October Reflection

Oh how I wish the glasses were completely in focus instead of the shadow. How'd I manage that? Oh well the colors the day I took this were amazing (10/10/08) and won't come along anytime soon. Also since November is usually a tough month to get shots I put together a Boston Harbor sunset from early August and a houseplant leaf before Jack Frost hits bigtime.

Photomosaics

created with Andrea Mosaic

Mankind is No Island

This video directed by Jason van Genderen recently won Tropfest, NY. It was shot entirely with a cell phone with a budget of $57.

evitcepsrep

I have been rather fixated with the notion of perspective lately. But all of life is simply a matter of perspective, yes?!? My perspective can be clouded by my pre-conceived notions about what something is, by my emotions that day, by what angle I am viewing something at, etc. Here I wanted to see what perspective I saw from this glass marble sitting on a glass table under a glass window. Note the church steeple in there? The same one I've been taking pictures of for the last week.

I love the moisture on my windows first thing in the morning and took this photo twice. Once my focal point was outdoors and the other my focal point was the window itself. The colors this particular morning are the yellows and greens of late autumn ... an analogous scheme.

Question for the day. If life is all about perspective - where WILL my focus be today?

Everyone's blogs...

...are just really fun to read - thank you for sharing them with me. Your work rocks! I can see your personality in your photos and that is amazing. I knew it happened with studio art, but never really noticed it until I taught digi photo online. Because I don't see students in person - but I do see them through their work.

The differences in optics

The top photo was taken out of a window with a Canon A70 Powershot. It was shot at 180 dpi with 2048x1536 pixels and was originally 1.08MB. I took it into Photoshop, cropped it and straightened the tower, and then "sharpened" the steeple. I always change the dpi to 72 because I work pretty much exclusively on the web. The final photo is 377x260 and a mere 108KB.

The third shot down was taken with my Nikon D40. Of course I got a much better photo because I was able to change the F-stop and focus on what I wanted. The original is at 300dpi and is 2000x3008 pixels. I brought it into Photoshop and straightened the tower, cropped it a bit and played with the color saturation. Then I saved it at 72dpi and the final shot is 533x711 and a mere 137KB.

You can definitely see really lost no detail in the photo taken with the SLR. The amount of things I did to the Canon shot really affected its quality and you can actually see the pixels in it!

Perspective II

Perspective is all about Point of View. It's a way to "know" something better or to judge it. What is the relationship that is has to something else? Well here I am thinking about the perspective of time. There is almost a quarter of a century between the guy at the top and the guy below marrying the beautiful princess. There was not even digital photography when he was born, these photos had to be scanned to become digitized. Photoshop is a wonderful tool for making collages like this...

Macro and Micro

Walks along the side of the road yield amazing photos. Sometimes I find something interesting and work hard at composition - taking into account how the different aspects of the photo inter-relate to form a whole. But I believe that an ordinary shot can become extraordinary if...

...viewed through a macro lens. What the macro len allows me to do is see detail, and detail is where I can observe the overlooked. I really like the macro lens because I can feel the texture of things through it.

This Zen photo completely transformed when I retook it with a macro lens...

and got deeper and deeper, zooming in to it see ever greater detail. Soon I became unable to make out what it was.

And saw the actual pixels which make up the photo. Amazing they are all square. How do the photographs have round features? Did you know that pixels do not have a certain size? You determine the size when you set the photograph's resolution!

Collagr.com

There are many collage-making tools. This collage is made from a "set" that I made on Flickr. First I loaded the photos up to Flickr. Once there I clicked the ORGANIZE tab at the top of the screen. At the next screen I dragged and dropped the photos from the ribbon at the bottom into the window. Then I saved it as a set and gave it a name. I clicked back to my Flickr HOME page, and clicked on the set name on the right in order to get its URL. That URL was pasted into the BUILD IT box on: www.collagr.com There are several options on collagr for the display and this version is called "stitched."

Once collagr built my collage I saved the photo to my desktop then loaded it to this blog!

Collage with Picasa

Burlington Vermont July 3, 2008

To make a collage fast and easy - put your photos in a file somewhere on your computer and then open Picasa. On the right hand side locate the file name and click on it which highlights the name and the photos that are in there. On the bottom toolbar click "collage" and you have many presentation options. After you find one you like simply "create" it and save it where you wish!

Compare and Contrast - Perspective

Ever since the 1980s when I became interested in recycling I have been fascinated with the physical things in our life that we take for granted. I think we buy a lot of things that we dispose of very quickly and I try to remind myself of that often. Both shots are of the container that has already been emptied of my favorite splurge. The photo at the top was taken while I was holding the bottle with one hand and the camera with the other. This is the shot taken with the flash, I tried it without and the results were poor. For the bottom shot I did not use the flash. I like the star design and the out of focus frame of the top shot. But if I was in the advertising department I would prefer the bottom shot with the V8 logo front and center like it is!

A New Semester

Well it's the beginning of a new semester so that must mean Karen is moving again. This is the fourth time in the last six years and every time it seems to get worse and worse. Home I believe - is a good thing. Let's hope I've found one...

Perspective

So much of the photographic experience is about perspective. Post a comment to this entry and tell me what you think this is and how you think the picture was taken.

Surprised by Joy

I was very interested in the seed pod from a Queen Anne's Lace as I was walking the dog this morning. Then I found the scene below a little further on and shot it. I was pleasantly surprised by the little fellow walking around on the flower which I hadn't noticed. "The very nature of Joy makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting." (C.S. Lewis)

The Power of Images

I have spent many an hour trying to capture the perfect photo. Many times while I am shooting I see the perfect photo with my eyes but it doesn't manifest on the film or in the case of digital photography, in the pixels. By the time I caught Mr. Livingston here the perfect reflection in the sand was long gone. If you do not understand the allusion, Jonathan Livingston Seagull was the first self-help book that I remember, written in the early 1970s:

Seagulls, as you know, never falter, never stall. To stall in the air is for them disgrace and it is dishonor. But Jonathan Livingston Seagull, unashamed, stretching his wings again in that trembling hard curve - slowing, slowing, and stalling once more - was no ordinary bird. Most gulls don't bother to learn more than the simplest facts of flight - how to get from shore to food and back again. For most gulls, it is not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight. More than anything else. Jonathan Livingston Seagull loved to fly.

Jonathan added another dimension to an otherwise monotonous existence. In the digital photography course this fall, students will teach themselves how their camera works while shooting photos and I will add the dimension of color, composition and lighting which will give their endeavors an artistic quality.