365.154 ominous

From the time I woke up this morning—and even before, perhaps—I didn’t want to make another abstract picture for the 365, so I shot every chance I got today.

I shot the empty office at 5:35am when I arrived to work.

I shot (surreptitiously) coworkers, cubicle neighbors, and the big fancy bosses that occupied the conference room and boardroom all day.

I shot the roly poly that was scuttling around the mens room floor.

Every chance I got, I shot, with the goal of capturing a 365 shot before leaving work.

Alas, I don’t yet have much experience shooting nonchalantly with the phone while walking, and so the best shots came out blurry and the worst shots weren’t of anything.

So I decided to try the old shoot from the car window on the way home, and got this.

I’m not sure why I like this one. There’s some tension here, due to the frozen motion. There’s lots of repetition and plenty of stuff to lead the eye around. There’s just something… an ‘I know not what’ about this picture that made it the one.

And you wanna know something strange? I knew it when I tripped the shutter.

GoGo, I guess.

D7000. Nikkor 24mm f/2.8 ai. ISO100, 1/1600 (AP Mode), f/8, -1.33EV. Heavy-handed processing in Aperture, to bring out detail in the clouds and intensify the contrast everywhere else.

Comments and suggestions will be appreciated.

365.153 facet

I really didn’t want to shoot yet another macro shot today, and really thought one of the power’s-out-so-I’m-bouncing-flashlight-off-the-ceiling-thanks-purely-to-photography long exposures I made early this morning, but none of them worked particularly well, and none were even remotely in focus, and I got home rather late, so here we are.

Oh well.

D7000. Nikkor 24mm f/2.8 ai, reversed, on 100mm extension. ISO100, .6 seconds (AP mode), f/2.8. Minor levels adjustment in Aperture.

365.152 Amused by my Intense Frustration, a Self Portrait

Some weeks ago, I submitted a photo of unfolded interior of a gallon-sized fishy cracker container and claimed that I would be making an on-camera macro flash diffuser out of it. This would be 365-95, if you’d like to reminisce.

Well, fast forward 57 days and guess where that former fishy-cracker container has been for all this time…

So I decided to spend a couple of hours doing what I said I was going to do, sort of.

5 or 6 hours and ~400 shots later, here we are.

First, I do quite like the light this mod gives off. It’s fairly warm, comes out in a tight, upside-down teardrop shape or in a narrow, open-topped strip, and is fairly well feathered, despite having very little in the way of modifications to it beyond opening the carton out flat and rolling one end around the SB-700 and temporarily fixing it with some gaff tape.

Second, the convertible nature of the mod itself makes me thing that it might be useful for something, somewhere, sometime, but who knows.

Third, the D7000 is incapable of setting separate focus settings for the ML-L3 remote… This means that I ended up having to remove the back-button focus, change to area mode, and cross my fingers that it would focus on my eyes and not my ears (which it decided to do if I was in any way out of center, even at f/8, and I had intended to use the shot for my about.me page, which would require a mostly off-center me to leave room for the about text and links… I’ll have to resort to photoshop after all: thanks, Nikon… though I probably could’ve used single-point af and just tried to make sure my eyes were close to the point I set, though I had very little success with that early on).

So out of ~400 shots, fully 250 were out of focus thanks to the flaky af, which—to be honest—never gave me any problems before, so it’s likely I was just doing something wrong. Another 130 or so had me looking particularly goofy, as I am wont to do in photos. And many of the remaining usable ones captured me in full-on rage mode, or looking rather vacant.

But this one worked, sort of, after I converted it to black and white and cloned out most of the frizzy hairs on the back of my head.

And I think I look rather nice here, even though I’m deep in the throes of I-want-to-smash-the-&%$@$!-camera mode and taking a moment to chuckle at myself for getting so bothered by something of so little consequence, really.

tl;dr: this photo finds me amused at my frustration and trying to deep-breathe my way out of it.

D7000. Nikkor 50mm f/1.8G. ISO100, 1/250th, f/8. SB-700 at full power, fired into a modified (but not yet completed) gallon-sized fishy cracker container.

In case you’re curious, here’s the fishy-cracker light mod in its current state:

365.152 Amused by my Intense Frustration, a Self Portrait

The top section can flip up, which cuts the intensity by at least two stops, and adds a tiny bit of ceiling-bounce to the whole operation. I think it’ll be pretty cool when I get it all finally assembled, if I ever get it all finally assembled…

365.151 Olive and Ivan: Hipstamaticats

So I was busily surfing the interwebs when I looked over and spied Olive and Ivan, basking in the midmorning sunlight.

The D7000 was zipped up in the camera bag, and Ivan would’ve run if I’d tried to take it out, but I had the iPhone close at hand, and have found a few new recipes, thanks to the several evenings I spent shooting the same scene over and over again with every possible lens & film combination (no flashes, though, and I may or may not post them for posterity…).

iPhone 4. Hipstamatic App. Watts lens, Blanko Noir film.

As a bonus, please enjoy the 9 best shots I snagged before the brilliant light moved on:

Recipes used:

The last three were provided by Dan Cristea (@dan.cristea on Instagram). Thanks!

365.150 Close, but not quite…

I tried for many hours to capture this:

“…[C]onsciousness flowed through and around her and into the darkness. She glimpsed the place dimly before her mind blanked itself away from the terror. Without knowing why, her whole being trembled at what she had seen—a region where a wind blew and sparks glared, where rings of light expanded and contracted, where rows of tumescent white shapes flowed over and under and around the lights, driven by darkness and a wind out of nowhere.”^

I don’t think I got there, and I will try again, but I was really excited when this appeared in the viewfinder, and I sort of knew that this—or one of its fraternal siblings—was the one, even though it didn’t quite make it.

Similarly, I read the quote a few nights ago, and knew that my current macro subject—the Collier Kaleidoscope—had the potential to reveal the tumescence and flowing and wind out of nowhere, if I could somehow harness my limited skills and make the photograph appear.

Close, but not quite.

D7000. Nikkor 24mm f/2.8 ai, reversed on the Nikon 36-72mm f/3.5 E Series, at 72mm. ISO100, 5 seconds (AP mode), f/2.8 & f/3.5. Rather heavy processing in Aperture, but not particularly overblown, and not as much pixel torturing as I’ve done in the past few days (or as much as I put on the set of pictures that I tried to bend to an HDR version of the quote above, but they didn’t work, and I knew they wouldn’t, but knew this one would).

^Herbert, Frank. Dune. (Radnor, Pennsylvania: Chilton Book Company, 1965; Berkley Medalion Edition, Sixth Printing, 1977), 444.

365.149 drive-by selbsporträt

I snuck out of work a bit early today (actually, there was no need to sneak, and I didn’t particularly, as there were few people left by the time I left), and the early-afternoon light looked just about perfect for some high-contrast street shooting.

But, being that I work in an anonymous office park in an anonymous section of an anonymous suburb of an anonymous urban metropolis, there was no one about to shoot, so I shot some cars in the parking lot, and practiced my exposure locking skills.

Boring.

But I kept the camera out and shot a bit on the way home, including this shot of some stationary overpass supports as I sped past.

After some cursing and slamming on brakes and friendly horn beeps and unfriendly hand gestures and the usual sorts of homeward bound holiday-weekend fun, I shot a bit more, looking to capture a nice bit of Dune that I read last night (fail), but when I got home and loaded all the pictures in—as an aside, I’ve not been loading everything of late, but only those photos that had some chance of making it to 365 greatness or that might make for fun viewing later, and this has cut my import quotient by 60%—this one screamed at me.

So it got some heavy processing in Aperture, and a rather avant grade (for me) 16×9 crop before I realized that the drippy, smeary, splotch on the window was the reflection of my arm and hand and the camera, framed by my light-blue shirt…

Good times.

D7000. 24mm f/2.8 ai. ISO100, 1/15th (AP mode), f/2.8, and absolutely tortured in Aperture.

365.148 if I could paint like this, I’d…

if I could paint like this, I’d… well, I’d just… I mean I’d…

but I can’t, so I use a camera instead.

Fairly heavy on the post today, James… But I like it, so groovy. I didn’t leave Aperture, but I did pull out some of it’s hidden manipulation features… still nothing you couldn’t do in a darkroom, I don’t think, but far more than I usually do. But, like I said, it matters not.

I have a feeling that this would fairly well represent Paul-Muad’Dib’s becoming the Kwisatz Haderach, but I haven’t gotten to that part yet, so it doesn’t.

D7000. Nikon 36-72mm f/3.5 E Series, reversed, on 100mm extension. ISO100, 1/5th (AP Mode), f/3.5. Heavily processed in Aperture.