Black & Wednesday 20131225

Working out what to do—photographically—in 2014… #1, get better at seeing, shooting, processing black & white. I’m not making any promises or resolutions, but I hope to post one b/w picture on Wednesdays, starting from today.

So this is the first: shot with the iPhone 5 and native camera app’s (iOS 7) ‘tonal’ preset. Contrast upped and tone mapped in Filterstorm Neue, further refined in Noir photo app, cropped to 6×7 in Filterstorm classic.

7/52-51 a Nursery and an Abandoned housing development: a photowalk

Due to spur-of-the-moment travel plans, this weeks pictures all come from one day of sporadic shooting, first at a plant nursery, and then at an abandoned housing development.

Sunday was just beautiful for walking around and admiring Allah’s creation.

LX-7, AP mode, settings in the Lightbox, with some edits in Lightroom.

Avatar, abstracted

Its about time for a new avatar, methinks. The current one on almost all social media is from 2012, and I’ve lost a bit of weight and gained a few grey hairs in the interim.

This one isn’t really in the running, as it’s just a mashup of the current one (from 2012) and a recent Hipstabstraction, combined with the Diana app (review forthcoming, perhaps, someday), then treated with the Mabel Lens and Robusta film in Oggl.

7/52-50 Phoning it in, poorly

Well, I just didn’t even try this week. Too busy with other stuff. Makes me wonder if I should give up this photography hobby altogether. I’m ashamed to even be posting these, and I have no plans to post these pictures to G+ or anywhere else. If you clicked this far, apologies, but maybe this will be an object lesson to you: avoid committing yourself to a project unless you’re willing to 1) fail occasionally and 2) actually make the time to work on the project.

Apologies, again.

iPhone 5. All shot with the built-in camera app. Most processed with Perspective Correct and/or Filterstorm Neue.

A note on Filterstorm Neue: classic Filterstorm is still the king of general photo editing apps on the iPhone, but the Neue version is slowly gaining on it, and I look forward to moving to Neue full time in the coming weeks/months/whenever the developer gets everything in there.

7/52-49 LensBaby Week!!!2!

Unlike the first LensBaby week for this 7/52, I started this one intending to use the LensBaby. And as you might notice, I got some somewhat better results (to my eye, anyway). I still wonder what I might be able to accomplish if I had the time and the leisure to really focus on photography: Allahu A’lam.

And Alhamdulillah I have much more to focus on, some incomparably better, others more or less equivalent; more or less chosen.

For those of you outside of Texas, we got about 3 inches of ice Thursday night… It took me 45 minutes to scrape the windshield. Good times. Hence the shift from houseplants to outside plants & trees. In both, I think the LensBaby held its own. Fun stuff.

For most of these, I shot without focusing, or with the old lean forward/lean back focusing method: I didn’t much bother with squeezing/twisting the lens. The minimum focus distance is roughly a foot, more or less. An aperture ring of f/4 or so might have sharpened things up a bit, but I wasn’t looking for sharp: I wanted color and light; form was secondary.

D7000. LensBaby Muse (plastic optic). ISO100, f2, AP mode. Some adjustment in Lightroom to bring out color and cheer things up a bit.