After complaining on FaceBook about how horrible the selective color fad is and that photographer should just stop doing it, here I am posting a photo that does it. I felt this was a great image to do it to, I hope this does the technique some justice. If not, shame on me! I tried.
While wondering around Canal street I saw this Pretzel hanging from a line at a street vendor. I thought it looked really cool just hanging there among the tourists snapping photos and locals trying to avoid said tourists.
I went for a long walk in the High Line Elevated Park on Friday and this was one of my favorite photos from the day. This is overlooking West 16th Street towards the upper bay and Jersey City. I really liked the colors in the sky and the shadows cast by people walking in to the sunset.
I am truly sorry for the delay in posting updates to the 365 project. I spent the weekend in New York City with some friends and did not bring my laptop along with me as I was already carrying a bunch of camera gear and wanted to travel light. I was snapping photos the whole time I was in the Big Apple, however Thursday’s photo comes from Providence, RI and not the big city. I got to the city late in the evening and did not bring my tripod with me, so getting a cool shot was super tough. Instead of posting a shit photo, I opted to go with this interesting photo taken while walking around Providence before I hopped on my bus. I wondering around Brook Street with Theresa after a great lunch at The Cuban Revolution and spotted this little bottle hanging out on someones window sill. You may have heard about these crazy bath salts, the ones that cause people to eat each others faces off, being labeled as “aromatic potpourri”. When I saw that phrase on this bottle I just had to take a picture of it. If my googlin’ is correct, this my friends is what may possibly cause you to eat a fellow humans face off. Please , do not do this shit. I do not want to stab a friend in the face for trying to bite my cheeks off!
If you live in Mass / RI, you know how shitty the weather has been lately. There seems to be nothing but gloomy, rainy days lately. I drove around the neighborhood for a while looking for something interesting, this place immediately caught my eye. I should have spent more time composing a great shot but it was raining. I had to shoot out the back of the SUV to avoid getting the camera gear drenched. This will have to do for today, but the next few days should produce some interesting stuff as I am going to New York City for the weekend to hang out with friends and take photos. I am not bringing my laptop so there wont be any updates to this project until Monday afternoon.
Today’s challenge was to go out and take a photo in black and white. Not take a color photo then post process it in to black and white, but to capture it in black and white. Needless to say, this is not what I was imagining in my brain. I would love to do more of this with real people.
I seem to be drawn to power stations and water – at night. I just love the architecture of this building and knew it would end up in a 365 at some point. This was created from 3 images at different exposures blended together manually in photoshop vs a standard HDR.
I spent my whole day editing photos from a gig on Saturday night and had only an hour to get my 365 photo before it was the end of the day. I scrambled around the city looking for something interesting but had 0 luck. I got back home with 5 minutes to spare and looked up at the sky. It is a super clear night and for one reason or another there wasn’t all that much light pollution going on. I decided taking a photo of the night sky and the stars would be better than not taking a photo an ending the 365 project.
It is really hard to post a photo I know sucks. but in the end I know it’s better than not posting anything at all and failing at this project all together. I want to do this nigt sky thing again but I planned on doing it for 2-3 hours and getting some amazing star trails – I only had 5 minutes so a 1 1/2 minute exposure had to do.
My first attempt at capturing someone in mid air. I want to do this again in a more controlled environment.
I’ll keep this one short and sweet: nothing I took today was that interesting, so here is a box of trash.
I saw a few of these done before and had to give it a shot. I wanted to do it during early sunset, which gave me the idea to HDR all the shots needed to make the globe. I had to take 3 rows of 360 degree panoramas, then 3-4 shots of directly above me, and directly below me. I ended up with 160 something photos when all was said and done. This is called “Mill World” because it was taken in front of a historic Mill in Fall River, MA which is known for it’s mills.
HDRing hand held photos is a pain in the butt, and the results are mediocre. Since this was going to end up as a tiny little ball, I was ok with the HDR’s not being so sharp. If I had to do this again, I would ditch the whole HDR part of it, as you can see, the globe does not look very HDR, but that is usually how I process my HDR’s. Anyway, this was mostly photoshop work, but it sure did make me take a crap load of photos to get the final product.
Note: HDR stands for High Dynamic Range, it is when you take 3 or more different photographs in the same spot with different exposures then merge them together in photoshop.
Again, this is not an original idea. You can google “how to make mini worlds from photos” and you will get some how-to’s. Most of them tell you to do it with flat photos, I chose to do it with a super huge, multi-row panorama to create a more detailed version.
You have probably seen this done before, it’s a rather popular photography project right now. I had to give it a go, the results are cool, but not what I was hoping to capture. I will be doing this again during this 365 for sure.
Basically, you put some steel wool in a wisk, tie it to the end of a rope, set the wool on fire, then spin it around while its shooting shards of firey steel wool everywhere. Cool concept! Big thank you to Andrew Baker for being a good sport and swinging that firey ball of madness around. I also had to light up the foreground with a flashlight because it was pretty dark where we were, so some light painting was involved with this shot.
So I saw this posted over on this blog: http://gearsidecreative.com/subtle-mirror-trick-photoshop-tutorial/ and just had to give it a go myself. This was actually a pretty good challenge to get the photos right. Check the link to the blog for details as to how this is done.
Some of you may have seen my post about capturing music in a photo. This was my attempt at capturing paint on a speaker bouncing to the song by Flux Pavillion – I can’t stop. This was done by covering a speaker in a black trash bag, then adding small puddles of watered down poster paint on to the bag. I then added a black paint roller tray in front of the speaker filled to the brim with water to give the reflection.
This is not an original idea, after I tried figuring out how to capture music a few FaceBook friends gave me some links to check out and I eventually saw one like this, however, they did not use the paint tray reflection, I added that in from the water drop project.
I walked around Fall River for almost 2 hours today and came back home with nothing on my camera. For some reason I just didn’t see anything that caught my eye. It was a beautiful day though, so I sure enjoyed the vitamin D. I guess I have a harder time finding things interesting during the day than I do at night. I think it’s just the way my brain is wired. Anyway, when I got back home I noticed this spider hanging out by my shed. I wanted to get the web and the spider in focus but I could only manage to get one or the other with a blurred background, or both with a shit background. I settled on the spider. Next time I want to try and get super close with a reverse ring on my lens, but I am such a baby with spiders I didn’t want to get too close.
Today’s motivation is at an all time low. It has been a rather busy week and this rain sure is not helping out at all. Today I give you a photo of a rainy window, I guess it was fun to play with more manual settings and focusing. I really wish it wasn’t raining today!
This is a view of Washington street in Providence at night. I decided today’s 365 would be taken in a confined area. I choose to take a photo wherever I parked for the evening in Downtown Providence. I took a few shots, but this one was my favorite. I waited for this bus to come by where I was set up so I could get some interesting light trails. You can see how the sign on the bus made for a really cool LED light trail in yellow and green that leads right in to the heart of the city.
Local 121 in Providence, RI is by far one of my most favorite places to DJ. The architecture, the employees, the overall vibe…. it’s just all around perfect for Funky House Music. Tonight I was asked by a friend Bryan to fill in for another DJ for the evening, so I gathered up the funkiest of the funky house tunes I had and invited all my awesome friends. Today’s 365 was taken while DJing for these amazing people, I wouldn’t have today’s 365 ay other way.
Today’s sunset was awesome, but my attempt at capturing was less than great. I came home to edit the sunset photos, I realized something was very off and I had to go back out and find another shot for my 365. I hopped on Google Maps before I left my house and found this little hidden area I never even knew existed. It could be some type of boat dock or fishing area, I am not really sure. It was SUPER dark down there and I am definitely going back to do some light painting soon. I aimed the camera towards the other side of the water and set the exposure time to 30 seconds. The results where ok, but the foreground was almost black and it needed to be re-framed. I then decided to re-frame the shot and use a flashlight to manually light up the foreground in the areas I wanted. I did it about 15 times and this was the end result, it is a little bland, but I am starting to get a hang of the light painting thing. I am also pretty happy I found a new spot for projects!
Notice the fancy boat someone left behind there? Yay Fall River!
I noticed a few people walking on the side of the new Veterans Memorial bridge that connects Fall River and Somerset, MA and wanted to check it out. I intended on going during the day and walking most of the path but I was stuck inside editing photos from a photography job this weekend. I found a path entrance at the bottom of Essex Street in Fall River. I only walked about half way up the bridge before I decided to walk back to the car, main reason being there was a lot of light on the bridge and it was a bit foggy out there. I plan on going back during better weather and walking the whole thing soon.
This was a longer exposure shot, but I re-colored most of the photo in sections in photoshop. Originally everything was a shitty shade of orange because of the color of lighting used on the pathway and bridge. I really like playing with this selective color adjustment thing, it makes for some interesting results.