Day 51 of 365

More playing with lighting tonight. First worked with an orange but lighting it correctly proved more difficult than I thought so it was used as a study in color contrast instead. So mushrooms it was since I had already worked with an apple. Decided to play with lighting and reflections.

Day 50 of 365

I drive by this old brick building that I can't really figure out what purpose it may have served when this was still an Army base but it's intrigued me for years. Today I finally decided to pull over and check it out on my way back to work from lunch. What inspired me finally was flipping through The Tao of Photography: Seeing Beyond Seeing by Philippe L. Gross and S.I. Shapiro and saw a closeup photo of a broken window in black and white. You'd think the subject would be boring but it was, as the quote I have above by Irving Penn, effective. So with this new inspiration I pulled out the boots and walked up to the building, walked inside and found what to me was a perfect setting for what was in my head. This is straight out of the camera and only one thing I would like to change in post. There are a few little light glares off small pieces of glass in the shadow area and I could have just kicked out of the way if I had noticed them.

I decided to leave it in color because I felt it was close enough to black and white anyway because of the way the light is shining through the really dirty glass and the natural light coming through the broken parts of the window.

Day 49 of 365

For those of you that enjoy the boots I promise they will return soon. With the weather and being sick all of last week I haven't felt like being outside much...mostly just to and from work and class.

I've been wanting to explore still life a little more and figured a single apple would be a good start. I wanted to work with just one light and black background to get the feel I was shooting for. After I got started I thought maybe a little water would add something to the shot. I took almost 100 photos and have several ones I like this was the one I felt had the best lighting and didn't need any post work done. I will be posting other shots I liked and did a little post work to to my Flickr account if you would like to see them.

I like to listen to my Zune while working with my camera and it was fitting that I had a podcast from 7 Photography Questions interviewing Jo Whaley, a fine arts still life photographer. She had some great tips and I'm finding this podcast to be really informative. Each podcast is with a different professional photographer and they are asked 7 questions that were submitted by listeners of the show and they also talk about examples of their work that you can look at online in the show notes. I think the best informational podcast out there for photography. The other big ones like TWIP, Camera Dojo and the like are great as well but 7 Questions is solely about that photographer giving you insight into what they do and tips for that particular type of photography they are experts at. It's different each podcast...not weeks on end of wedding photography.

Day 48 of 365

I was in a rush...didn't take a photo all day because of rain but was walking to class and saw some earlier rain running off a corner of a building. Figured it was a good opportunity to capture motion.

Day 47 of 365

It was a fairly rainy and miserable day today but did get to enjoy seeing this rainbow at the end of the day.

Day 46 of 365

My wife, Jen, is the creative one in the family and enjoys making cards. Today's photo is of a small insert that is part of a much larger Valentines card she made me.

Day 45 of 365

Very large, like Jurassic Park sized fern fiddleheads. I'm 6'3 and the foreground one was at eye level.

Day 44 of 365

I had a meeting first thing this morning so went straight there from home. I was the first one there and was sitting there looking around the room and pulled out my camera and decided to see if I could find things to photograph. It was kind of dark so I had to increase my ISO from 100 to 400 and was able to lean on a table or the wall if I needed to. While the setting is pretty boring I was able to find some nice lines and patterns to photograph.

Here's my photo of the day


I didn't want to fill up my blog with all the other photos I took so put them together. Click for a larger version.

Day 43 of 365

I wanted to bring the boots out today but didn't get much time to find a good setup. I noticed a small patch of wild flowers growing across the street from my office in a big open field so after work ran over there with the boots to see what I could do with them. There weren't as many as I thought but then again I was looking at them from 150 yards or so away. I think the last week of having a cold and feeling a little blah is creeping into my photography...I can really only describe the following as blah. I couldn't decide which was less so, so posted a color and b&w version. I was envisioning b&w when I took the shot so have allowed myself that much manipulation in Photoshop.

Day 42 of 365

I wasn't able to get a boots photo today and since I had a night class I figured I'd just do something the lightbox again tonight. On the way home the moon was peaking through the clouds and looked really cool...unfortunately by the time we got home and I got my camera and tripod setup I wasn't able to get a very good shot. I kind of like this one because of the colors and the wispy clouds...but the noise bothers me. I didn't have the in camera noise reduction on and probably should have.