Day 365- Happy New Year!

It’s Day 365- I made it! Happy New Year!

I celebrated 365 days of photography today by spending the day taking photos at the Cosumnes River Preserve.  I saw more different species of birds in one place than I ever have- except for a zoo.  We will definitely be going back. Bless my husband for carrying that tripod around! I won’t be posting any of those photos today, because there are too many to go through and not enough time. I took photo # 365 this morning before I left, as a sort of tribute to Photo #1.  But this time, I used Christmas tree light bokeh instead of candles.  Tonight we celebrate the New Year by drinking the champagne!

Photography highlights of the year (in no particular order):

  • Mastering manual settings- they are now my comfort zone
  • Discovering that I really can find something to photograph every day
  • Getting a macro lens and taking all those flower photos!
  • Taking some great photos of my grandsons
  • Getting my beloved Nikon D7000 , my zoom lens, and now- my speedlight (Thanks, Lonnie!!!)
  • Learning Photoshop
  • Learning to add textures to photos
  • Getting my tripod and learning to feel comfortable with it out in the world
  • Yellowstone photography- elk, bison, big horn sheep, great horned owl
  • Playing with HDR
  • Making photo friends all over the world- a constant source of inspiration!
  • Having people read and comment on my blog and on Flickr
  • Learning to see the world with new eyes!

I’ll post my photography goals for the new year tomorrow. I can’t wait to see what 2012 will bring!

 

 

 

 

Melinda3 Comments

Day 364- One more day!

Only one more day of my Project 365 for 2011!  I am going to do this again next year with some new goals- more about that tomorrow. . .

So here is a shot of our neighbors’ fishing boat all decorated for Christmas. Perhaps my last Christmas photo- but we’ll see. . .

Melinda3 Comments

Day 363- Goats with a Job

Just about everyone in town loves these goats! This is a small part of a herd grazing on a hillside in Benicia.  The town hires them to clear the hillsides of grass, thus preventing grass fires.  They are a big hit with the children; many times my first graders would start their day at school reporting on where they had last seen the goats, with special status given to those who had them near their house that day.

I won’t go into the headache I had deciding which processing option to go with today. Let’s just say I tried them all and settled on a black and white conversion, emphasizing the seriousness of their mission. . .

 

Melinda1 Comment

Day 362- Clock Bokeh

For the last month or so, checking the topic for the next day has been my bedtime routine. If I forget, my husband reminds me. If I’m tired, I do it on my iPhone from bed- checking the photo of one of my Flickr contacts in the group (being in Australia or somewhere far away, she’s often first to post).  That’s what I did last night. Her photo was called Time, and it was a lovely textured image of a clock.

I planned to go downtown to shoot one of the clocks down there.  I ended up doing laundry and watching videos on using my new flash, and I realized that the time had past to get good light downtown.  While practicing with my speedlight, I took some photos of my grandfather clock.  These are the kind of shots where I raise the ISO or use a tripod and long exposure- but today I used flash bounced on the white shutters.  It was like I was cheating- it was so easy!

However, I felt like a dork when I uploaded it to Flickr and realized that the topic was Money can’t buy– and my Flickr friend had creatively interpreted it to be Time.

Oh.

But I like the picture, and it will be my photo of the day.  If I think of something else for the topic, I’ll take another photo!

Only 3 more days. . .

f/2, 1/80, ISO 200, 35mm, with flash

Melinda2 Comments

Day 361- Blue Jeans

Resolving to not be seduced by the Christmas light bokeh again, I went for a macro shot of my husband’s blue jeans to meet the challenge of BLUE for my Flickr group. No, I didn’t use my new flash- I set up the tripod so I could get a 3 second exposure. I am studying flash, practicing flash with my husband and son as subjects (and now my son has left 😦 ), but it might be awhile before my flash photos appear on the blog!

f/10, 3.0 sec, 200 ISO,  85mm

Melinda2 Comments

Day 360- New challenge!

 

Thank you, Lonnie!!!

Look at my new toy!!! It is easy to attach to the camera and use right out of the box- but if you want your photos to look natural and not “flashy”, well then, there is a LOT to learn!!! Here’s some synchronicity- there is a Clickin-Mom’s breakout session with Neil van Niekerk on Off Camera Flash going on right now! I have started the class, even though I will be using my flash ON camera.  In the videos, he goes over the principles off both on and off camera flash, so I can learn both.

So far, I’ve taken fairly natural looking photos inside with the flash bounced off our (yellow!) walls. At nighttime, however, the flash had to work harder- and my photos look flashier.  The good thing is that a lot of wrinkles disappeared!- but the photographs themselves just look too bright and “lit.” I tried fill flash outside today- not great so far. I’m excited to master these skills, so I will have something to fall back on when I can’t get good exposure inside with the grandkids.

Learning flash is going to be one of main photographic challenges for 2012!

Melinda1 Comment

Day 358- Honey, I exploded the Christmas tree. . .

 

In case you want to try this at home, put your camera on a tripod with a small aperture (like f/22) and a long shutterspeed (4 or 5 seconds), focus, and slowly zoom out.  This one was from around 50mm to 18mm.  I tried this with trees outside in the summer and remember others doing this with Christmas trees last year. I thought of it again when I saw it on Courtney’s Click It Up a Notch site (see link on side).  Fun!

BTW, only one more week of Project 365 2011!

Melinda1 Comment

Day 357- To do . . .

As Christmas approaches,  the to do list is long, and the task of coming up with an idea, taking the photo, editing, and posting seems daunting.  Fortunately, the topic for today is BUSY, so this photo seems like the obvious choice!

f/1.8, 1/25, ISO 200, 35mm

Melinda4 Comments

Day 356- Merry (Monochrome) Christmas

Today’s theme is symbol, and I chose to photograph a detail of the wreath (symbol of the coming of Christ) on our front door. I left the door open, so that I could get some Christmas tree light bokeh in the background.  For variation, I used a used a brown toned black and white conversion.

f/3.8, 1/60, ISO 3200! (too lazy to set up the tripod today- too much to do!), 85mm

 

Melinda5 Comments

Day 355- Cold, Foggy, and Bleak

For today’s topic, transportation, my husband and I went down to the waterfront, hoping to capture tugboats escorting a tanker through the fog, or perhaps a fishing boat. However, it was such a foggy morning that we could only see the water by the shore. I ended up snapping some photos of sailboats at the marina and adding a little texture to give some contrast to this bleak image.

Melinda1 Comment

Day 353- Stained

Before bed last night, I checked to see what today’s topic would be.  I groaned when I saw stain– what an unappealing topic! When I told my husband, he immediately said, “Your father’s stained glass!”  I had a good night’s sleep, knowing there would be something fun to photograph in the morning.

My father was a man of many interests- music (he played saxophone and clarinet in a Dixieland jazz group), photography, gardening, wordworking, and, in his retirement years, stained glass.  He made the stained glass lampshade that hangs in our kitchen, and one year, he made our family a set of stained glass ornaments. His example of being creative during retirement years is one I try to live up to (although I also like to chill out with a book like my mother, a voracious reader).

Here is a detail of a star ornament made by my dad.

f/4, 1/6, ISO 200, 85mm

Melinda1 Comment

Day 352- Starbursts?

This was one of those frustrating photography days. The theme is through the looking glass, referring to using a door, window, or mirror as a frame.  My plan was to take a photo of my Christmas tree reflected in the mirror of my hutch- simple, right? I wanted to use a small aperture, so that the lights would show up as starbursts.  I used my tripod with a long exposure and focused on the tree. No starbursts! I tried all different exposures and focus points and would run upstairs to check my focus after every few photos. Nothing looked right, and I finally realized that the soft focus of the Christmas cards in front were detracting from the photo. I decided at that point to forget about the starbursts and go for an HDR photo.  I focused on the cards and took a series of bracketed shots.  After deciding on the set I liked, I edited them in Photomatix for my HDR processing- and discovered faint starbursts. Go figure!

Melinda3 Comments

Day 351- Armed and Dangerous

We have this chair we love.  L O V E !

It is an antique, and we have had it repaired at least three times.  When someone (usually company . . .) sits in it and puts their weight on the arms to stand up, it is just too much for this dear old chair to bear. CRACK! The last time this happened, we let the chair sit unrepaired in an extra room for over a year.  We recently had it repaired again, but we just couldn’t bear the thought of an unsuspecting soul sitting in it and splintering it again. And oh yes, we would care about injuring the guest as well!

Why do we care so much about this old chair? My mother loved it- and there is a story.

When I was a child, my mother admired it so much when she visited a friend’s house that the friend finally presented it to her as a gift.  Mother had it recovered with some old needlepoint that either my grandmother or great-grandmother had done years earlier, and it was a beautiful addition to her living room.  And it remained unbroken until it came to live with us. . .

I also have some vague memory of the owner of the chair being a distant relative and have the intention of solving this genealogical mystery, but that’s another story.

And oh yes- the topic for today is ARMS!   So here are the infamous splinter-prone arms of the chair!

f/3.5, .8sec, ISO 200, 85mm

I took many photos of the chair today- using the tripod with a long exposure.  I used custom white balance (good girl!), varied angles and aperture settings for different depth of field.  I took shots where the needlepoint was in the background, either in focus or blurred. I ended up going with my first photo with no needlepoint- and then thought it looked better with a black and white action added (meaning my custom white balance was for nothing!). Oh well. . .

Melinda1 Comment