Day 5 of 365 – Water Drops

I have been wanting to give this a go for some time now and finally got a chance to try it out. It’s not that hard to do, but there is a lot of preparation involved. It is also recommended to be done with an off-camera flash which I do not have access to at the moment, so I improvised with bouncing my flash off various objects. I also used some fabrics and tissue papers over my flash to get some interesting color in to the image. I will be playing with this some more in the future, next time I will use a bigger water tray and hopefully have a transmitter for my flash unit.

Day 4 of 365 – Light Painting v2

I wanted to do more light painting, but this time I wanted to try and draw some stuff in to the photos with LED lights. I already had a mountain of  the lights laying around, so I wired them up to an old cell phone battery and attached them to a pole that stuck in to an old iPod box. You can see a photo of this wacky thing here. I headed down to a few open areas in the city with my friend Colby. The results aren’t the greatest, but I think I finally got the hang of it towards the end of the session. I need to plan something like this out a lot more before the actual shoot. I also need to find a darker area to do this in. I am going to try to combine the style from my first light painting and this second one together to form one awesome image. So far this 365 thing is great. It just keeps me thinking and looking for a new place or thing to photograph in a creative way no matter where I am or what I am doing.

Day 3 of 365 – Smoke Stack

I spent a few hours walking around Fall River, MA looking for something interesting to take a photo of. I armed myself with my camera and my 50mm lens and nothing else then hoped for the best.  I did not even notice that there was a smoke stack 3 feet in front of me while walking, then I looked up and thought “Wow, this thing is huge”. The clouds broke and the sun felt great for a while, then right as I was getting closer to my house, it started raining again. I am not really happy with the results here, but I think I will be back there to take another shot sometime soon. It’s interesting to see something so big up close, that does not seems so big from just a few blocks away. I would love to see the making of one of these things. Each brick must have been hand placed on this thing – that is some massive work!

Day 2 of 365 – Rain

So today’s challenge was rain. Lot’s and lot’s of rain. I first tried outdoors after midnight with my flash and a headlamp, the results where gross. I then spent about an hour today outside in the garden with all my rain ready gear and started snapping some shots. I was not sure what to capture, I feel like everything has been done before, then I remembered I have 363 more days of this to go. I can not keep sweating it and just need to go with it, so here it is – rain drops on the blade of a plant (OH MY GOD THATS NEVER BEEN DONE BEFORE!).

Day 1 of 365 – Light Painting v1

Here is my first photo for my 365 project! I wanted to try and take some more night shots with the moon, but the clouds once again screwed me. I was driving around Fall River, Ma, the city I grew up in with a good friend Andrew. We where trying to find places we didn’t know existed – so I opened up google maps and looked for any areas down by a body of water. We came across this Boat Ramp that over looks South Watuppa pond and I started framing my shot. I did not have luck with the moon, but when I turned around I noticed the two boat ramps on each side of me looked really cool and symmetrical as they disappeared in to the water.

The problems here where it was past midnight and it was pretty dark. I tried a 5 second, 10 second, 15 second,  and a few other long exposures with different ISO settings and got some cool effects, but still not really what I had imagined. It was also pretty windy so I the branches where blurring up a bit. I set my exposure time to 10 seconds and then had Andrew hide back out of frame with my 430EXII flash set to full 1/1 power. When I hit the shutter, I had Andrew run across the frame shooting the flash at some surrounding bushes to illuminate the dark areas. The end result was pretty cool, but there where two sections where the flash was pointed towards the camera and made for an unplesant blow back effect. I took another shot without the added flash then merged the two photos in Photoshop.

This was an un-planned attempt at light painting and I really can not wait to do more of this type of thing with better planning.

365 Photography Project

I have decided to embark on a 365 day journey that many people start, but few actually finish. I will be taking, editing, and posting 1 photograph a day for the next 365 days. This will of-course be in addition to my normal work. I will post the photos here on my blog then link them on to my FaceBook fan page. I am not quite sure if there will be a theme to the project as a whole, but I do have a list of ideas for weekly themes throughout the project taken from this blog. It looks like this first week will be the theme “Up”. I look forward to seeing where this photography project takes me, and hope you will enjoy the images created over this time frame.

Some upcoming themes:
“Up”
“Anger”
“Temptation”
“Looking In”