Published on
January 17, 2010 in
Stuff.
This week’s theme was “Sky”. The weather did not cooperate a lot, as it was frequently an even sheet of uninteresting gray and often drizzling, but I did get lucky with a short break between weather systems.
During one of the only days where the sun came out I got this moody shot as a new storm front was blowing in from the left of the scene and obliterating the last of the afternoon sunshine on the right of the scene. There was just enough light from the late afternoon sun to put a hint of color and detail in the storm clouds, while really setting off the big fluffy clouds from the sunny morning. The bare trees provide a nice contrast against both extremes. Once again I am satisfied that I acheived the subject goal.
Next week: “Money”
Published on
January 12, 2010 in
Stuff.
Today was Day Two of the 2010 Imaging Expo in Nashville, and it was very nice! It was far larger than I would have expected for Nashville, easily rivaling events like Macworld in (San Fran or New York), and I spent about two hours walking the show floor. I’m budgeting my money right now, so I didn’t spend a lot of time chatting with people in every single booth as I don’t like to waste people’s time unless I am a serious prospect, but just looking around was informative and a good way to kill a chunk of my afternoon. There were many good companies there, but I did come away with a short list of my own personal “best of show” exhibitors and interesting sights. Continue reading ‘A trip to the 2010 Imaging Expo’
Published on
January 10, 2010 in
Stuff.
This year I am starting a “52″ project. A 52 project means that for each fully calender week I will have a different photographic theme I will try to capture in photographs, and I will post one of the better ones here on the blog. You may be familiar with “365″ projects, where you take a picture of something every day for a year, and while this is a fine idea for flexing the creative muscles the results are often pretty, well, throwaway. A 52 project gives me more time to concentrate on the week’s theme so that I can go to a little effort to get a shot worthy of keeping.
Here is one of the better shots from this week’s theme, “Cold”.
To start my project off I created a spreadsheet with the last Saturday of every week, for all of 2010. I then created three columns for ideas; “easy”, “medium” and “hard”, and I started filling them in with all sorts of thematic ideas as they occured to me. “Cold” was actually in the “medium” column, but I got a lucky break during the cold snap we had last week when some nice icicle structures started to form on my ancient wood porch in my backyard. I experimented with some macro shots, but it actually looked a lot like a running stream of water taken at a high shutter speed so I decided to back up a bit an include a little more of the surroundings. The crusty, mossy wood of my porch roof makes for an interesting contrast with the clean gray icicles, and the heavily out-of-focus background of the leafless trees in the yard adds a nice brown tone as a backdrop. I shot at about f2.8 so that I would use the lens optics near the sweet spot of sharpness, while still allowing such a shallow depth-of-field that the foreground and background would get thrown into a nice soft haze. All in all I am satisfied with it.
Next project, “Sky”.
