Daily Photo Weekly Wrap-Up: Week 48

This week felt a bit muted. I was a bit under the weather and the colors seemed a bit drab. The snowdrops are up around here though, a sign that makes me happy:

Hipstamatic

Hipstamatic

Hipstamatic

Hipstamatic

As Shot

Hipstamatic

Hipstamatic

As Shot

As Shot

Welcome to this week’s instalment of my daily photographic record. Posts in this series will be photos from the week before, roughly Friday through Friday. This, once a week, wrap-up post will publish on Sunday. The photos for this post will be in a gallery format, they will have all been taken on my phone. The captions on the photos will be an indication of the photo-editing software used to edit them, or simply “as-shot” for those that are unedited.

Writing a weekly wrap up with a gallery is a way for me to gather my thoughts on what has caught my attention in the previous week. It will be a way of filtering through what I am thinking about photographically. I’ll also be able to come back to these posts and look at what trends emerge over time.

As with all my posts, your comments are welcome. I appreciate your interaction with my work here on this blog. It is my intention to publish in this series on Sunday. Every Sunday that is possible. Looking at my year, I already know there are some weeks where I will not be close enough to my technology to make a post possible. In an effort to keep this project pleasant for myself, I won’t be attempting catch-up posts.

Hope to see you in the comments below and in this space next week!

Cheers!

Daily Record Weekly Photo Wrap-Up: Week 40

It’s been a busy week and these photos pretty much represent all the photography work I have done this week, which is to say, not a lot. But because I did manage at least this, I am posting it, a bit of an oasis for me in a swirl of other activity. This week’s photos also reflect the deep and sometimes stark colors of the time of year.

As Shot

Hipstamatic

Hipstamatic

Hipstamatic

Hipstamatic

As Shot

Long Exposure and Hipstamatic

Hipstamatic

Hipstamatic

As Shot

As Shot

Hipstamatic

As Shot

Welcome to this week’s instalment of my daily photographic record. Posts in this series will be photos from the week before, roughly Friday through Friday. This, once a week, wrap-up post will publish on Sunday. The photos for this post will be in a gallery format, they will have all been taken on my phone. The captions on the photos will be an indication of the photo-editing software used to edit them, or simply “as shot” for those that are unedited.

Writing a weekly wrap up with a gallery is a way for me to gather my thoughts on what has caught my attention in the previous week. It will be a way of filtering through what I am thinking about photographically. I’ll also be able to come back to these posts and look at what trends emerge over time.

As with all my posts, your comments are welcome. I appreciate your interaction with my work here on this blog. It is my intention to publish in this series on Sunday. Every Sunday that is possible. Looking at my year, I already know there are some weeks where I will not be close enough to my technology to make a post possible. In an effort to keep this project pleasant for myself, I won’t be attempting catch-up posts.

Hope to see you in the comments below and in this space next week!

Cheers!

Daily Record Weekly Wrap-Up: Week 7

Despite the stormy spring weather we’ve had here, this week’s gallery makes it look as though it has been lovely. I guess that’s me putting on a “nice weather” filter. The birds photographed are swans. It’s rare to see them in flight here.

Hipstamatic

Hipstamatic

Hipstamatic

As Shot

As Shot

As Shot

Welcome to this week’s installment of my daily photographic record. Posts in this series will be photos from the week before, roughly Friday through Friday. This, once a week, wrap-up post will publish on Sunday. The photos for this post will be in a gallery format, they will have all been taken on my phone. The captions on the photos will be an indication of the photo-editing software used to edit them, or simply “as shot” for those that are unedited.

Writing a weekly wrap up with a gallery is a way for me to gather my thoughts on what has caught my attention in the previous week. It will be a way of filtering through what I am thinking about photographically. I’ll also be able to come back to these posts and look at what trends emerge over time.

As with all my posts, your comments are welcome. I appreciate your interaction with my work here on this blog. It is my intention to publish in this series on Sunday. Every Sunday that is possible. Looking at my year, I already know there are some weeks where I will not be close enough to my technology to make a post possible. In an effort to keep this project pleasant for myself, I won’t be attempting catch-up posts.

Hope to see you in the comments below and in this space next week!

Cheers!

Wordless Wednesday: Orchid

Weekly Photo Challenge: Oops!

For this week’s challenge, I invite you to take you on a walk around the zoo with me as I go in search of a photo. I take a lot of photos and I’m grateful for digital photography.  It’s easy to go ahead and take a photo, try another angle, another setting perhaps.  Think for a minute, try something else.  The beauty of digital is that you can throw away all the duds.  My laptop trash bin often has a lot in it. Here is a little gallery of our walk:

Let’s both look away, she’ll probably still take a picture.

We are busy obviously, please go away.

Hello, branch in the frame, upper right corner!

So you see the tree right?

I try to take a shot of all the animals whose names I will forget. I think this is a good idea.

I’m overexposed AND my mouth is full, move along.

You can roll over any of the photos to see why they will not be making it into a blog post other than this one where I show you all my oops moments.  For those of you who visit regularly, you will recognize that cheetah.  He was in last week’s post looking like this:

ISO 800 f/5.6 1/250 0ev 200mm

To get that one photo, I took one hundred and twenty two photos, for me that is almost nothing.

I have a few that I will keep.  I’ll edit those, make sure they are tagged, and save them to a separate hard drive too.  The rest, well those are headed for the bulging trash bin.

Thanks for taking a walk with me. I always like chatting about photography.  Feel free to comment below, either about what I have done here or about your own creative process.

Cheers!

 

Weekly Photo Challenge: Intricate

The original post for this week’s photo challenge mentions a robin’s nest as a possible example of intricate.  I’m going to take that a step further and suggest that it is not only the nest that is intricate, but that those weeks of being an egg and hatchling are perilous and require a lot of intricate details go right for the young bird. Two years ago four of the five health hatches were taken away by a larger bird of prey, a simple example of what can go wrong for these young ones.  This year’s nest is doing well so far, four healthy hatches.  The nest is getting crowded as the birds are growing, here is the nest first thing this morning:

ISO 800 4mm f/2.7 1/200

I have been taking a quick photo on the macro setting with my point and shoot every morning to get a beak count before I set up my larger camera.  I had taken this photo and was inside getting the chairs for my larger set-up when I heard a lot of squawking and looked outside to see that one of the birds was on the ground and hopping away.  Much to the distress of the adult birds the young bird was sitting out in the open like this:

ISO 800 200mm f/6.3 1/250

The adults spent several minutes trying to corral their youngster:

ISO 800 200mm f/6.3 1/250

The baby hopped back closer to the nest and was fed by the adults:

ISO 800 195mm f/6.3 1/250

But the nest is too high up for this baby to get back in.  The adults managed to lure it over to a patch of wildflowers we have.  A few minutes later, the young bird was led by the adults into our hedgerow which will provide more cover while the bird is learning to fly.

It seemed like a bit of a stressful moment for the adult birds as they saw to their young offspring.  Their chatter attracted the attention of other animals who came to watch.  In addition to myself, there was another pair of adult robins, a pair of mourning doves, a northern flicker, a squirrel, and a rabbit.  All of these animals, attracted by the noise, came to watch the moment unfold.  After it was over the robins went back to the business of feeding the rest of their remaining offspring.

ISO 1000 50mm f/6.3 1/250

Just a few of the intricacies that go into being a robin. As for me, to capture these few moments required two cameras and three lenses.  I started with my point and shoot.  The rest of the photos were taken with my Canon 50D.  I used my longer 70-200mm lens for the yard shots and then switched to the 50mm when taking the last photo.

I’ve been posting photos of this journey on Flickr and Twitter, so feel free to join me there and follow along. Your comments are welcome below.

Cheers!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Wall

This week’s photo challenge works in nicely with something I started this week.  After attending a photo seminar last weekend I decided to try a few ideas that caught my attention.  One idea discussed was having a project wall or board.  So, I went out and bought a white board, some markers, and some magnets:

ISO 1000 4mm 0ev f/2.7 1/20

The four columns are different projects I am currently working on.  My thought is to have current versions of photos I am working on up and in a highly visible place so that I can be thinking of them throughout my work day.  Also it is a spot to jot down ideas as they come to me.

So, my photo for this week is a summary of the photography projects I have in the works.  At this point I really like the board.  In part because I am working on several different things and sometimes I find it easy to lose my train of thought  and I’m hoping this will help me.

Do you use a board or wall like this to help you stay organized or focused in your work?  How many creative projects do you have going at any one time?  Feel free to comment below.

Cheers!

Weekly Photo Challenge: (Let the Journey be the) Reward

Easy to say, let the journey be the reward, hard to do though in my opinion.  I had been rethinking the way I view my workday this week so in a strange way this challenge did tie into what I had been thinking about this week.  I have an hourly part-time job and then I have my own business which I am hoping to have up and running in the next few years.  It is easy to let the hourly job, with its short term reward of a paycheck, take precedence over my own business whose reward is more long term and harder to describe.

So, this week I started a timer to keep track of the hours I am putting into my business.  An attempt to remind myself that this job is as real as my paycheck job.  So far, I have found it helpful, so I am going to stick with it for awhile.  One of the things I was working on this week while I was on my new clock, was layers and textures.  As part of that I went out this morning and took some photos of leaves, dead and brown, in the hopes of using that image to create new ones.  So below is a description of what I was working on.

First here is the original leaf photo:

ISO 1000 50mm 0ev f/7.1 1/50

It’s a bit dark and needed some cropping.  This is a version that I edited into more of what I had in mind:

ISO 1000 50mm 0ev f/7.1 1/50

Then I decided to try combining it with another image.  Here is the image I chose:

ISO 800 75mm 0ev f/4.5 1/250

I then combined the two and created this final image:

ISO 800 75mm 0ev f/4.5 1/250

Is this image one that I will sell? Nope, but it is the technique that I will use in other images that I would.

In this case with the two images in Photoshop, I drug the leaves in as a layer below the owl image. Then I put a mask on the bird layer and using a paintbrush set at about 40% opacity, I painted the leaves faintly in.

What do you think of the technique? Is this something you have also tried? What to you is most rewarding in your artistic endeavors?  Feel free to leave a comment below.

Cheers!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Rule of Thirds

I find the rules of photography interesting. Interesting in that they are good guidelines, and challenging in that, as an image creator, you need to decide when the best time to break the rules are.  This week’s challenge pertains to my favorite rule, the rule of thirds. It’s my favorite because I find it to be the most challenging of rules.  It is almost always a good composition guideline but can be the most fun to try to creatively break.

I stuck with following the rule this time around because I am working on a project where I think the rule applies.   I am just starting to work on a series of images dealing with concussion.  My youngest has one, and it has meant serious restrictions on activity.  In this first image I am working on conveying the difficulty of reading when your vision is blurred.

ISO 640 50mm 0ev f/3.5 1/20

I felt the rule of thirds worked for this image because putting the figure in the bottom right corner with the book out of focus and overwhelming in the image just seemed to make sense.  I shot this scene a few different ways, but this one, where even the figure was slightly out of focus, was my favorite.

I used my 50mm lens to get this image.  I was also trying out a magnifying lens that I inherited recently, but I liked the 50mm images better.  The shutter speed is slow on this image, so I started with my tripod but then ended up rearranging the image and just put the camera on the floor.  I’m using natural morning light only and even with a slow shutter speed, and an aperture of 3.5, I still needed to bump the ISO to 640.

Once I picked this image from the several different versions I had shot, I cropped it a bit in Photoshop and then added a bit more blur using the iris blur filter.

So what do you think, does this image convey what I am trying to get across? Do you think this was a good use of the rule of thirds?

Cheers!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Serenity

As I was thinking about how to respond to this week’s photo challenge, serenity, it occurred to me that I would say serenity is an idea that shows up a lot in my photography.  For this week, I chose this image:

ISO 100 185mm 0ev f/5.6 1/100

The image itself was taken this past fall.  I stopped, looked up, and saw this lovely pattern of light that I thought would turn out well in a photograph.  This final edited version is actually a fusion of two identical images shot using different exposures and then edited in Photomatix Pro.   Here are the two originals:

ISO 100 185mm 0ev f/5.6 1/100

ISO 100 185mm 0ev f/5.6 1/100

I felt that creating an HDR image would bring out the jewel tones in the leaves and the bokeh effect in the background of the image.  When I took the original photos, it was a bright day so I had lowered my ISO to 100.  It was also a bit breezy, and in this case I wanted the leaves to be still, so that is the reason for the fast shutter speed.  I settled on an f-stop of 5.6 after a couple of other tries, because I felt like that was the right balance of bokeh in the background and clarity in the leaves.

As for serenity, it’s been a bit elusive in my life lately.  I’ve missed the last few photo challenges.  It’s nice to be back, and I’m looking forward to getting caught up on my comments and visits to other blogs.  As for serenity in a photo, this particular image works for me but what do you think? your comments are welcome below.

Cheers!