Kris Krug hands me my ass with my own camera

I know what it is to be a professional - I operate a dental air engine that spins at 200k in people’s mouths - yep, two hundred thousand RPMs. It’s difficult to imagine what that means, because people can’t imagine 200 thousand RPMs in their mouths. They are usually afraid of the dentist. What it really means is… if you swallow during a procedure, and your tongue accidentally pushes into my handpiece, neither of us will feel a thing, but there will be a 1mm gash in your tongue that I may need to put a stitch in.    Every dentist operates in unforgiving conditions, people swallow, gag, salivate, cry, and we’re expected to run a tool turning at 200k - enough to cut glass to within a 1/10th of a mm, every day.  (Don’t worry. If you swallow, I’ll protect your tongue with my mirror. My mirror has very precise 1mm gashes in it.)  Given my own experience, being a professional means making the difficult or impossible look easy. We dentists also take a lot of photos,  the best way to communicate very complex tooth anatomy/shading to our lab. I can take photos of teeth,  but that’s pretty much where my experience ends. Enter Kris Krug and his fantastic talk at Gnomedex. His lecture was spot on, and it was filled with advice for someone just like me, an amateur, but curious about what that manual setting is for.  I have a Canon G9 I got with airline miles, I don’t have the time to figure out a DSLR, so I thought the G9 would be the next best thing, and really it is a NICE camera, and I’ve had fun with it, but it is inspiring to watch a professional take shots, and make it look soooo easy.   I’m surprised when I get a really nice shot (of anything other than teeth)  I know how precise I can be with a handpiece,  Kris is the same way with a camera,  his eye for light, subject, and frame is so honed he makes it look effortless.  Here’s what he shot with my camera.

Framing, and knowing how the light will interact with the camera was just effortless for him.

This shot with the blurred folks in the background… damn

An off axis frame like this,  I didn’t tweak, or correct any of these shots, they are just casual snaps with a nice point and shoot in the hands of a professional… I am not worthy.

Thank you Kris Krug for a wonderful talk, and for helping me make better content,  we all capture our own experiences, and with people like Kris around our memories are that much richer.