365.323 Ohne Titel (at the Drive-In)

Rather than fight fatigue and time after work to make the 365 picture, today I left a bit early, and snapped a few frames before work instead. If the exif is to be believed, this was shot at 5:30:02am, but don’t believe the exif, as I always set clocks a few minutes fast, and the camera was back in the bag and the three of us had made our way across 100meters of parking lot, down 25m of sidewalk, and were in the building waiting for 5:30am (when the suite doors unlock) to arrive at 5:28am.

Anyways, it worked out fairly well, as I have plenty of time now to do… whatever, and still get an early dinner and an early bedtime. Hooray!

D7000. Sigma 30mm f/1.4. ISO100, 1.6 seconds (AP mode), f/1.4, -1EV. About 45 seconds of slider play in Aperture.

365.322 the iPhone succeeded where I failed

Note to self: don’t attempt unfinished ideas after working a 10 hour shift unless you already have a safety shot, or are not under pressure to produce a picture.

I had an idea for the faucet challenge and spent my prime after-work shooting time setting up and failing (miserably, I might add) to capture the not-fully-formed idea…

Luckily, I shot this earlier in the day in preparation for my short DayOne entry. (In addition to the RantBook(tm), I keep a condensed and iPhoneography-illustrated version in the DayOne app. It’s got a nice UI, and has gotten me back into the habit of making pictures—usually throwaways—with the iPhone every day.)

There’s something I like about this, but I’m not sure what it is. The bright spot in lower left ruins the otherwise meh composition, and there’s not enough separation between the foreground bits of grocery/lunch sack and its background bits, but I still like it, sorta.

iPhone 4. Built-in Camera app in HDR mode. (ISO80, f/2.8, 1/15th, all auto). 2 resulting images combined and tweaked slightly in TrueHDR app. Cropped, further tweaked, vignetted, and a Chris Marquardt-inspired b/w-converted-to-luminance-layer added in FilterStorm. Dust/lens filth cleaned up in Aperture.

365.321 a strange commute

Feeling uninspired after a 9.5 hour shift of staring at computer screens and clicking mouse/keyboard buttons, I stared blankly around the apartment until my eyes fell on the spray bottle I used to train the cats when they were younger. I continued to stare blankly until my eyes fell on a small reflector I made from a candy wrapper and some duct tape.

3 minutes later, this was taking up hard drive space. Hooray.

D7000. Vivitar 50mm f/1.8 (Cosina), reversed, on ~40mm extension. ISO800, 1/1600th (APmode), f/4, -1EV. About 1 minute of post work in Aperture.

365.320 learn something every day

And I learned quite a bit today!

I learned… that the de facto project manager at work left out a rather massive part of the project my team (and others) have been working on for the past 6 weeks, and that’s due in one month, which means that I’ll (and probably only me) need to work through the Thanksgiving holiday and most Saturdays between now and mid December; and more importantly, perhaps, that the Sigma 30mm f/1.4 that I love so much 1) vignettes like crazy at 1.4 and 2) isn’t all that sharp in the corners at f/1.4.

Also, I really hate getting home after 4, as that means I don’t get around to shooting until close to 5, which should be my dinner time since I’ll need to be going into work extra early for the rest of the year. Hooray!

I’m not quite sure what the D7000 decided to focus on here, but it appears to be something behind the trees that I can’t see (and neither could it). I also meant to be shooting in f/8, as one of my project ideas for 2013 is to learn about compositions with deep depth of field, and plan to shoot exclusively in f/8 or f/11 for a month or three (or for a 52 project (I might run 2 or 3 52 projects instead of another 365, but I’m not sure yet… it might be 7 52 projects, or maybe I’ll go for a 780, or maybe I’ll quit shooting altogether (the last one is somewhat unlikely), but I really don’t want to have to shoot something every day…).

So Hooray for learning new things! I like the natural vignetting, as I don’t have any other lenses that vignette at any focal length (maybe the 10-24, but I never shoot that wide open) due to the cropped sensor, and the blurred corners are also quite pleasant methinks (not that they’re fully visible here, and not that the overall lack of sharpness or shrunken dimensions pretty much remove the visibility of special blurred corners due to a wide aperture).

D7000. Sigma 30mm f/1.4. ISO100, 1/2500th (AP mode), f/1.4, -1EV. About 45 seconds of slider play to help get things more like what my eyes saw.

365.319 lazy Sunday

After a full morning of writing and cooking, and a half-afternoon of checking out apartments on the interwebs, I was feeling a right bit lazy, photographically speaking, and since I haven’t tossed off a macro abstraction lately, this seemed as good a time as any, so here it is.

Woo.

D7000. Vivitar 50mm f/1.8, reversed, on ~40mm extension. ISO100, 1/25th (APmode), f/1.8, -1EV. About 5 minutes of slider play in Aperture.

365.318 LBC0

Well.

Have I been in one pissed off mood today. Sheesh.

I woke up miffed. By what, I have no idea.

Had plans to have breakfast and visit the Arboretum this morning with Momma, so I woke up early (usual weekday time of 4:30a instead of usual weekend time of 5) to make sure I had time to get my clothes washed before she came.

Well, the fancy new washer here at the apartments decided it didn’t want to wash the load of clothes that was in it, so when I went to put the two loads into the two dryes, I found I had to go back inside, fetch the detergent, move the unwashed load into the working washer, and start over again, meaning I’d just lost roughly 50 minutes.

The miffed became peeved.

Then I tried to clean pictures off the iPhone: it took 4 restarts of Aperture and 3 eject and reattachments of the iPhone to get the pictures imported, and then Aperture decided to crash while importing to the backup location.

The peeved became wild frustration.

Then I tried to give some money to a kickstarter campaign, but got distracted by Chrome’s failure to properly auto-complete, cleaned out the auto-complete settings, tried again, auto-complete failed again, tried again, again with the failing of the auto-complete, so I gave up on the whole thing (apologies, Kickstarter starter!).

The wild frustration became seething anger.

Then I went and fetched clothes out of the dryers, hung and folded, and found it was just 7. Great: plenty of time. Except I found a cheerful message from momma that she was on her way. This meant I had roughly 10 minutes to shave and shower.

The anger became fury.

So I ran, shaved and showered as quickly as I could, and came out to find 2 calls and another message from momma: a cheerful “I’m here,” with an obvious “and pissed that you’re not waiting on me” subtext.

The fury intensified.

So I went to call her back and just then the phone began ringing. I told her I was running a bit behind and would need 5 or 10 minutes to get my shoes on and comb my hair.

Thanks to the marvelous cell phone service that is AT&T, she gave her usual “I can’t hear you” reply, so I screamed into the phone “GIVE ME 5 OR 10 MINUTES” and hung up.

I took some deep breaths, put on my shoes, and started to walk to the bathroom to comb my hair when the phone started ringing again.

Fury. Fury. Fury.

I answered, screamed “I NEED 5 MINUTES!,” and pressed the hang-up button as forcefully as I could.

The room turned read and I could feel blood pounding in my temples.

Fury. Fury. Fury. Fury.

I tried to take some deep breaths, but found that I quite literally couldn’t, so I called Momma and suggested, as calmly as I could, that she should go have a nice breakfast and nice walk around the Arboretum, as I was in a foul mood and wouldn’t be any company.

Fury. Fury. Fury. Fury. Fury.

I went and combed my hair. I paced around the apartment. I felt like an asshole for screaming at my mother. I stomped around the apartment. I drove to the grocery and stomped through the aisles, stormed through the checkout, grabbed up my bags and charged back to the car. I came home.

Fury. Fury. Fury. Fury.

I forced myself to take a nap.

It didn’t help.

I listened to music, surfed the internet, swept the floors, worked on the Tokina review, and tried to calm down.

I didn’t, really.

I called up a buddy to see if he still wanted the intuos tablet I offered him a month ago. Went and met him and his wife for lunch and I was cheery and friendly throughout and it was really great to see them both and I definitely enjoyed the time I spent with them (and I probably owe Alicia a couple of bucks for my end of the lunch), but I really just wanted to smash something.

I came home and had another nap. I shot some macro junk that I’ll be deleting shortly. I went out into the courtyard and stared at the bricks in the entryway. They looked nice-ish, so I snapped a quick iPhone shot. I shot some more macro junk. I imported the macro junk and decided it was all junk. I stomped around the apartment. I looked at the brick pics on the phone and decided I liked the picture sideways, so I began the process of convincing Aperture to import from the phone again. I learned that the killall command in the Terminal works for any application, and used that to force Aperture to quit (twice) instead of using ‘Force Quit,’ which made restarting easier and eventually led to successful importing of today’s 365 pic.

Still: Fury. Fury. Fury. Fury.

Let’s hope some dinner and playing with cats and some netflix and a good night’s sleep helps. My shoulders and back are starting to ache from being tensed up all day.

iPhone4. ProCamera app. ISO80, 1/30th, f/2.8 (all handled by the OS). About 30 seconds of slider play in Aperture.

355.317 Serenity NOW (2)

I really shouldn’t nap after work. 9 times out of 10, I wake up feeling great, but the first person I come into contact with raises an aggravation that persists for the rest of the day.

This usually doesn’t matter a whole lot, as I so rarely see any three-dimensional humans after work anyway, much less speak to them. But today, while shooting this, I was interrupted by 2, count ’em: 2! well-meaning and friendly neighbors who just wanted to say hello and ask after my health, even though it was obvious that I was busy playing with the camera.

I was perfectly nice to them, as always, but believe me when I say “Serenity NOW” today, I mean SERENITY NAO!!!1!!

And apologies for trotting out this tired technique again, but 1) I knew I could make a competent-ish picture this way and 2) the light is entirely different at 5pm (after DST ends) than at 2:30pm in July when other versions were made: hence the oranges and reds in this.

Also, I think the composition here is pretty weak, with all manner of shapes practically dragging your eye out of the frame and that are in no way countered by the strong swirling towards the center. So apologies for that too. A crop to square would probably help, some, but I’d lose too much (like the groovy shapes of the bokeh balls on the sides and in the corners).

D7000. Nikon 75-150mm f/3.5 Zomb-E Series. ISO400, 1/80th (AP mode), f/3.5, -1EV. About 2 minutes of slider play in Aperture.