Photo 365 - Day 56 (Framily Flower)

Day 56 (August 29th, 2010)
Title: Framily Flower

Today was a crazy (but darn fun) day!  Lot of folks over, lots of cooking, lots of cleaning, and just a whole lot of "lots".  Our friend Amy was nice enough to bring over some lovely flowers today and I thought I just had to shoot them! (I mean the flowers, not Amy.  That'd be mean.  "Thanks! [BLAM!]")  I wish I could have gotten some pictures of all the cooking that happened, but I couldn't for two reasons:

1) I had a lot of prep-stuff to do before folks arrived.  Supposedly having Magic cards littered about the entire kitchen/living room isn't considered "Decor".  Who knew?!

2) Theresa would have killed me.  "You are stopping to take pictures?!  I think not! [Stabby, Stab, Stabby] "  

So, perhaps next time when some of us (re: everyone else but me) isn't so stressed out I'll get some fun cooking photos.  I'm also going to do me weekly hindsight tomorrow, because its late and I am falling asleep while typing them (thank God for spell checkers!).

I hope everyone had a great weekend, you saw friends and family (aka: Framily), and basically took it easy.

Photo 365 - Day 55 (Good Food)

Day 55 (August 28th, 2010)
Title: Good Food

Ok, this is my last "messing around with lasers" shot (at least, for a little while).  Now, none of these were really planned out (all I knew was that I wanted to try and take long-exposure shots while playing with a laser) but I had a lot of fun making them.  I'm certainly going to experiment more with this technique and try and get it to look a bit "cleaner" in execution.

The subject matter for this particular shot is the best pizza place in all of the East Bay (perhaps central valley), Pizzaiolo.  Its a great little place on the boarder of Berkeley and Oakland (I think its technically in Oakland, but just barely).  They have a single page menu, that changes daily, with 3-4 apps, 2-3 first course items, 2-3 main course, and 5-6 pizza options.  They also have a daily desert menu that's crazy (as well as Blue Bottle Coffee).  I highly recommend it if you are wanting some thin crust pizza that's got a lot of character.  Pricing is about $20-30 per person (without boozage), but worth it!  Right, done with my marketing now! 

Enjoy! 

Photo 365 - Day 54 (Red Handed)

Day 54 (August 27th, 2010)
Title: Red Handed

The old cliche goes: "Caught red handed!"... Since I haven't been caught yet (not that I'm saying I did anything!), I thought it might be kind of fun to show off that red hand! 

This is another "painting with light" trick that I started last night.  I just held my hand in-front of the lens, pressed the shutter and then "drew" on my hand/fingers with the laser.  I did a couple of them, but I think this one came out the best.  It reminds me of the song "Red Right Hand" by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds.  A bit morose and dark, but its got a nice beat!  (If you would like to hear it, its at youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vU22ts-Qcw)

Enjoy!

Bonus Picture!

I took the shot from yesterday, played around with it a bit in good ol' Photoshop and made this (my new Twitter background!)  I kinda like it!  Reminds me of viruses or something nifty!

Photo 365 - Day 53 (Light Noodles)

Day 53 (August 26th, 2010)
Title: Light Noodles

I found my laser pointer!  I was sitting around playing with my newly rediscovered toy and I thought that it might be fun to try and "paint" a photo with it.  It was quite fun trying, but you really can't tell if you got anything until after reviewing the photos on the computer.

To get this (and some others that I'm working on for tomorrow - I had fun with this!) I placed the camera on the tripod, set the lens to a very wide aperture (f/22) and used my 50mm fixed lens.  I chose the 50mm lens because it provided me the right sized "frame" to work with on the ceiling.  I tried using a shallower aperture (f/2.8) but it let too much of the reflected light off the ceiling and you could actually see the paint which too away from the overall look and feel of the shot. 


Tomorrow I'll be doing some more "light drawings".

Photo 365 - Day 52 (Bug)

Day 52 (August 25th, 2010)
Title: Bug

This picture requires a bit of a back-story.  I am lucky enough to live in the San Francisco Bay Area where we don't really believe in weather.  Our "winter" weather averages around 50-60 degrees, sometimes we allow a little light rain and, if we are really brave, we might actually put a jacket on.  For our "summer", it's 70-80 degrees, foggy till 11am (so not to wake us up too early with all that sunlight) and slightly breezy.  On "hot" days it will get to 88 or 89 and basically work stops and everyone in the entire state goes to the beach.  This is why our housing is $1.2 million per square foot. 

Now, this last week we have had some, as I like to call it, "Texas Ass Weather".  Temperatures over 100, no wind, humid, and basically sucktastic.   Now, for a San Franciscan, 100 degrees is basically like WALKING ON THE SUN!  Its hot.  H.  O.  T.  Not toasty, or warm, or scorching, but H!O!T!

So, on this insanely hot day I had decided to have some sort of temporary brain embolism and go walking to find a picture.  I got my camera ready, had my hat (thinking that would help and not burst into flames instantly), and a small bottle of water.  I walked out of air-conditioned building right onto the corona of the sun.  Did I mention it was hot?  As I bolted back in (as my shoes were melting) I decided: "Perhaps I'll take a picture inside today!" 

I was looking around the house thinking of what to shoot and I saw some ladybugs on the balcony.  One was crawling up the glass door and I decided "Hey, that's all kinds of nature!  Perfect!"  So, opened the door to walk out and take a few close-ups of the little bug and that's when I remembered that the balcony was chock full of "outsideness".  Really hot outsideness.  So, that plan was scrapped and I decided the BEST picture would be from below the bug as it walked up the glass door... from the inside. 

Long story for a silly shot.  Enjoy!

Photo 365 - Day 51 (Trillion Dollar)

Day 51 (August 24th, 2010)
Title: Trillion Dollar

Normally I'm not one to get into politics (or religion - I have my options on both and I'm happy with them and I don't really feel the need to attack others with my thoughts on these matters), but today I read something that generally stunned me.  We, the American People, owe about $13.258 trillion dollars.  Trillion - that's with a 'T'.  As in, "a million, millions".  That is such an unfathomable number, that its hard to even compare it to something real.  I personally have seen a million of a thing (I saw an exhibit with one million cents. It was a whole lot of pennies!).  But a trillion is just silly.  And 13 trillion is beyond silly.  I mean, who in there right mind would let us owe them 13 trillion of ANYTHING, let alone dollars! 

I found a few things to put into perspective of what a trillion (let alone 13) could be:

a) the adult human body is made up of approximate 50 trillion cells.  Hair cells, skin cells, brain cells, all of them = 50 trillion. 
b) The Milky Way Galaxy (where Earth hangs out), contains about 100-400 billion stars.  It would take 2.5-10 GALAXYS to equal a trillion stars.  (Over 33 GALAXYS worth of stars to equal 13 trillion!)

Crazy... 

I thought; what would George Washington think if he was told 230ish years later the country he help found would own $13 trillion dollars?  He'd probably ask for a cup of tea and a smoke...

Ps: totally random "art" advice - googly-eyes make everything better! 

Photo 365 - Day 50 (DNA kinda) and Weekly Hindsight

Day 50 (August 23rd, 2010)
Title: DNA Kinda

This is the last in my weekly "science" based photos and I know its not technically DNA, but there are three key factors that I took it:

1) The coin is really cool (its a 2003 British 2 Pound coin celebrating the discovery of DNA)
2) Its a whole lot cheaper than getting a mass spectrometer or other scientific thingy that can "see" DNA
3) Its my wife's favorite coin. 

Weekly Hindsight

This week was quite an experience!  When I first thought of doing a science week, I really didn't think it would be so difficult to pull off!  This is one of those times that I jumped into a project without really thinking out the details of how it was going to be accomplished. 

One of the biggest problems that I started out with, was what scientific concepts do I use?  I first asked many of my friends who are scientist what would be a good, simple, principle to show.  This was an epically bad idea.  Not the part about asking my friends, that was fine.  The problem was asking scientist about science!  As much as I appreciated some of their input (molecular bonds, genetic recoding and radioactivity), many of their suggestions were not really photograph-friendly and/or not "simple".  So, I took what ideas I could from them and tried to make them as simple as possible. 

Many of the photos came out quite a bit different than I had originally conceived of them, but in a good way.  I particularly liked the Evaporation (water drop) and Solubility (food coloring in water) photos, because without any context they are very surreal photos that really make you wonder. 

One little bit of advice I'm going to give this week: When you are taking shots in difficult lighting, I highly recommend using the RAW (+JPG) setting on your camera.  The JPG compression settings can really lose a lot of the detail/feel of the shot when the lighting is less than perfect.  With RAW, the camera just "dumps" all the data that it captured when the photo was taken and you can do whatever compression (via software like Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom) you decide later.  Just remember, RAW takes up a lot more space than JPG and requires you to do a little bit more work before you are ready to share your work.  Keep in mind, even though RAW takes a little more room and time to get your perfect photo, its still a heck of a lot faster than developing your own prints in a darkroom. Having to mix all the chemicals, developing your film, making the print in the enlarger,then running the print through the chemicals, and then 40 min later realizing you are slightly out of focus on that print and you'll have to start again.  So, a little RAW tweaking isn't so bad. 

I have some more "weekly" ideas coming up, but I think I'll try and just shoot some random stuff this week to maybe spark some imagination.  It was also fun this week because as of Sunday, I've had 1500 visitors to the blog.  Either I've got one person who is stalking me, or I've actually gotten some folks reading this who aren't imaginary!