themeless month

Not a dramatic scene, but I really liked the ice hook that the gulls are perched on (the smudge in the sky just above the horizon is a gull in flight - when the photo is as large as my computer screen that gull shows up pretty good!). During "break up," ice from Cook Inlet is strewn along the banks and is just as grey as the volcanic silt mud they rest on. My effort here may not be apparent to anyone else. Mainly I'm trying to get comfortable with low contrast shots.

Maybe I do have a theme - get comfortable with begin uncomfortable. I really wanted this to come out sharp! But was already in bed, which accounts for the angle of this view, and didn't have my tripod handy. Martin waited as I held my breath in effort to be as still as possible for a shutter speed of 15 seconds. His patience ran out, "Are you done yet?" 'Course, I was holding my breath and couldn't answer!

Does this challenge any comfort zones? Probably not, as I took this in my own kitchen and boiled eggs are something I can generally handle without to much trouble. Maybe I'm working on allowing myself to take pictures of anything, and find the beauty or interest in simply what is.

This one is just something I had been staring at for about a week and finally decided to take a picture! The dark area, which I hope resembles a heart, is a fairly new development on this bone (a whale vertebrae) which has been on my deck for a handful of years. I think the dark spot, which there are several of, is a moss or a growth of some kind. The bone sat in the shadow but there was lots of light out that day. Light on the bone diminished the contrast of the heart-shaped image.

I played in this tunnel for quite a while! No one seemed too creeped out over that, thankfully.

Lucky timing - nice low angle of the sun made for shadow patterns, but still enough light for the bike riders to have crisp detail.

more b & w

Just playing with some back lighting to see what kind of sparkle I could make.

Might not look like much, but when I first saw this I was wondering who the hell wrote on my kitchen counter! The sunlight reflecting off the "cream top" reflected the negative image of a shadow. Now I look at it and scratch my head, but at the time it seemed interesting.

Spent too many days indoor this month. This pic, plus the one below, are of a project using tumbled stone beads and a bit of copper wire. Playing with shadows of the wire above I wanted to create layers... and below, I think I was just playing with the lack of contrast between the beads and the background. The contrast is only in the shadows created by the beads and there's even some light in those shadows.

True confession: all this months photos are digital. I had hoped to work with film photography, and did, but didn't develop the roll in time. Next month's goal: film photography with continued focus on exposure and lighting!

Black & White

For the first time since we started this game, I think I might have had a month where I accomplished at least some of what I set out to do. The first three pictures were taken intentionally for my black & white month. I have found I am trying to pay more attention to exposure and lighting and in some pics had some success, others not so much. I realize that the black and white images really start to show when I am not paying attention to light and focusing more on the subject or composition. I guess that is the idea of them, but clearly I still need to work at it!

I actually took the picture below last month when I was in Guatemala, but when I realized this month how little I pay attention to lighting I decided that I wanted to include this one. I was paying attention to the lighting and the composition at the same time when I took it, so I wanted to show I was capable. Still more luck than skill, but I am happy to say I am pleased with this one!

I read a photography book this month and one of the techniques mentioned was 'panning'. While I was waiting for Kelly one day I decided to be a creeper and practice my panning technique on the cars that were winging by on the nearby street. Turns out it is a lot harder than I anticipated (as usual). I really liked this one, so even though it doesn't fit in with my black & white theme for the month, I wanted to show my success!

Portraits?

I started the month off with wonderful intentions of working on studio portrait techniques, but right away found myself distracted by other variations on the subject matter. It started with my brilliant idea to do a self-portrait since I didn't have another willing body around at the exact moment I decided to start my monthly challenge. As usual, this idea turned out to be more complicated than I had originally anticipated. There was lots of leaping up, spinning dials, then trying to reposition myself to make the picture look natural. I won't confess how many pictures I took before I managed to find a passable one, but I did learn a lot in the process! I continued with the same idea, candid 'portraits' of others in my family, using the various manual settings. Luckily this time my subject matter were distracted by the superbowl and willing to sit for long stretches while I futzed with all the dials on my camera. Again, MANY attempts later, I got a few that were decent.

I was on a roll, even if I was not exactly following my initial plan. I decided I would devote the rest of the month to my original premise of 'studio portraits'. Then I went away to Central America. Once again, I got distracted and went way off track. I guess you could say I worked more on 'public' portraits...

So in the end I did do some form of portrait work, though it was not the kind I had planned at the beginning of the month. As I continue to explore with my camera, I am amazed by how much I still have to learn! I think I am going to have to revisit this technique in the future as once again, I feel as if I haven't even scratched the surface.... perhaps next time I will actually manage to work on 'studio' portraits?!

subjected

Lee Whitten: the subject... because he was the only one who didn't object! Believe it or not I did take color photos during the photo shoot. But when it came to selecting ones to post, I guess I'm still not done with sepia. I'm not sure what to say about working with portraits except to say that out of the 60 shots we took I like them all! That must be the danger of working with someone you love - even the blurry shots make you go "awhhh, cute." Taking the photos was just plain old fun, selecting a few to post became the challenge. How to discern what is a good photo and why I think it's good... that might be the first step to making a portrait and developing a voice.

Light, Exposure, Manual Settings

Since this is the first month of Technique Twelve, I am still trying to figure out how to describe the technique I am attempting to work on each month. Rather than simply posting the various camera settings I think I will bore you with an explanation of my thinking/mission for each month and go from there.

For January I was trying to work on using manual settings to play with exposure and lighting. Specifically, I was hoping to become comfortable enough with the endless options on my camera dials so that I could successfully get the image I wanted without having to resort to 'auto' settings or flash photography. I was only moderately successful. While I do feel more comfortable with some of the settings, I am by no means fully confident yet. I am hoping as I play this game over the course of the coming year, I will be able to look back and see that I have indeed become satisfactorily proficient by year end! So on to my submissions for January:

Beside the obvious exposure challenges of the above picture, I had an added bonus of a weird green reflection which I tried to remove using photoshop. While I got rid of most of it, I am not totally satisfied with the end result. A bit of a learning curve there as well, so something else to work on over the coming year. Perhaps some research will show a simplier, tidier way?

While the above picture is pretty ordinary (and boring) if taken with all the auto settings on my camera, it was a bit of a challenge for me with the manual settings. Same with the one below. The bright snowblind outside the window and the sun streaming in, combined with dark of the desk & Mac's coat were more challenging than I initally realized. By the way, there are squirrels in her yard....the nerve! She would like to eat them all.....

Again, I have taken tons of icicle pictures using the auto settings on my camera, but trying to catch the motion of the drip with the extreme snow blind outside while keeping the exposures correct was a challenge for me. I was pretty psyched that I caught the big drip and a tiny bonus dot...

I am including the above pic simply because I am playing an art game with my sister and had to take a picture of my submission for that game. I used the tripod in a relatively dark room, manual settings, colors stayed true, so a success! :o)

light, exposure

This one was a simple concept, try to take a picture just at the right moment of the morning - not too light and not too dark. Too dark and my camera makes only grainy pictures. Too light and you wouldn't be able to see Venus. 'Course, you can't see Venus with the picture this small, so some of my intentions got lost in translation (there is a dot, if you look hard enough, diagonally down from and right of center. It's perched just atop the tips of a few delicate branches). The manual settings of my camera allow for selecting the ISO as low as 80 and as high as 1600. I ran out the front door of my house to get this shot... leaving the tripod inside. The light was rising too fast and I didn't want to miss the shot by trying to find the tripod, so I set the ISO at 1600 hoping I could escape a blurred shot. The sacrifice was that the blue sky isn't as richly colored as it looked to my eye, but there was enough texture from the clouds... and it is what it is.

Breakfast. Maybe not of champions, but of... photogamers. My intention was to get a crisp shot and I did have to use the tripod to get it. At this point my use of manual settings is... intuitive manipulation. For this I started with the ISO setting (for some reason 800 ISO was giving me the look I wanted. I don't understand this stuff I just spin dials until the screen shows me what I like). From there I played with the f-stop and manual focus... again, until it looked good to me. As it turned out with this shot the image of sliced red apple, cheddar cheese, Parmesan cheese, bright white cup, red handled knife all set on a slightly grease stained cutting board... just didn't look that interesting once I downloaded the shot to my computer. Hence the tweaking - sepia was finagled by using photo editing software.


I took shot after shot on this day... the hoar frost is so attractive to me it was fun to play with what was and wasn't in focus, what was or wasn't in the background, what was and wasn't in the bright light. Besides playing with focus for this shot I used a low ISO and then played with the shutter speed to see how richly I could draw out the drama. Speeding up the shutter speed just a touch faster than what the camera indicated (green light) I got the balance of richness without being too dark that intrigued me most.

I was walking the dogs in the back yard saw this one teensy little leaf resting on the snow. I herded the dogs away hoping they wouldn't pee too close to it! After puppydogs were done and back inside I pulled out the trusty ol' camera and dove into that intuitive manipulation (aka: manual settings exploration). For this shot I did end up editing out some of the blue. No matter what dials I manipulated, spun, twisted and turned I couldn't get the snow to look the way it looked to my eye. Any advice?

My main effort here was to allow my obsession with crispness to be put on hold. The sky was layered with clouds and the sun occasionally pierced a layer, blindingly. I admit that I did initially tweak this to intensify the dark ridge of trees at the horizon. But the crispness that I could create ended up challenging me. What is my fascination with hard edges of black and white? So I restored the original (I did take it as B&W on the camera) and eased into allowing this to be just as it is. Fast shutter speed, 200 ISO. A dark shot allowing "cloud drama."