrong—and how to fix them.

Letting your camera do all the work

Photography is a creative art. You express your intent through the choices you make in composition and exposure. Two photos of the exact same scene, one shot at a fast shutter speed, will look completely different. It’s the same with aperture.

If you only shoot in automatic mode, you’re letting your camera make creative decisions for you. It’ll use acceptable exposure settings most of the time, but it’s almost never going to choose ones that give you a creative or interesting photo.

To really improve as a photographer, the first thing you’ll have to do is get out of automatic and start using camera modes, like aperture priority mode and manual mode. These will give you more control over your exposure settings so you’re the one making decisions, not your camera.

Slavishly following the rule of thirds (and other rules)

Relying too much on the rule of thirds makes Bing sad. You don't want to make Bing sad. (Harry Guinness/)

There are lots of articles out there with lists of rules for improving your composition. Most of them are… fine. But simply following a list of compositional rules makes for boring, uninspired shots that look too similar.

Take the rule of thirds, the most famous of these rules. The idea is that you will take better photos if you divide each shot into a three-by-three grid and place important compositional elements on the third-lines or, best of all, the points where they intersect.

Now don’t get me wrong, if you have no idea how to frame a well-composed photo, the rule of thirds will stop you from making howling mistakes where you cut off peoples’ limbs or crop your images in bonkers ways. But strictly following this rule, and only this rule, is a pretty weak way to compose your shots.

For starters, it doesn’t work for every photo. Below, I’ve followed the rule of thirds by placing both of Bing’s eyes, the most important parts of the composition, on the intersection of the third lines, and ignored it by having a center-weighted composition.

Let Bing's eyes stare through the rule of thirds grid and straight into your heart. (Harry Guinness/)

To free yourself from the rule of thirds, you’ll need to practice using your eye to balance your photos and emphasize what you want to show. Bing’s a small dog, so I don’t want an extreme close-up—you’d have no idea what he really looked like. I much prefer the following composition, which shows him with a bit more context and gives him space in the photo.

Bing is a good dog. (Harry Guinness/)

When it comes to composition, keep the rule of thirds (and other rules) in mind, but don’t follow them blindly. If it works well for the shot you’re after, great. But don’t be afraid to deviate if you think it looks better a different way.

Not working a shot

When you’re learning photography, you almost never get the shot right the first time. Your initial composition will be off in some way, you’ll fail to notice something undesirable in the frame, or your exposure settings won’t be the best. It’s a big mistake to assume you’ve got the photo just because you’ve taken one that’s OK.

Whenever you take a picture, follow up by “working the shot.” Ask yourself if different camera settings might improve it in some way. What if you took it from a few feet to your right or left? How about backing up or moving forward? You may not even be taking it at the best time, especially if you’re doing landscape photography. Maybe you’d be better off waiting an hour for the sun to get lower.

When you work a shot, you’ll make a lot of mistakes. Plenty of the things you try will be wildly off base. Most of the time, you’ll discover that by putting in a bit more time and effort and trying several options, you’ll dial in on a much stronger image than the one you shot first.

Not pushing yourself out of your comfort zone

Once you get to a certain level of skill, it’s easy to stop trying to improve. I’m a pretty competent portrait photographer. I know where to stand, what settings to use, and how to pose a model. I can reliably churn out good portraits.

That’s why I stopped shooting them.

Once you’ve found something that works for you, it can be hard to motivate yourself to try new things. I’ve hit various plateaus over my career. I had my black-and-white phase, my portrait phase, and my wide-angle phase. In each one, I’d found a way of doing things that reliably produced good results. Handy professionally, but terrible creatively.

As you improve, you’ll find yourself in similar situations. Maybe it’s pet photos, sports photos, or flower photos you nail, but whatever it is, the best way to keep improving is to try new things and push yourself out of your comfort zone. That way, you’ll keep learning.

And, even better, many of the things you learn will be transferable back to what you were already good at. Pushing myself to work with color improved my black-and-white photos. Shooting nothing but landscapes made my portraits stronger.

Getting too creative

If this photo makes you anxious and angry, it's doing its job. There's simply too much going on. (Harry Guinness/)

Being creative with your photography is great, but you can take things too far. Most photographers at least flirt with some terrible, terrible ideas as they develop their style. Some of the common ones (most of which I’ve been guilty of) are over-saturating photos, selectively de-saturating photos except for one single color, “artistically” missing focus, slapping a heavy vignette on everything, using “Dutch angles” (where you frame a photo at an off-kilter angle), and going all-in on high dynamic range photography, or at least the look associated with it.

These sins tend to become particularly tempting around the time photographers start experimenting with Photoshop and other photo-editing programs and realize how “epic” they can make their photos look with a bit of post-production. And I get it, high contrast, super-saturated images can look great. But most of the time they look like the fever dreams of someone who’s seen a Picasso painting—once.

This is one of the hardest mistakes to fix because pushing yourself and trying new things isn’t a problem—until it is. Then, you have to rein yourself in, but first you need to realize you’ve taken things too far

Which brings us to the worst mistake you can make as a photographer.

Not assessing your work

It’s impossible to improve as a photographer if you don’t regularly critique your own work. You need to look over your photos and consider what worked and what didn’t, so you don’t keep making the same mistakes every time you shoot.

Every so often, take some time to go through all the photos you’ve shot over the last few months, as well as some from a year or two ago. With fresh eyes, you’ll see little ways you could have improved your shots—and places where you went wildly wrong. It’s normal to be embarrassed by some of the photos you shot a while back that you thought were great. I know I am.

Once you spot a problem or a pattern you keep falling into, make a conscious effort to avoid it the next time you’re shooting. When I noticed I was relying heavily on black-and-white images, I banned myself from shooting them for a few months. Learning how to use color made me a much better photographer.

The best thing is that as soon as you start evaluating your photos regularly and trying to improve, you’ll get much better—and see your progress in every review session. Even if this section is the only bit you remember from this article, you’ll eventually fix pretty much every other mistake you’re making.

[scootoaster]

Six common photography mistakes to avoid for better pictures

There's nothing necessarily wrong with this photo, but if you get comfortable with a certain photography style (such as portraits), it can be hard to branch out. (Harry Guinness /)

Taking great photos is hard work and it’s easy to make the same mistakes again and again. And as soon as you start overcoming one set of mistakes, you start making new ones. I’ve been at it for more than a decade and I still get things wrong all the time.

Most mistakes that photographers make, however, aren’t unique failings. They’re the same traps everyone falls into. I’ve been there, and every other professional photographer has been, too. Here are some of the most common things amateur photographers do wrong—and how to fix them.

Letting your camera do all the work

Photography is a creative art. You express your intent through the choices you make in composition and exposure. Two photos of the exact same scene, one shot at a fast shutter speed, will look completely different. It’s the same with aperture.

If you only shoot in automatic mode, you’re letting your camera make creative decisions for you. It’ll use acceptable exposure settings most of the time, but it’s almost never going to choose ones that give you a creative or interesting photo.

To really improve as a photographer, the first thing you’ll have to do is get out of automatic and start using camera modes, like aperture priority mode and manual mode. These will give you more control over your exposure settings so you’re the one making decisions, not your camera.

Slavishly following the rule of thirds (and other rules)

Relying too much on the rule of thirds makes Bing sad. You don't want to make Bing sad. (Harry Guinness/)

There are lots of articles out there with lists of rules for improving your composition. Most of them are… fine. But simply following a list of compositional rules makes for boring, uninspired shots that look too similar.

Take the rule of thirds, the most famous of these rules. The idea is that you will take better photos if you divide each shot into a three-by-three grid and place important compositional elements on the third-lines or, best of all, the points where they intersect.

Now don’t get me wrong, if you have no idea how to frame a well-composed photo, the rule of thirds will stop you from making howling mistakes where you cut off peoples’ limbs or crop your images in bonkers ways. But strictly following this rule, and only this rule, is a pretty weak way to compose your shots.

For starters, it doesn’t work for every photo. Below, I’ve followed the rule of thirds by placing both of Bing’s eyes, the most important parts of the composition, on the intersection of the third lines, and ignored it by having a center-weighted composition.

Let Bing's eyes stare through the rule of thirds grid and straight into your heart. (Harry Guinness/)

To free yourself from the rule of thirds, you’ll need to practice using your eye to balance your photos and emphasize what you want to show. Bing’s a small dog, so I don’t want an extreme close-up—you’d have no idea what he really looked like. I much prefer the following composition, which shows him with a bit more context and gives him space in the photo.

Bing is a good dog. (Harry Guinness/)

When it comes to composition, keep the rule of thirds (and other rules) in mind, but don’t follow them blindly. If it works well for the shot you’re after, great. But don’t be afraid to deviate if you think it looks better a different way.

Not working a shot

When you’re learning photography, you almost never get the shot right the first time. Your initial composition will be off in some way, you’ll fail to notice something undesirable in the frame, or your exposure settings won’t be the best. It’s a big mistake to assume you’ve got the photo just because you’ve taken one that’s OK.

Whenever you take a picture, follow up by “working the shot.” Ask yourself if different camera settings might improve it in some way. What if you took it from a few feet to your right or left? How about backing up or moving forward? You may not even be taking it at the best time, especially if you’re doing landscape photography. Maybe you’d be better off waiting an hour for the sun to get lower.

When you work a shot, you’ll make a lot of mistakes. Plenty of the things you try will be wildly off base. Most of the time, you’ll discover that by putting in a bit more time and effort and trying several options, you’ll dial in on a much stronger image than the one you shot first.

Not pushing yourself out of your comfort zone

Once you get to a certain level of skill, it’s easy to stop trying to improve. I’m a pretty competent portrait photographer. I know where to stand, what settings to use, and how to pose a model. I can reliably churn out good portraits.

That’s why I stopped shooting them.

Once you’ve found something that works for you, it can be hard to motivate yourself to try new things. I’ve hit various plateaus over my career. I had my black-and-white phase, my portrait phase, and my wide-angle phase. In each one, I’d found a way of doing things that reliably produced good results. Handy professionally, but terrible creatively.

As you improve, you’ll find yourself in similar situations. Maybe it’s pet photos, sports photos, or flower photos you nail, but whatever it is, the best way to keep improving is to try new things and push yourself out of your comfort zone. That way, you’ll keep learning.

And, even better, many of the things you learn will be transferable back to what you were already good at. Pushing myself to work with color improved my black-and-white photos. Shooting nothing but landscapes made my portraits stronger.

Getting too creative

If this photo makes you anxious and angry, it's doing its job. There's simply too much going on. (Harry Guinness/)

Being creative with your photography is great, but you can take things too far. Most photographers at least flirt with some terrible, terrible ideas as they develop their style. Some of the common ones (most of which I’ve been guilty of) are over-saturating photos, selectively de-saturating photos except for one single color, “artistically” missing focus, slapping a heavy vignette on everything, using “Dutch angles” (where you frame a photo at an off-kilter angle), and going all-in on high dynamic range photography, or at least the look associated with it.

These sins tend to become particularly tempting around the time photographers start experimenting with Photoshop and other photo-editing programs and realize how “epic” they can make their photos look with a bit of post-production. And I get it, high contrast, super-saturated images can look great. But most of the time they look like the fever dreams of someone who’s seen a Picasso painting—once.

This is one of the hardest mistakes to fix because pushing yourself and trying new things isn’t a problem—until it is. Then, you have to rein yourself in, but first you need to realize you’ve taken things too far

Which brings us to the worst mistake you can make as a photographer.

Not assessing your work

It’s impossible to improve as a photographer if you don’t regularly critique your own work. You need to look over your photos and consider what worked and what didn’t, so you don’t keep making the same mistakes every time you shoot.

Every so often, take some time to go through all the photos you’ve shot over the last few months, as well as some from a year or two ago. With fresh eyes, you’ll see little ways you could have improved your shots—and places where you went wildly wrong. It’s normal to be embarrassed by some of the photos you shot a while back that you thought were great. I know I am.

Once you spot a problem or a pattern you keep falling into, make a conscious effort to avoid it the next time you’re shooting. When I noticed I was relying heavily on black-and-white images, I banned myself from shooting them for a few months. Learning how to use color made me a much better photographer.

The best thing is that as soon as you start evaluating your photos regularly and trying to improve, you’ll get much better—and see your progress in every review session. Even if this section is the only bit you remember from this article, you’ll eventually fix pretty much every other mistake you’re making.

[csmalldog]

“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”  ― Pablo Picasso

Tucked away discreetly on Bermondsey is an absolute gem of a find if. Step with me into Pure and Applied: a workshop, antiques shop, print sellers, and gallery combined.

We first discovered this place during an annual street festival, which Bermondsey throws every year and in which all the shops and sellers throw open their doors and plenty of others join in to hawk wares ranging from homemade to high design artisan. Bermondesy Street is home to several restaurants and stores and is delightfully free of brand franchises–although this may change as its popularity has risen and development works near London Bridge have made it more accessible. But nevertheless, it remains downright charming and fun to visit and we look forward to the summer shindig every year.

    Because Pure and Applied is so unassuming, we nearly missed the door opening to its wonders, and what a loss that would have been! Step inside and you are instantly bundled in an eccentric cocoon of old paper and wood, with the glorious attendant scents. Piles of historic prints are stacked everywhere with a mix of antique frames crowded on every wall. Print drawers and glass cases house some treasures, but most are free to rifle through as you, the happy wanderer, deem fit. A few walls serve as an artist gallery where you can purchase current art, and all the way in the back sits a huge, iron hand printer that’s worth a peek if you ever stop by.

While the shop look may be bohemian, they service all kinds of clients from humble household jobs all the way up to world class museums and galleries. I fell in love with it and return to it whenever I’m on Bermondsey Street, but it’s taken me years to finally get around to my own framing projects.

Naturally there was nowhere else I wanted to go when I was ready to bite the bullet. One of my long term goals was to begin framing all our pieces, not least of all because some of them have literally be carted around the world at this point and it was starting to feel like I was risking danger by not having them properly mounted. After major leaks damaged every single ceiling in the flat and resulted in gallons of water pouring through it, I decided it was time to begin putting things under glass.

I’ve been collecting antique prints for years. My goal is to have a gallery wall in my someday house that’s a perfect jumble of all the random things I’ve found over the years. This includes several old maps (I want to eventually own an antique map of everywhere I or Jeff have lived or traveled), a sheet of early modern parchment with marginalia art, hand-colored prints cut out of 18th century books, and magazine covers from the 1920s. On our recent trip to Portugal we chanced upon the most incredible bookstore I’ve ever seen in my life, and walked away with a Portuguese automobile advert from the 1930s, and after spotting an original print in a bar in Athens, I tracked down a reproduction of an aperitif advert that I fell in love with. Some are big, some are small, and none of them match one another–I love each one dearly.

Jeff and I always wanted to own proper art someday, sourced from artists local to our cities or neighborhood, and got our first piece from a London artist last year for our anniversary after seeing her work at an East London market. Charlotte Gerrard’s inspiration is animals and she did a wonderfully charming series based on cows…which you would not think would stop either Jeff or I in our tracks but managed to halt both of us at once, which was a pretty good sign we should buy from her. It was the first “art” we purchased and the first piece I had framed, followed recently by a reproduction printed map of Dublin in the early 20th century made by temperance workers trying to name and shame every pub in the city. Needless to say, there are a LOT and Dublin is no dryer for their efforts.

Both of these projects were custom frame jobs, where the Pure and Applied team made recommendations to help make each piece look unique and fun. I’d love to purchase one of their antique frames someday, but I’m pretty sure these would be massively out of my pricepoint, and of course you need the serendipitous match of a similar sized piece of art. In any case, the prices were on par with what you would pay a quality framer anywhere else I looked, with the benefit of proprietary frame designs. I’m very much a snob in that I like things that not anyone could just find or pick up (see also my love of vintage clothing, irritatingly niche perfume, or custom anything), so this place suits me down to the ground.

Each piece framed is very much a project, however, and I budget for them one at a time without rushing. Our cow print was my Christmas present and the Dublin map was my birthday treat, six months later. So far they are sitting under our kitchen bar awaiting their fate. I don’t want to hang any of them up and put holes in our walls when there is a likelihood of us moving in a couple of months, so at the moment they are carefully wrapped up. But whether we sign another lease or move to a new apartment this fall, I know they are not rolled up in our spare room somewhere and will be properly displayed very soon.

It’s going to take me a long, long time to frame our collection, but it’s been so fun to start the process. To have found such a cool place to do it through is the icing on an already decadent cake. Seriously, check them out if you’re ever in Bermondsey and want to revel in some shameless artistically, expert eccentricity. You won’t regret it.

Home is Where the Art Is: in which I (finally) start framing my jumbled collection of prints and treasures. “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”  ― Pablo Picasso Tucked away discreetly on Bermondsey is an absolute gem of a find if.