Stay tuned!
Here are some green tomatoes. I lit them from below by shooting a flash through a sheet of tracing paper. I used a direct flash above and slightly off to the side for fill.
Man I've got a lot going on now. All summer it's been realtively chill, and now I've got a bunch of things going on at once. Not that I'm complaining. It's all pretty cool stuff, but one at a time would be nice. I do want to get back to updating this blog more often and maybe get a haircut. I'm already sporting my long haired hippie look! ;-) Well enough about me, what about you?
Been kinda busy lately. I'm working on getting a portfolio together. It seems tougher now to find the time to shoot. Here's a shot of my desk. I like the green reflection of the watch. Guess what time I took this photo. No that's not PM.
Morning OJI've been retouching some of my photos. I quite enjoy it. I don't think I'd want to be a retoucher, but as a part of another job, like photographer, or designer that'd be cool. Anyway, about the image, I didn't notice the refection in the bubbles until I looked at them in the computer.
I heard some strange noises outside my window. If you've never heard a squirrel yelling or barking, or singing or whatever you want to call it; it's very strange. It almost sounds like a pig. Anyway, here's the best one I got of this little guy.
Nothin much to say here. I used the camera's little popup flash to shed a little light on this one.
Here's a lighthouse in Mystic Seaport, Mystic, CT. One thing I noticed about this lighthouse is that the light is actually a CFL! Maybe at night that's plenty bright enough. Or maybe the whole lighthouse is now just for show, and no longer needed. One thing I do know, is if they're using a CFL to save energy, they'd do better to light it when it's not in direct competition with the sun.
I didn't take this photo, but I took plenty of others yesterday, so this will stand in their stead. It's the last thing a veggie burger sees. :-O Oh and David, not you Dave, the other one, the one that likes sparklers, I haven't forgot about you, if you're reading this. I don't think I'll have access to sparklers for a while, but I've got another idea that I plan on trying soon, hopefully within the next week or so.
Here are my shoes heading towards "the light" under my bed. I'm starting to feel a bit like a zombie myself. It's all self inflicted. I've been seriously procrastinating working on my thesis. I have been getting some work done on it, but it's very slow. Almost done though... mostly.
Here's a quick homage to Andy Warhol. Oh I think this is the 30,000th exposure on my camera.
Took a couple days off from shooting. It was weird after only maybe 2-3 days without picking up the camera, how different it felt. This photo is my leg, dramatically lit, making it somewhat abstract and a little dramatic.
I've been working for a while on the image, and I'd say I'm about done. I'll leave you in suspense though, as I want to keep looking at it for a while—spend some quality time alone with it. I'll post it eventually and have a fairly detailed writeup about it. I'm thinking of printing it and entering it into a local art show. I almost never print any of my photos. And I've never printed any of my photos larger than 8x10. I'd like to print this one a bit larger. As I said though I want to spend some time with it first, then see how it prints before I decide what to do with it. Who knows, maybe I'll start doing more printing and more fine art-y stuff.
I think I'm seeing light more. Light coming from a low angle tends to look very nice. I tried to capture this as a patch of light shown on my sneakers. My first attempt was a tad disappointing. There was too wide a dynamic range. That is, the shadows too dark, and the brights too bright. The photo looked too harsh. Now, many photographers would make an HDR, or high dynamic range image by taking a series of exposures and then combining them using some program to create an image with a high dynamic range. I've done this before. It's fine and you have a lot of control and can get some great results. But in this case I just popped up the tiny built in flash, adjusted the FE compensation (set the flash to not be as bright) and fired off this shot. The flash threw just enough light into the shadows to brighten them up a bit, so they're not totally black. Thus compressing the tonal range.
Don't over-think this one. It's a flower—a bouquet, actually. Took me all of about 2 seconds to shoot. I even shot the foreground flower dead centered too. That's generally considered a no-no. So with just a slight crop, it's much more interesting. I'm surprised at how bright the color looks mostly right out of the camera. Granted it could be brighter, but I'm just not used to seeing that come out of my camera. Though I probably haven't been shooting many vibrantly colored objects lately.
This craggy moonscape is actually an old tax form that I've had sitting under a window for at least a few months. Occasionally, a little rain would splatter in on it—eventually making the paper very textured. I lit this with a hard light at a steep angle to create a high contrast, highly textured image. You can see the edge of the paper in the bottom right corner area. I'd get rid of this if I was going to make a print or do something serious with it. I'm sure you can use your imagination here :-)
I saw a pretty large wasp in between my open window and screen. I'm not sure if it's a mud wasp. It was after dark when she showed up. I wanted her to go away, as I'd be kept awake by the occasional buzzing; wondering if she'd get in. Somehow a good sized yellow jacket managed to get past the screen a while back, and I've been a bit leery of those things being in the window ever since. I tried a few things to get rid of her, but to no avail. So I figured it was time to take my daily blog photo. I guess she didn't like all the attention. She flew away—but not before I'd wrapped up my shoot.
Here's the setup for the last post, Cereal Flasher II. Now, the gory, technical details. Vivitar 285 HV diffused through a paper napkin @ 1/16 power triggered by PW camera left. Sigma 500DG Super optically slaved, 28mm zoom, at I believe 1/32 power. The light from this flash points up at a white plastic cutting board I held at an angle above the subject, in order to light the reflective surface of the spoon.
