365.325 Ohne Titel

Apologies for the delay in sharing yesterday’s 365 pic. I went on a photowalk with the North Texas Photography Explorers MeetUp Group to the City of Dallas’s annual City Lights opening night.

A few photos from the festivities, as well as a rant about ‘not even #@%*%&@ Thanksgiving yet’ to follow, though I didn’t get much that I was happy with.

Shooting random strangers is not my forte; shooting random strangers in the dark, even less so.

D7000. Sigma 30mm f/1.4. ISO800, 1/15th, f/1.6 (Shutter Priority), -1EV. A crop to square to remove a massive black hole on the right, and about 4 minutes of slider play in Aperture.

365.324 morning stroll (AKA “I was walking like a ghost”)

I woke up insanely early this morning, and rather than surf the internets randomly, I decided to go on into work and try to make a 365 pic before work again.

During the drive, I decided on a small aperture/long exposure, ghost walker shot, and I guess I got what I asked for.

But this picture (and the other 7 I shot) look very odd to me. Cold. Like the lighting/picture quality on those bad sci-fi shows from the late 1990s and early 2000s, maybe. Sort of slicker than anything else out there, smoothed over. Very Very Digital, and in that very unreal way that digital sometimes is.

It sorta creeps me out.

And I didn’t quite get what I wanted out of the picture, or the composition or anything, so I’m glad I get to go into work tomorrow. Maybe I’ll try it again, though it would probably be better to wait until Monday, when I’ll have dark pants and a dark(er) shirt on (likely).

I do like the lens flare and the sunstars, though, so I guess that counts for something.

I thought of compositing all the ghost walkers into one scene, but the camera (resting on top of the car) was never in the same place from one shot to the next, and so matching up parking lines and leaf litter would be nightmarish.

D7000. Sigma 30mm f/1.4. ISO100, 10 seconds (AP mode), f/8. About 15 minutes of effing around in Aperture: burning and increasing contrast in the shadows and the ghost; fixing (sorta) the colors (my shirt today was a powder blue, not a purple); and trying to un-digital the image (I ended up just giving up).

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.