Saturday - February 21, 2009

Saturday was a busy busy day but I DID manage to get one picture. It's terrible! Not the subject matter because it's my oldest son after FINALLY getting the mop on his head cut off but terrible in that it is B-L-U-R-R-Y! I didn't even check the picture when took it and I usually do. Lesson for day four...CHECK THE PICTURE AND MAKE SURE IT'S FOCUSED! LOL! I said in my first daily photo experiment post that I would learn stuff surely by doing this. Well, I went back the fundamentals of photography yesterday! I never thought "focus" would be a big issue but if you don't check it...it could be a huge issue. Especially if there is no way to retake the shot. I think this could have been a cute snapshot of my son but instead is a cute subject that is blurry. YUCK!! It's hard enough to get good pictures of a thirteen year old because they don't want to cooperate with anything and I make it worse by messing the one chance up by not checking it when I was done. HA!

So here is my lesson found online about this subject:

"The plane of critical focus in your image will be the area that falls on the active focus area. As you point the camera at various subjects and press the shutter button halfway down, you'll see the subjects pop into focus in the viewfinder."

Here's the picture. I won't even go into setting details since it's blurry. I LOVE my little man's new haircut though! :-)

Friday - February 20, 2008

Okay so I am totally cheating on this one and I'm posting two days late..which will probably be a regular occurrence as I don't have time to get on this computer every day.

Remember Thursday when I said I took pictures of tree bark, our lawnmower and grass? Well, here's the grass one. I got so busy Friday evening that I completely forgot to take a picture.

So instead of a current one from Friday....here's some wild weedy grass from my back yard. I shot this with my 70-300mm lens. I had my shutter on 1/100 as a random selection, aperture at F5.6 for shorter focus range, ISO on 640 because the sun was going down and I needed more light and wasn't going to be able to bump my shutter down much more and still hand hold and was zoomed in at 300mm. I adjusted levels and added a touch of a warm photo filter since that's the time of day it was.

Here is my first boring snapshot. And a cheat one at that. :-)

Thursday - February 19, 2009

I'm a day late posting this one and I haven't even taken my photo for today. Anyway, this photo was taken after many other shots of just "stuff". The grass, a push lawnmower, a tiny flower, tree bark....I just wasn't feeling too creative. I wanted to try to use my telephoto lens but just couldn't get anything I was even halfway content with. Well, wine always helps, right? I didn't even think about it until after I had actually poured a glass but I had taken a couple of shots in the past of wine or some other neat looking alcohol bottle and realized that it could make for an interesting subject...again. It's not the greatest "shakes" but is sure is better than the push lawnmower picture and the picture of the grass that surely everyone has tried to photograph creatively. So, here it is.


I started off going with color on this one but instead decided that B&W would do it more justice. I did my standard levels and curves. Then I applied a gradient map as my conversion process to B&W. After that, I revisited the levels & curves adjustments to get it just like I wanted. I shot this hand held at 1/40 shutter speed, f5.6 aperture, 640 shutter speed and a focal length of 50mm. I'm pretty happy with it for a "snapshot". So...off to take a photo for today. Maybe I'll get it posted by tomorrow. Have a great remaining Friday and thanks for stopping by.

Wednesday - February 18, 2009

I've seen this idea done a few times and though I wish I had thought to start my own "photo a day" experiment on January 1st I guess now is better than never, right? I haven't done too much in the way of "blogging" in a while though I could probably post lots of entries to catch up on all the pictures I've taken since Stacy's wedding last summer.

This morning was my first morning taking my Nikon to work. I've got a little Kodak Easy Share too that I think I'll start leaving in my car just in case I forget my Nikon.

I plan (but as they say, best laid plans and all....) to take a photo every day. It may be a "piece" of junk snapshot or it may be a master"piece" that will make me a million (yeah right, don't cross your fingers on that one.) I may post it that day or I may compile a few day collection and post them all at once. In any event, it's going to be fun and if I actually stick with it, I think I could actually learn some stuff I don't know yet about photography and making it creative.

I love abstract and funky so don't be surprised if I post something that makes you say what the H^%* was she thinking when she took that picture?

So, that all being said, here we go with day one...

First of all, I took a picture a while back at night on a slower shutter speed while driving down the road that has become one of my most favorite abstract photos that I've taken. It turned out pretty neat. Here is that shot.

So this morning, I was about 15 minutes early to work so I drove around towards downtown and came back up the long way. I set my shutter speed to 1/2 second, my aperture to F6.3 and my ISO to 400. My lens was at 50mm. I had absolutely no rhyme or reason for these settings as I was driving down the road. I knew I wanted abstract so other than changing my shutter speed from 800 where it was previously set to keep the grain out all I did on purpose was kept bumping the shutter speed down to get blur in my hopefully abstract but still subject detectable image. It's funky I think but I like it. It definitely shows that I'm going into a city area of some sort if you can call our small downtown area a city and it's blurry soft to give it the abstract look of an unknown town. I love how the colors turned out for me and other than minor levels & curves adjustments, I just threw in a little bit of a vignette with a color sample out of the blue/purple mid tones in the photo. I also like how the street is quite deserted at this time of early morning and I like how the middle lines of the street come in from the bottom left to offer a diagonal path into the city I am shooting ahead. That all being said and my own critique done on myself, here is the photo.

Day one in my opinion was successful. As I move along I hope to get more risky and brave in my photography. I've always been afraid of "journalistic" type of photography because of the fear of someone stopping me and saying, "why are you taking pictures of me" but it has always interested me. Maybe I'll make that my goal for the end of 365 days of shooting. I'll plan to eventually break into some journalistic styles and see if I can get past that fear.

As always, thank you for your interest and please feel free to comment on any blogs I've posted.