Week 21 (May 21st - May 27th) | Picture 34

This week was a challenge. My child is going through a fairly significant sleep regression, and we will be out of town for the second half of the week. To say that I haven't thought of anything to do here is an understatement.

I use Flickr for a lot of my inspiration. Usually, I use it for ideas and then try to recreate something a little different. This week, I didn't do much different (well, unless you consider creating a much worse version the different part).

Inspiration image here. Be sure to check out some of his other pictures while you are there - his work is quite impressive.

I thought the tilt was fun and I happened to have some food coloring and some really strong tape to hold down my glasses. (Warning: Do not attempt with your great-grandmother's fine crystal. I used my husband's cheap pilsner glasses.)



Camera: Nikon D700
Lens: 28 - 75mm f/2.8 (@55mm)
Aperture: f/4.5
Shutter Speed: 1/200
ISO: 200
Flash: Flash: SB-800 off camera, manual, 1/4th power
Exposure: manual

To start with, my composition is all wrong. My glasses are way too far apart so I had to use a panoramic crop to make it "work." It still doesn't work, but trust me this crop ratio is much better than the SOOC ratio. My light is wrong. It's uneven and the glasses are too lit, lacking shadows and depth. Even the glasses themselves are wrong. They were on a somewhat flimsy surface (a plastic lid to a storage container) so when they were tilted they weren't all level. I could go on and on about what I did wrong. But it's still a cool effect, and it's definitely all I'm going to be shooting and posting this week.

Week 20 (May 14th - May 20th) | Picture 33

What has gotten into me? Two posts in one day. This will make up if I miss a future week. :)

I wanted to play around some more with my OCF tonight, and this is what I came up with.



Camera: Nikon D700
Lens: 50mm f/1.4
Aperture: f/16
Shutter Speed: 1/250
ISO: 200
Flash: Flash: SB-800 off camera, manual, 1/4th power
Exposure: manual

I love the light and the effect. I don't love the pitcher. I think it would have been better with a very simple wine glass or pilsner - but I'm not redoing it tonight.

Setup was beyond cheap. Black poster board for the subject back drop. Then white poster board surrounding the back of the setup to wrap the light onto the subject. Sound confusing? Couldn't be more simple - see the setup here.

Week 20 (May 14th - May 20th) | Picture 32

My mom brought us some flowers from her garden and they are just beautiful. Not the most stunning picture I've ever taken, but they are so pretty.



Camera: Nikon D700
Lens: 50mm f/1.4
Aperture: f/4
Shutter Speed: 1/250
ISO: 200
Flash: Flash: SB-800 off camera, manual, 1/8th power
Exposure: manual

White shoot through umbrella about 4 feet directly left of flowers.

Week 19 (May 7th - May 13th) | Picture 31

Oh back-lighting, how I love you!

My super awesome friend Amy (who I very fortunately got to hang out with this past weekend) is the back-lighting queen. I, up until recently, had never really played with back-lighting but have been taking in all of Amy's photo tips on the subject. It has this wonderful ethereal quality that is so soft on your subject. My latest obsession is seeing the magical things it does when it lights up my toddlers little curls.

When you aren't taking pictures of people, it's a little harder to make it interesting, but I decided to take our weed covered yard and back-light a fairly boring subject.



Camera: Nikon D700
Lens: 105mm f/2.8 macro
Aperture: f/5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/1000
ISO: 400
Flash: none
Exposure: manual

Looking at my settings after the fact, I could have easily gone to ISO 200 and slowed my shutter to 1/500 - but when my face was pressed to the ground during tick season, I didn't think it through to that extent. I should have also removed the blade of grass competing with the dandelion. Maybe next time.

Week 18 (April 30th - May 6th) | Picture 30

I've got a new toy! Well, new-to-me. The toy itself is actually pretty old, somewhere in the neighborhood of 45 years old. My dad (who passed away in 1996) had a pretty serious photography hobby in the late 60s. I happened to mention to my mom that I was interested in shooting some film and I couldn't believe it when she told me that she still had my dad's camera. I thought for sure it was long gone - given away, sold, or lost.

I tried not to get my hopes up about the camera - for all I knew it was broken or there was a corroded battery inside.

The camera appeared to be in excellent condition, but was without a battery. It didn't even occur to me that I would have a battery compatibility problem - but 50 years ago, mercury batteries were excellent technology. That excellent technology was banned in the early 1980s because of the harmful side effects from exposure.

A little poking around and I found everything from a $5 to a $50 DIY solution for the battery problem. $5 being a short term fix and $50 being a permanent fix. But, before I dropped $50 on a camera that may not even work, I went for the cheap solution. My $5 battery and my roll of film arrived a couple days ago and the camera's meter powered up with the battery!

I am so excited to shoot my first roll of film. It will probably take me a while to do it . . . With manual focus and wanting to make every shot really count - I am going to be pretty selective about what I shoot. Digital has spoiled me - a lot. I can take 200 pictures, I can see the results immediately, and it costs me nothing to take 200 more if I need to. Film almost makes me nervous, because I don't want to waste any shots. Once I get through my 36 exposures, I'll share some here. (Depending on how the first roll comes out, I may invest more $ in refurbishing the camera internally - but I want to see how it does without any tweaking first . . . )

For now, I'll share a picture of this seemingly pristine Minolta SRT 101. My dad was so proud of this camera and enjoyed his hobby so much. It makes me very happy to keep a small piece of that alive.



Camera: Nikon D700
Lens: 28 - 75mm f/2.8 (@75mm)
Aperture: f/5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/200
ISO: 200
Flash: Flash: SB-800 off camera, manual, 1/8th power
Exposure: manual

Nothing fancy about the picture - flash was on a shoot through umbrella like last week's image - except this week it was straight on the subject instead of off to the side.

Week 17 (April 23rd - April 29th) | Pictures 28 & 29

I decided to go back to some OCF this week. I've been really focusing on macros lately and haven't played with my artificial lighting much.

The more I take pictures, the more I realize that light is easily 95% - or more - of what makes a good picture, regardless of the subject. Be it natural or artificial (I love both and have a long way to go before I master either), light will make or break an otherwise perfect image.

I wanted to do something high key this week. It's probably high key enough that it wouldn't print well, but it was nice to do something really bright for a change.

I tried the glass with some white wine in it and it killed the effect. The wine was in the glass looked okay, it was the background that didn't work. The wine was diffusing the light enough that the background had a large shadow on it. This would have been a perfect time to use 2 lights - the primary light for the glass and then a second light used as a fill. So that was a big failure, but the wine made some tiny bubbles when I poured it and I did like how those pictures came out.

The glass, sans wine:



The bubbles:



Camera: Nikon D700 (settings identical for both images)
Lens: 105mm f/2.8 macro
Aperture: f/5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/250
ISO: 200
Flash: Flash: SB-800 off camera, manual, 1/8th power
Exposure: manual

Setup was a speedlight shot through a white umbrella at a 45 degree angle, white poster board for a background, and a white piece of foam core as a reflector to help light the far side of the background. Setup picture here.

Week 16 (April 16th - April 22nd) | Picture 27

I sit here at the very end of week 16 and I have nothing to show you.

I contemplated just letting the week go. I have at least a half dozen friends I should be emailing back instead of worrying about this blog. But I opted against skipping a week because this wouldn't be a challenge if it was easy. (God bless the people who have 365 blogs - I do not know how on Earth they find the time.)

I contemplated trying to find some way to light my wine glass without taking the energy to go to the basement to get my reflectors and lighting gear. I opted against that - because I'm just too darn lazy tonight - and most nights lately for that matter. (The glass was full at the time it was considered a candidate but is now empty . . . soon to be refilled and emptied once again before bed.)

So I decided to sit here, drink my wine, and trudge through my LR catalog to see what pictures I took in the last week. On the plus side, I took a tremendous number of pictures - several hundred. But they are all of my little boy. Great for mommy and family memories, but that doesn't help me one bit for my photography blog.

There were literally 4 images I took all week that were not of my child. They were all of our Japanese maple tree that I sit under when I take his picture outside. None of them are anything special, but this one was the least bad of them all. I hate the composition. (Hello random focus.) But I love the colors and the sun peaking through.

If I'm being honest - I failed this week. The point of this challenge was to go out and find something to shoot. Not to schlep through my catalogs at the end of the week and hope to find something worth sharing. But my small victory is that I am sharing a picture. And I really hope to do a better job in coming weeks.



Camera: Nikon D700
Lens: 105mm f/2.8 macro
Aperture: f/5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/500 (As I mentioned, I was taking pictures of my toddler. 1/500th wouldn't have been my typical choice here if I had thought about it . . . )
ISO: 1250
Flash: none
Exposure: manual