I awoke at 4:00 this morning and – as is customary – I couldn’t fall back asleep. By 5:00 I was looking at my phone to look at the sunrise forecast and to see if there was something that could try to capture with my camera, but I couldn’t come up with an idea. The sun was going to rise in less than 40 minutes and there was no cloud cover, so the sunrise was going to be very unremarkable. Part of me wanted to just go sit at the computer and putz around, but I thought better of it, grabbed my camera gear, got dressed, and got into the car to drive to Green Lakes with intentions of going for a walk and taking pictures of wildlife … if I could find any. The birds would be out for sure, but the deer are always a little hit-and-miss depending […]
I had a few ideas for this one. I liked that the #pin image said something. And I wanted this image to say something as well. I immediately landed on using Scrabble pieces out of context. I considered making a statement about malignant individualism: I would have two stack of letters with the letters “M” and “E” at the top. Then, on the surface of the table top, I would spell out “you”. Wish a wide angle (or maybe even the fish-eye) I would shoot straight down on the letters and use the perspective to emphasize the size of “ME” above “YOU”. I would have titled it “John Galt” (the lead character in the book by Ayn Rand titled Atlas Shrugged). I also had the idea of removing an S, E, L, and F from the bag of letters and then dumping them into a pile/mound until I came upon […]
Nouns: Bobby-pin. Hair-pin. Safety-pin. Rolling-pin. Push-pin. Verb: to hold something down I don’t want to work too hard on this in post and (again) preferred to capture everything in-camera. That condition/criteria precluded me from my original idea: taking an image of myself with the bottom of my shirt stuck in a window frame and me trying to pull myself free. I then could have cut myself out and photoshopped me onto the bulletin board hanging over my desk at the office with a pin holding my shirt in place on the board. I elected instead to find a few comics that playfully expressed my disdain for the workplace and decided to capture a full-body selfie of myself. I would take a similar idea as I had before and would still afix myself to the bulletin board with a pin, but I would make it purposefully 2-dimensional. I placed the corner […]
This one came to me pretty quickly, really. The execution took a little bit of time, though. I knew I wanted to use the magnetic balls that the kids had, but which ones? The large ones that Austin fiddles with at school would have easy enough, but they don’t stack well and have a random oil-slick finish that wouldn’t have photographed well anyway. So, that left me with the smaller magnets. I really wanted to have 5 stacked perfectly vertically and have sixth askew, but it wasn’t physically possible. I tried to have a small arc that would lean to the side, but not touch the ground, but I would have needed 3 hands to position any more than 3 magnets and (frankly) I didn’t want to put that much work into it. So I was left to work with 3 magnets and then it sorta worked itself out. They […]
I recently decided to try to participate in #FlickrFridays. It is a pretty lame thing, really. A bunch of loney or bored people on the internet participate in a weekly challenge to try to create and post an image that pertains to a given topic. But … I am bit always surrounded by social circumstances and I am often looking for something to occupy my mind, so I figure I would give this thing a a whirl. The first topic that I have come to us #tension. Immediately, I thought of physical tension, especially in cords, and lines, and strings. I also considered the idea of emotional tension. The first interpretation, of course, is far more easy to capture than the latter. So … last weekend I would take my camera and tripod to 3 Falls Woods and see if I could create any waterfall images; I would think about […]
The light looked promising in Fulton when I left the office, but I began to have my doubts by the time I was in Hannibal. The clouds were rolling in and would almost certainly obstruct the light that I was hoping for. Still, I continued to Sterling anyway. The bugs aren’t out in force yet and the weather is going to be colder and wetter for the next 3 days. Then it is the weekend … now was the time. Within 5 minutes of my arrival to the nature center, the sun was behind the clouds. It was obvious that there would be some short-lived moments of light over the course of the next hour, so I grabbed my bag and my tea and walked to the swamp (the signage calls it a rookery, but it is a swamp). The cold weather was already evident and the birds were on […]
I had decided that I was going to go out with my camera. I wasn’t sure where to go and I wanted to avoid a long drive, but there was a 50/50 chance of a nice sunset over Lake Ontario with the sun lining up perfectly over the lighthouse if I were to be standing at the park on the eastern margins of the city at the end of Smith Beach Road, so I got in my car with intentions of trying to capture images of the herons at the Sterling Nature Center before going into Oswego for the sunset. I have been to the Nature Center dozens of times, but I had never been on that section of trails because it is a dead-end trail into swamp and bugs. Besides, if I am going to Sterling, it is to explore and enjoy the peaceful shoreline of the lake. But […]
I had the chance to take the camera out a little bit when I was out the with the kids yesterday. By the time we arrived to the park it was after 1:00pm and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, so I had no expectations of any spectacular images. While the kids were finishing their meals, I walked to a couple of trees with shadows that interested me. I liked the fractal nature of the above image and the sweeping curve of the below image. I’ll never print either of them; they were just something to point my camera at. Both images are almost entirely SOOC with only a lift of the shadows. Everything else (for better or worse) was manipulated pre-capture with in-camera settings. I also confess to not recognizing the suitability of the square crop to the second image until I was home. I applied the same […]
I did it. I created 2 images that I was ready to submit to the monthly camera club competition to be reviewed and critiqued by Gregory Heisler, but when then time came for me to receive the link to submit my images … well, the email never arrived. I had sent in the check for paid member ship at the end of February but it never cleared. I sent an email to the president of the club to ask for the contact information of the treasurer (to whom I had sent my membership dues and wanted to see if they received my check) but I did not receive a reply. So … both of my images went unseen. So, I am left to critique myself. This image of Austin is nice and I think it is lit well-enough. I was initially inspired by some of the split lighting that I […]