“photo of the week”

I keep forgetting that the point of this exercise is not to offer up the best of the best each week, but simply to constantly be shooting. Not only that but to show even the failures, analyze them, and learn for next time. My biggest problem has always been quantity. I think I’ve shown that I can get quality out of a scene, now I simply need to work on quantity of work - I tend to only shoot those scenes that I deem “just right” or at least very nearly so. I just need to shoot more. So here’s this weeks sampling:

I’m getting some nice tonal range here but now my only beef is my clarity, these shots are all just a bit blurry - even though I was shooting at a fairly high shutter speed. I’m shooting for either a 50mm (cheap) or 85mm (bit more expensive). My other complaint with my current lens is the lowest f/stop is 4.5 - I’m missing about 3 stops or range and it’s killing me. Both the 50mm and 85mm go down to about 1.8 which would be great - I’m finding myself wanting to stop down more and more to blur the background to separate my subject, but I’m very limited in that regard. Tack that onto my current shopping list of equipment.

I knew I couldn’t keep a schedule. At least I know not to work for a newspaper. This week’s photo’s are pretty much about me just trying to get something posted this week having fun in front of the camera. Self-Portraits. I did have fun with these, as I tend to do once I get an idea and start messing around with it. No attempt at decent quality - it’s all on-camera flash, pointed straight at my face in the middle of the night. It’s neat to see how my expressions changed from what I wanted them to be to what they become after the pre-flash burned out my retinas.

I was pointed to a great website: Strobist by my friend Josh recently, as such, I’m looking to pick up a decent flash unit and and try some studio work. I’m looking at a Vivitar 285HV. It’s a workhorse, a powerful flash, and almost totally manual, which is all that I’ll need once I can get the flash off the camera (tripods, cords/Pocket Wizards, umbrellas - $$). Anyway, hopefully within a few months you’ll be seeing some studio style shots from me - I’m looking forward to it!

I can’t remember what I was trying to show in the above shot - but I got this from a long series of pre-flashes as the camera tried to get focus and evaluate the scene. Flash in your face + night time = seriously burned retinas.

You can tell I had fun, and that was the point.

Note: the next Photo of the Week will probably be coming to you from my parents computer in NY, as we’re going up for a visit at the end of this week. It’ll be nice to get a change of scenery.

A very disappointing week. I tried to get downtown and get some shots of all the run down areas of town, but I had Liam with me and he was rather uncooperative. So all in all I have very few shots to choose from this week.

I’ve noticed all my photos are pretty weak on contrast, I can get my shadows where I like them, but my highlights are either washed out or muddy any photoshop tips/hints in that direction? It could be a setting on my camera as well, I’ll have to check that out. Anyway, here they are:

This is a hat that’s been sitting in a chair in our sunroom for weeks. Yup. It’s a hat.

This is the base of a lamp post in downtown near the Philips Petroleum building. It’s a nice area that I had never really walked through, I’d like to revisit it at night sometime (once I get a tripod).

I love chipping paint photos, but again, I wish the white could have been a bit whiter.

Sorry, I’m technically a day late on the PotW, but Friday seems a better day to do it anyway. Well, here goes:

This weeks batch was actually very difficult. First I had to weed out all the Liam pics, which proved to be my best stuff of that batch. Then I had to filter out three from the rest. I was really digging a lot of the ones I took this week, making it difficult to choose three.

This one was tough, since Liam was right there with me, so I was trying to spin the (what do you call those things?) thing around without whacking him in the face. I would have liked to have gotten another shot at this pic, but it was a no go.

Edward Weston in the house! This one is very evocative of the work of Edward Weston - my all-time favorite photographer. Of course, he was using a Large Format camera (Quick Aside: the Large Format class I took in school ruined photography for me. I LOVED L/F so much that once out of that class, I really couldn’t go back to 35mm. The amount of control and clarity you get with L/F is astounding.) so he really has the advantage on me.

Why is this interesting to me? I don’t know. Some workers are gutting the elementary school’s heating and a/c units and this was a shot of some kind of….part.

Well what do you think?

In an effort to get myself back into taking pictures on a regular basis, I’m going to start a weekly post entitled (fittingly) Photo of the Week, where I take a bunch of pictures during the week and post my favorite(s). Beyond that, this is pretty well self-explanatory, so, on with the pics! Oh, I forgot my one rule: It can’t be a picture of Liam - we post so many of those already and it’s too easy. I’ve got to go out and really search for a picture.

This was a tough choice, but I really did like this one the best out of the ones I shot today (more below, for comparison) I’m experimenting with some built in filters in my camera - one that tints the B/W to be a slight blue color, and another that adjusts the contrast. I really like the look of the blue and I’ll probably experiment a bit with that. Here’s some other favorites: