I had an unplanned adventure to the Newport Storm Brewing factory in Newport, RI today thanks to my friends Theresa and Matt. It was a rather small place, but the hostess was very friendly and had us try 4 great beers. They also produce Thomas Tew Rum, this is a photo of the rum barrels.
When all else fails, I guess taking a super freaky portrait of myself works.
The Film from the Future guys asked me to give them a hand with making paint dance for a music video they are working on for the band Cassela. They saw my “I can’t stop” 365 photo and wanted to colaborate on this awesome project together. I shot photos along side their video but all my photos came out like shit. I couldn’t get my focus on point and since they where shooting video, the lighting was not what I was used to using (strobes). At some point Josh suggested we put a canvas under the speaker because the splash back was looking like a piece of art. Here is a photo of one of the finished canvases made from paint flying off a speaker to the music by the band Cassela.
This is another one of those “something is better than nothing” days. I spent most of my day editing photos from the past weekend and a recent gig so I did not have much time to dedicate to my 365. Close friends of mine know my mother and that she is an amazing seamstress. The house is full of random sewing supplies, so when I looked around the basement and saw this stack of thread I decided I would try to make it work. It almost looks like a multicolored city skyline made of thread.
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!
