Painting with Light - Take 3

Ok, so I had a week off last week, hence I had time to play and end up with "Painting with Light - Take 341" or whatever this might have ended up being. I also have very few settings on my camera to change, so for me it was a matter of just clicking the shutter over and over. This was going to be my challenge entry, but after re-reading that description, I figured I'd get nailed for not illuminating a subject, so I came up with another idea. Anyway, I think this might be the end of this batch of outtakes, unless of course I get desperate for something to post.

Painting with Light - Take 2

Ok, so this was really probably something more along the lines of "Painting with Light - Take 78", but I was having fun.

Painting with Light - Take 1

This isn't a challenge entry, but it was one of many (i.e. several, oodles, way too many) attempts at playing with some flashlights, 2 light up pens, a bunch of string, some tape (to hang the string from the ceiling), a few index cards.. oh, and the battery charger for the camera. It's amazing what you can do with that stuff and a point and shoot camera. The longest I can get the shutter to stay open is only about 5 seconds and I have no focus control at that point, so I'm a bit limited. Even still, I had a bunch of really neat shots at the end, and I'm still not even sure if I'll enter any of them (those silly DNMC folks might attack and I just don't want to look at pitiful scores for another week). So, I figure I'll share some of the shots here. So... enjoy! :)

Tines

I've seen lots of fork shots with cool shadows, so I tried my own shots of one. I liked this shot the best because of the unique angle, but the colors just didn't seem right. I played with it in PS until I ended up reversing the colors somehow and I kinda liked the shiny and bright effect. So there it is... a fork. How many more days until December 31? :P

Albany

Ok, so this shot didn't really turn out at all like I'd hoped. The clouds were cool so I thought I'd drive to get a shot of the Albany skyline. By the time I got to the spot to take this shot, the interesting clouds were pretty much gone. Oh well. This ended up being the best shot of the bunch.

Hilltop Cemetery

This is an outtake from the Duotones challenge. I had been driving looking for anything interesting and found this cemetery at the top of a hill (Hilltop Cemetery to be exact). The front half is newer, and then these older stones were towards the back. I liked the long shadows here, but had a hard time keeping them dark without messing up something else while I was Photoshopping it. I also like how the background is open and you can tell that it's up high... nothing out through the trees. Some of the duotones I tried completely muddled that feel.

Broken Heart

This was my entry for the 'Heart' challenge. I took about 20 pictures of these little hearts, then cropped them all to the same size. Played around arranging them until I found this setup of 16. I did a bunch of stuff in Photoshop... but I have no idea what anymore. I was just clicking and sliding and moving settings until things looked good and this was the result.

Pollen

I spent a bunch of time today working on my challenge entry, so this is an old picture. Besides, there aren't any flowers OR bees out these days.. too cold. Anyway, I went looking for this really neat macro shot I have (had?) of some strange, spikey bug eggs, but I can't find it anywhere :( But, I ran across this pollen coated little fella so I thought I'd share him today.

Rose

Well, this PaD is a tool for learning, right? I keep thinking I need to figure out some better lighting to get rid of the harsh shadows. So, I have this little end table with a bottom shelf. Drape a sheet over it, add a desk lamp on each side, put a sheet of posterboard inside and voila! I grabbed a dried rose that was in the vase originally sitting on the table to do some test shots. My macro setting works great for focusing, but I have no control over the white balance. The auto setting lets me set the white balance, but even with the macro turned on I can't focus. While I love my little point and shoot, it clearly has it's limitations.

I took a bunch of shots on both settings and decided that the ones taken with the macro setting were better since the dof was better... even if there was some horrible yellow tint to everything. Photoshop can fix that.. right? Well, in fixing that, I ended up with some strange blue glare spots. To fix those I desaturated the shot a little. I really have no clue all the steps I took here... I just keep playing with settings until I have something I like. If only I could remember where everything was for when I needed it later. But, that's what this PaD is for, right? Shooting, testing, practicing, and learning. If that's the case, I'd say it was a successful day.

Personally, I love seeing before/after shots along with setups that people use to take their pictures. So, here's the original shot I was working from for todays picture.

Eeyore

Eeyore is my favorite of the Pooh characters. I was looking for something to take pictures of that might work well for practicing converting pics to b/w or duotones and there was Eeyore! I think I tried every white balance and color setting my camera has, and finally used the 'vivid' shot to convert. I followed the instructions from this website (up to fig. 9) and then played a bit more with some of the settings. Anyway, this is the result :)

Yawn!

And so, my kitty (Mieko) makes it back into the PaD. Cats have the strangest tongues, and after seeing a close up shot of one, I wanted to get my own shot of one. That's one of the things that I love about macro photography... capturing things that exist right in front of me, but that are so small you can't really see them. Every time I catch her yawning it's blurry, or the focus is on the wrong spot... but today, I finally got it right. Ok, so it's not the best shot in the world, but I accomplished my goal. And she's probably very happy that I'll stop taking close up shots of her tongue.

Here's a closer crop too for those of you who really want to know what a cat tongue looks like. Click for the bigger version.

Power Outage

Power went out for about an hour last night, so what did I decide to do? Take pictures of course. The power was out all around me, but the buildings in downtown Albany were still lit. It looked strange with no street lights or house lights on from here to there. I don't know that I effectively captured what I was trying to, but the panorama I tried came out even worse.

Basketball

Our school had a staff vs. students basketball game to wrap up the season. I took my little point and shoot down to the game, set it to sports setting, bumped the exposure up and clicked away. Overall the shots were average, but grainy. This was one of the better shots... caught the action between both teams, wasn't cluttered with lots of players... but it was still very dark and grainy. I fixed what I could with my limited Photoshop skills, and there you have it... another day complete.

Trotter and Snouter

These are 2 silly little plastic pigs from a game called Pass the Pigs. Basic idea being that instead of rolling dice, you roll pigs and see how they land, which determines your score. Guess I'm getting desperate for PaD material? I actually spent a good deal of time on my heart entry yesterday and was playing with different tools. At one point, I had figured out how to get the background of my shot white without completely ruining the rest of the shot, so basically this was my attempt at doing the same thing with a new picture (with limited success). Still learning... and that's what this is all about.

And... as an extra bonus picture... a small rant. Yesterday was Valentine's Day. February 14th. It's irritating when Halloween rolls around and all of the Christmas stuff is already out... but every day when I drive to work I pass this dance studio with this huge display in the window, which as of yesterday was still there. Yep.. the picture is blurry, but I finally remembered to reach in the bag for the camera to take this one, but you get the point. When.... WHEN will this come down!? There is also another store down the road that took down HALF of their sign advertising Santa suits for sale, leaving half in front of their Marti Gras display. Sigh.

Valentine

Happy Valentine's Day everyone!

~ b l u e ~

This is the shot I submitted for the abstract challenge. I laid a CD in the corner of the bathtub and turned the water on just a trickle so it splattered water on the CD. Used a blue flashlight to illuminate the CD and surrounding area. Cropped the picture and then cloned out some water drops from the side of the tub. Even though it didn't place high, I still like it a lot... so it now finds its way into my PaD.

Zoom!

Looks like one of those screen savers where the stars are flying at you. I thought this one turned out kind of neat with the signs overhead.

Church

Was out driving and saw this great moon with the clouds. I knew this church was not too far up the road and I thought they would make a great shot together. By the time I got there though the moon was well hidden. I tried cloning out the wire that goes off the left edge of the picture, but my photoshop skills are still pretty bad and it looked worse after I messed with it. :P So I ended up with no moon and a distracting wire... but there's still something I like about it. Maybe it's just the fact that it completes day 42.

Butterfly Catcher

Here is my entry from the "My Shadow II" challenge... which came in 5th place! (Seems to be my lucky number?)

I hung a shower curtain from the ceiling in the living room, placed a desk lamp behind it with the camera on the other side. With a 10 second timer, it didn't give me much time to run around and get into place making sure I wasn't blocking the light (I liked the feel of having the "sun" behind the shot), squat myself just far enough down that my head wasn't chopped off the top, and to get my hand in some kind of normal looking spot to be catching a butterfly. My bottom hand kept ending up in all kinds of contorted spots and strangely when it finally had a normal pose, it just happened to line up with the 2nd butterfly. At that point I was done shooting, even if it wasn't perfect. This WAS a 24 hour challenge after all and I was running out of time! Post processing included rotate, crop, brightness, contrast and saturation adjustments, and cloning out a few wrinkles.

Black and White

I tried to turn a shot into b&w for a challenge submission, and no matter how much I played with it I wasn't quite happy. Mostly I was just decreasing the saturation to nothing. So last night I started looking at other peoples b&w shots, reading how they adjusted photos, finding some online tutorials, and I'll admit that most of the Photoshop lingo just flew right over my head. The only one I understood gave the basic premise that 'Photographers use a red filter over their lens to bring out good landscape colors and lighten blemishes if they intend to change a photo to b&w after shooting' and in essence all I needed to do was to add red tones to my shot before converting to greyscale.

So, I chose a few shots previously taken, adjusted the brightness/contrast as I felt necessary and then converted each to greyscale (saved) and then went back to add the red tones before converting it again (and saved). When I compared the shots, there was a noticeable difference, but I still don't know if it's just because the one with the red was darker or if it really had to do with the red tones. This particular shot (actually taken a year and a half ago) is of an old building I passed on a drive through Vermont. I think it came out the best of the shots I was converting. After spending so much time playing with Photoshop, I decided it deserved a place in my PaD, even if it is an old picture.

If anyone has a better (and easy to understand) way to convert an image to b&w, please point me in the right direction! Thanks! :)

Melting

This shot was originally done for burst of color, but I was going to attempt something similar for abstract and just never got around to setting it all up again. I shaved little slivers off of different crayons and put them on a sheet of aluminum foil. The aluminum foil went into the pan and I turned the heat on just a tad. Took the picture just as the crayons started to melt on the sides. The hardest parts of this were the static crayon shavings sticking to everything (and keeping them off of the actual pan), and getting the shot just as they started to melt. Too much melting and the colors all ran together... and taking the shot after it started to cool back down made it look strange.

Abstract - Take 3

I went for a walk in the park last week and came across this stage area. The walls are all painted black and this is part of the back brick wall. I also tried shooting the side walls which were a completely different texture. I bumped the contrast up on this one since it had a grey overtone to it, but I thought it was lacking something to enter in the challenge. That's the nice thing about having a PaD... I can still share the pictures that I like but that didn't make the cut.

Abstract - Take 2

I had fun with this abstract challenge... so I figure I'll post a few more of my outtakes here. This one is water droplets on a CD, but I just couldn't get it to come out clearly enough. I couldn't get the tripod set up to keep the camera at the right angle to get the bright rainbow reflection and yet close enough to the drops. Also the background came out terribly and I couldn't seem to fix it in Photoshop, so I had to crop in tighter on the colors. More abstracts to come this week...

Laundering Money

I realized that I hadn't put up a picture for today while I was running around trying to find enough quarters to do laundry. The good news is that the little coin accepter has a nice tray on it that my camera could sit on to get a crisp shot. The bad news is that the basement doesn't have great lighting and the reflections of the ceiling are... well... less than attractive.

Squirrel

Went for a walk in the park yesterday, and this little guy was awfully friendly... or else just hungry and hoping I had some food.

Shadow

I asked my kindergarteners to make the silliest shadow they could yesterday in honor of Groundhog Day. A lot of them start making silly faces or wiggling, which doesn't always show up in their shadow. This little guy thought and thought... he finally had a mitten off and over his head, and his fingers all outstretched. When my shadow hand reached out to hold his shadow's hand, yet I wasn't touching him, he was amazed.

When I started going through my pictures yesterday, I came to this one and was disappointed. The green parking lot line, the kid on the snowbank, and the little boys bright red coat all distracted from the shadow. So, I cloned out the line and the child on the snowbank, and desaturated the picture.

Abstract - Take 1

My first attempt at abstracts for next weeks challenge. A bit grainy since the rest of the shot was too bright and this was the only salvageable spot I could crop out. I was inspired by my rain soaked windshield... I think the idea worked well though and I might try it again if I get a chance.

Navy Blue

Ok, so this is my outtake from the Blue challenge. I showed a few people this and the shot that I entered... all of them said the other shot was better. Looking at the score so far, I'm not sure I made the best choice. Anyway, I liked this shot, and as it was pointed out to me, they are Old "Navy" jeans that even say "Blue" on the button. Two happy accidents as far as the challenge would have gone.