Day 212 of 365

Day 212 of 365
Originally uploaded by Rob Weiher

I accept that during a year long daily photo project you're just going to have those days where you can't get inspired and feel completely devoid of creativity. Tonight was one of those days. My wife handed me, what she calls the blank doll, and I identified with it.

Day 211 of 365

Day 211 of 365, originally uploaded by Rob Weiher.

Really liked the colors on a feather so thought I do a little reverse lens macro on it. If I retook the shot I'd try to not have the focus be so apparent on the left side.

This is the second day of me trying the Flickr blog feature. I load the photo up to Flickr, which is what I've always been doing, and click the Blog This feature and it opens up a new window where I can type in my thoughts. Speeds up the process a bit but I still have to go in and reformat as it sets the photo to the far left and at a size larger than I want.

Day 210 of 365

Day 210 of 365, originally uploaded by Rob Weiher.

Not feeling very inspired today.

Only a few days left to enter the Learning Digital Photography podcasts "Numbers" contest to win a copy of the OnOne Plugin Suite 4.5. Get the specifics here.

Day 209 of 365

More of the spinning pins but this time with some motion thrown in. Started with the pins as close to the 50mm lens as I could get them and with the shutter open and the pins spinning (via the power drill, which I can't believe took me so long to think of using) I moved the drill back and away from the lens. I got the effect I was shooting for.

Now that I have a way of making things spin I'll be doing some more experimenting I'm sure. Hopefully my experimenting isn't getting boring for those of you checking my site. I'm really heartened by the fact that I'm still coming up with ideas at this stage of the project. There have been days where I don't feel like taking a photo at all but still did, so these last couple of weeks where I'm excited to get out there and play have been nice.

Day 208 of 365

I hadn't taken apart the pin prop I used a couple of days ago and while sitting there trying to figure what to photograph tonight I had the hair brained idea of seeing what it would look like spinning. After a few failed attempts at spinning by hand I remembered the power drill. I attached the foam core the pins are stuck in to the power drill and let it start spinning. Below is the same shot but edited a little. I used the linear contrast curve to bring the colors out more and gave it a bit of a high pass sharpening.

Day 207 of 365

Decided to get outside today and stretch my legs a little since I find myself spending most of my photography time in the garage hunched over a table in the corner coming up with odd and abstract creations. I fully intended on doing some street photography but while walking to a spot I wanted to sit and just observe what was going on around me and take a few photos in the process I stopped to look at some flowers.

While looking at the flowers I noticed bees, lots of bees flying about landing on the flowers and collecting pollen. I've never had good success taking photos of bees or butterflies so thought I'd sit there for a bit and see what I could photograph. I thankfully brought my 70-300mm macro lens with me so put that on and waited for a bumblebee to land on the nearest flower. Instead a butterfly landed and started posing for me. I finally have my butterfly shot.

Day 206 of 365

Jessica of Quotidian Photography (check it out if you enjoy photo projects...she has a very nice one going on) ask me the following questions in yesterdays comments. I thought I'd answer her questions as part of today's post in case others had the same questions.

Why did you choose portrait, when landscape would have allowed us to see more pins? Also, the light is only on the front pins, and I would like to be able to see more of the pins in back. Did you light like that on purpose?

To be honest I choose portrait for yesterdays photo because I didn't like any of my landscape shots. I was having a hard time lighting the pins because I stuck them in a white poster board so the light was reflecting quite a bit of light. The back pins are actually a reflection off a piece of clear plexiglas I stood up behind the pins. I was shooting for a reflection to give it more depth but it ended up being too dark to really show this.

My lighting style, if you can call it that, tends to run dark, especially while working in my little space in the garage. This stems from my own personal preference, which is I enjoy darker images, and working with what I have. I recognize that this may not appeal to everyone but it's where I am with my learning.

Hope I answered your questions Jessica. Anyone who checks my site out...please feel free to ask questions like this. I tend to just shoot and not really think about what I'm doing, listening to music helps me just kind of run with it and play without over thinking, so I may not have a good answer but I'll try regardless.

Today's shot is much like yesterdays but I did shoot landscape. I played a little more with the reflection idea but while playing with different lights, this time a string of Christmas lights, I ended up liking the way the reflection of the lights looked with the pins in the foreground.

Day 205 of 365

Something simple tonight...a forest of colorful pins.

Day 204 of 365

I was fully prepared to just do more shots tonight of objects in different states of swirl but decided after taking a bunch (as you can see below) to play with reflection instead. I have been kicking around some ideas that include this piece of Plexiglas so went with one of the ideas tonight. We've all seen shots of water drops that are reflecting a flower or something else in the water drops. This is no different...I hadn't tried it so thought I'd get it out of my system.

Before doing the flower reflection shot I played around with string of beads with Om symbols on it. I wasn't really into it having done so many of these types of shots recently. I did like a few of them so thought I'd share one.


Back on day 197 I posted a shot and asked if anyone could guess what it was. I got a couple of guesses and completely forgot to say or show was it was. It was a piece of art paper with white dots. For my shot I used back lighting so light was coming through the white dots and moved the paper with an open shutter. Sometimes I just focus in on a particular area and with my cable release in hand stand away from the camera and move my subject around while taking shots. I don't know what I'm getting until I check later.

Day 203 of 365

Wanted to try something a little different on the floating numbers from a couple of days ago. This time I used my zoom lens and did the open shutter zoom technique on them to get a different type of motion.