Day 14 - struggles

Singing is hard.  I guess it's easier to tell when something is really terribly sung than when a picture isn't very good, which perhaps hides how hard photography is.

This shot was close range; Nikon D3100, 35mm, f/1.8, ISO1600, 1/30; slightly cropped and converted to sepia in Aperture.

Day 13 - Piedmont Park and playing with HDR

Here I played around with HDR some.  It's essentially faked HDR, which is faked photography, but who really cares?  It's all about the image.  Now, the problem with the image is the loss of fidelity.  I used a pretty cheap HDR program, and I got the exposures by using Aperture's 'quick fix' settings to increase the exposure one stop, exported that image, then increased the exposure two stops, exported that image, then decreased the exposure one stop from the original, then exported that image.  Then I took those four images (the original, +1, +2 and -1 exposures) and used HDR studio, a cheap program for macs to create the final image.  All this processing in the JPEG format led to some noticeable degradation of the image.  But overall, I was pretty happy with the final image and the colors that came out.

Day 12 - Architecture

I really want to get into architectural photography.  However, I really haven't had the time to scope out buildings where I'd have access to a lot of good shots.  However, I was relatively happy with this shot.  I just kind of snapped it off while walking back to work from starbucks.  It's the front of the building I work in, The Biltmore Hotel.  It's obviously not actually a hotel any longer, but has some upscale apartments and office space.  It's got a very classical/colonial vibe to the architecture.

Day 11 - color splash

So, this technique gets overused a lot.  I especially can't stand when someone actually uses it to take attention away from the subject.  Like a picture of a kid, where some random color on his shirt is highlighted.

Here I used it because I liked the framing in this picture, but Brice's color is more or less the same as the color of the background, making him not stand out as much.  So, I put the background and the foreground in black and white, but left him colored.  I'd rather have him against a nice, natural contrasting background, but with what I had to work with, I think this really saved the picture.

Day 10 - New 35 mm prime lens!

f1.8 is an amazing thing.  Love the bokeh (oh damn, dropping photography jargon on ya, bokeh simply means blurry background).  Love the sharpness.  So far I'm loving this lens.  It's also encouraging me to play around a lot more with aperture priority mode on the camera to control depth of field.

Day 9 - messing with fake out of focus

So, I didn't get to take a lot of photos today, but I did get a good one of my dog.  Problem was, with the lens I had on, the depth of field was too great, so the sort of tacky neighbors yard ruined to the picture somewhat.  My 35mm f1.8 lens was on the way, or the shot would have been nearly perfect.

So, I used fake blur.  Yeah, it's sort of noticeable, but I think the shot's better because of it, it's better than having the neighbor's house distract.  Not my finest moment, and it definitely won't make any future 'portfolio' I'd put out.

Other than the fake blur, the shot was cropped, but not otherwise altered.

Day 8 - Missed My Dog

While I went to visit my parents for the weekend, my older dog stayed home with his mom.  I missed him.