aRdot pHotography

This was a tough one. Not neccesarily the subject matter per se, but the fact that I live near Palm Springs and its summer time right now and clouds won’t be seen for months. So, I had to use one of my pictures from my recent trip to Salt Lake. Now, when I took the picture I was really mad that I didn’t have my tripod with me because I knew I was going to want to do some HDR stuff. So, the image isn’t a clear as I’d like, but it’s been like 3 days since my last post and I don’t want to not post for another day.

So, here it is, my HDR image of clouds as seen from the Salt Lake City cemetery looking towards the Coldecot Copper Mines.

Day-18 - Clouds

No Clouds in the Desert Sky

Electronics are either man’s greatest feat or the most taxing burden we’ve ever devised for ourselves. Some times they feel so liberating, like when you can take the internet to the park, and at other times they’re a leash keeping you ever connected with everyone … friends, family, work.

Without electronics I could not have taken this picture.

So, what is it? It is an old  firewire card from my computer that hasn’t worked in years ( so why do I still have it … I’m not really sure). I used the light tent and with my 50 mm lens set to a mid level depth of field (f5.6). I then cropped the hell out of it to get the interesting part of the image (Since it was a 50 mm I had the entire card and then some).

I’m not sure what the blue thing does, but I liked the height that it gave in the image and that’s what I decided to focus on. In Lightroom I opted to brighten up the image a bit, play with the saturation and sharpen it. What we have as an end result is nothing like the original card, but something that I like better.

Day 17 - Electronics

Reflections allow us to see ourselves, but they also allow us to see things from a different perspective. They can allow us to see something that we might have missed had it not been for that odd angle, the fading glimmer of light, or even seeing something that we didn’t see before.

The image I took for this was from my recent trip to Salt Lake City. I was at Temple Square on a Thursday and there were so many weddings, with young brides and grooms. Photographers taking pictures in front of the Temple. Quite the sight.

But what really struck me were the smaller children that were involved. Children dressed like adults for their relative’s wedding, looking dapper and too grown up. But under the facade of maturity was the need of the children to play. And so I got this image of a couple of brothers playing in the reflecting pool on the East side of the temple while their mother watches over them … not in a hen-pecking-don’t-get-your-good-clothes-wet-or-dirty kind of way, but just in a watchful maternal way, and I thought it was kind of cool.

I took the image and cropped out a lot of ‘noise’ and focused just on the kids playing. I also did some saturation adjustment in Lightroom and in Photoshop. The big difference between the two is how the saturation is applied. In the Lightroom version (image 1) it’s all over. In the Photoshop version (image 2) the desaturation is ONLY in the ‘real world’ while the reflection still has the color. I like the second image better if only because it adds some drama to the image. It evokes, in my mind anyway, the question of is this the real world, or is the blurry reflection the real world? Maybe a bit too much … but that’s what it does for me.

Day 16 - Reflection 1

Day 16 - Reflection 2

People do some pretty freaky stuff with zippers. I’m not nearly that adventurous. What I did instead was to take an old pair of jeans and shot a pretty standard image of the pants highlighting the zipper. Then I post processed the hell out of it to get an image that seemed reasonably interesting.

The most obvious thing done here (I think) is the saturation of the zipper and the desaturation of the blue jeans. I am trying to make the zipper (and the thread that holds the jeans together) stand out from the blue jeans. I also did an interesting tight crop on the zipper to get out the superfluous other parts of the jeans that weren’t adding to the image.

I like how the zipper slithers across the image from left to right in a very random way. The jeans edge of the jeans in the bottom right hand corner give a very worn feel to the jeans (and these jeans have been well worn, holes in the knees and crotch, torn pockets, etc.).

I also dig the abstractness of it. Although it’s totally a zipper (or at least half of one) if you didn’t know what it was, you might struggle to figure it out.

Day 15 - Zipper

What is more quintessential that a photograph of a bowl of fruit? Unfortunately, I did not have enough fruit to fill a bowl, so I just kind of leaned them against each other. Using Lightroom I saturated the hell out of the fruit to make the image a little more interesting, but it’s just not there. I think I needed to get a little more ‘outside of the box’ on this one in order to be happy and I just didn’t have it in me.

So, my goal is to make the next assigned picture a little more interesting and captivating.

But until then I give you, “Fruit or Why is that Banana Dry Humping that Apple?”

Day 13 - Fruit

Lines seem to be all around us in the man made world. In more concrete examples, they define the boundaries between sidewalk and street, pedestrian and car. In more abstract terms they define who of this nation-state and who is of that nation-state.

Lines allows us to differentiate between us and them. I’m not a big fan of lines. So, in the image below I tried to destaturate the hell out of it and show the starkness of the line-mindset.  The only part of the image I didn’t destaturate was the green grass. You don’t find lines, per se, in nature.

I like nature’s construction better.

Day 14 - Lines

Minimalism is one of those abstract concepts that I think I understand until I really start to think about it, and then, well it’s not so easy.

As an art movement it seems to imply a stripping away of the non essential parts of what people consider ‘art’, creating what is, in essence the ART that everyone should be able to identify with. What generally happens is people can say, “I don’t get it.”

So, in my attempt at minimalism, I thought I’d go a different route. Instead of stripping down all of the elements from the image, I thought I’d encompass what it means to think of minimalism, for me, in a very concrete way.

For me, nothing is more minimalistic than nature. Strip away the smart phone, your Facebook status, your most recent Twitter update, the shopping malls, even the fancy new DSLR. Everything can, and perhaps should, come back around to nature and our place in it.

So, I took a picture of a trail that goes off into the distance, seen below. Some of you might ask, where does it go. I’ll tell you, but you have to ask.

Day 12 - Minimalism

Been away for a while and now I’m back.

My cousin is a beast when it comes to sports, and school and pretty much everything he does. It can be irritating.

This is him dunking the ball in front of his house. I chose it as the ‘Moving Target’ because well he was moving and damn if it wasn’t awesome to see. I got to really use the super high burst rate of the 7D for the first time in a setting that seemed to make sense. I took about 250 shots of him and his friend dunking on their court at home. From different angles and different dunks … 250! And the best/worst part is with the high burst rate it only took about 20 minutes before I filled up my 8GB card.

After the shoot I notice the shadows of my cousin dunking and wished I had seen them while I was shooting. There were these trash cans i the way of the shadow laying against the background, but there were just present enough to see how freaking cool they would have been in full view. So, next time I’m at his house I’ll make sure the trash cans are gone. Of course, it might be a while and he’ll be off somewhere in the world and won’t be able to dunk the ball for me.

It’s a good thing he’s got a younger brother!

Day 10 - Moving Target

I love walking around downtown Salt Lake City. I lived up there for about a year and it was always one of my favorite things to do. Today it occurred to me that I had never walked around during the spring time. How did it occur to me? Well, I had never seen so many beautiful, big tulips in my entire life!

I took this image with my 50mm set at f1.8 to get a super shallow depth of field. I wanted to focus on only one of the bulbs. I also tried to frame the focused bulb with the stems and bulbs of the other (non-focused) bulbs. I also tried to get the focused tulip to standout not just by being the one in focus, but also by being a different color scheme that the ones in the foreground. As you can see the nice purple color really stands out against the yellow and pink tulips that are surrounding it.

I got a lot of images while on my short walking tour of Temple Square, but this was by far my favorite:

Day 11 - Landscape

Cemeteries are awesome places to get fantastic photographs, in my opinion. This image was taken in at Mount Olivete Cemetery in Salt Lake City across the street from Rice-Eccles stadium. I’ve heard it’s one of the only Catholic cemeteries in Salt Lake. This cemetery has many old style head stones, and several mausolea (creepy!), a herd of deer that live on the grounds AND these old street sings.

This old rusted sign marking the intersection of Cascade Ave and Main St with the head stones in the background really gives the feeling of the place. Kind of spooky, even during the day. Awesome!

Day 9 - Sign