The Impromptu PhotoWalk

Well. I went on an impromptu photowalk with the leader of the North Texas Photography Explorers MeetUp Group.

We met up shortly after 2, and wandered around for an hour or two.

Given that this took place in Dallas, on September 2, during the part of the day where the heat really gets going, on mostly unshaded, mostly white concrete roads/sidewalks/paths…

It was HOT.

And I didn’t bring any water.

Luckily, there are some waterfountains on the Katy Trail, otherwise it would’ve gotten ugly.

All in all, a good time, if a bit flipping HOT.

Everything was shot on a D7000 with the Nikkor 50mm f/1.8G in APMode, somewhere between f/4.5 and f/8, and be aware: there are no real masterpieces here…

365.249 reflections/clear blue sky

I went on an impromptu photowalk this afternoon (more pictures to follow), and got some pretty OK results, I think.

I’ll tell more of a story when I post the full album here in a few minutes.

In the mean time…

D7000. Nikkor 50mm f/1.8G. ISO100, 1/1000th (ApMode), f/4.5. Some straightening, and a tiny bit of cropping off the top and right edge (to remove a shadow from the central-ish support column), but otherwise straight out of the Aperture RAW conversion.

365.248 disoriented

I got some nice pictures of some cat toys, but the cats decided to hide instead of play, again, so no cat pictures for caturday…

Scaredy Cats.

So I shot some pictures of the wires behind the computer, and liked this one, with no identifiable structures or forms much better…

GoGo, I guess?

D7000. Nikkor 50mm f/1.8G. ISO100, 1/10th (APmode), f/1.8. About 2 minutes of slider play in Aperture, exported, then I started over again and tortured pixels for about an hour before deciding I liked this one… of course, I’ve lost the version information… Oh well, it’s a throwaway anyway.

365.247 tilt-a…

So the North Texas Photography Explorers MeetUp Group and the Dallas Photography MeetUp Group met up for a joint MeetUp tonight to shoot streaking taillights, ’cause everybody needs a streaky taillight shot, right? Right?!? Right?!?!?!?!?

Indeed.

So this is the most disorienting one I made.

I wish I’d taken the 10-24. But last weekend at the skyline shoot, I didn’t use the 10-24, so I only took the 24mm (and the Tokina 35-200 with the mold in it…).

Those extra 14mm (and the range from 10-24) would’ve made for some fun, mindbending streakings.

What was also tough: by the time the sun went all the way down, traffic had died down considerably… I’ll have to try this again in November or December or January…

D7000. Nikkor 24mm f/2.8 AI. ISO100, 15 seconds, f/11. Minimal processing in Aperture.

 

I’ll share a few more tomorrow, maybe.

365.246 dream of flight

So I shot a bit on the way home today. I didn’t get anything good, except for this shot, which isn’t particularly brilliant or anything, but appeared to have some possibilities, so I started playing around.

If you look closely, there’s a strange sort of border or frame around this. This comes courtesy of a group of adjustment brushes/sliders that I found in Aperture: iPhoto Effects. I had no idea this existed, and everything is way overdone (the edge blur effect, seen here, is at ~15%), but they add a nice change from my usual mix of standard sliders, and the edge blur is rather effective here, I think.

It may not be great, but at least it’s not another #$*%&^@ macro abstraction.

D7000. Nikkor 24mm f/2.8 ai. ISO100, 1/5000th (APmode), f/2.8. About 25 minutes worth of slider play in Aperture, plus some fiddling with Topaz Labs Adjust 5 (didn’t find anything), and a perhaps final attempt to get photomerge or merge to HDR pro working in CS6 (both fail, still: must research).

365.245 Ohne Titel

I came up with several brilliant titles for this, each more evocative than the last. But in the end,  you’re the one looking at it (or, more likely, not), and so you’re the one that gets to title it.

Is it a magic crystal from one or another of the video games, books, stories, movies, or other media that feature such objects?

Is it a warning, signal, beacon, arrival, or other object of fortune?

Whatever it is, it’s not the sort of thing I want to make pictures of, and would much rather get over my fears of change or of being noticed/looked at/judged, which I know to be self-destructive on the one hand and completely irrelevant to who/what I am on the other, and go walk around somewhere, try my hand at street photography, maybe do some urbex-type stuff, add to my graffiti archive, and maybe, just maybe, gasp meet some people, make some new friends, get myself out of this get up-work-come home-shoot-dine-feel sorry for myself cycle that I am most definitely stuck in, and have been for some time.

Perhaps this is a picture of the brass ring that I’ll win if I can become something more like the person I want to be.

Ha.

In any case, I was just playing around after the cats decided not to cooperate, again, and knew this was the shot the second the mini mag light lit up the crystal in this way… so at least I can recognize a shot that I might make.

D7000. Nikkor 24mm f/2.8 AI. ISO100, 5 seconds, f/8. Roughly 3 minutes of slider play in Aperture.

365.244 what the!?!

Another day, another attempt at capturing the cats at play, another day they refuse to cooperate.

Jerks.

So I took the camera to them.

Ivan is not perfectly in focus here. I have great difficulty estimating distances, and would normally have just used f/8 or f/16 and not bothered, but I wanted to blur the foreground, and at this focus distance, with the amount of available light, and a subject that would remain still for 5 or 6 seconds at most, I zone-focused a bit close.

Oh well.

So. Let’s see. where to begin…

The composition is mediocre, at best. The exposure is close-enough, but (as discussed) the focus is off. And the only redeeming quality (for me) is the rather fun post processing I rocked out here.

So I’m well on the way to a week of fails. Hooray!

D7000. Nikkor 24mm f/2.8 AI. ISO100, 4 seconds, f/4. About 7 minutes of playing with sliders (mostly the levels) in Aperture, but only after waffling around on which of the bad pictures I took (not ‘made,’ took) was the least bad for a good 25…