044/365 - Jim - Fringe

( f/11 70mm 1/160 sec ISO 200 Nikon D300 )

Theme is TV Show. This is the first of many hopefully. I want to take some logos from TV shows and reproduce them as a photo of my own. If you haven't watched the show Fringe, you should check it out. It is the latest show by J.J. Abrams and deals with fringe science such as telepathy, reanimation, etc. So far it has been really interesting. For this photo I cut an apple in half and poked it onto a boom connected to a light stand. I wrapped the boom with black foam because it is silver and would have reflected. Once I had the shot, I started on the post processing. I turned it blue, added the babies (click the image to see it close up), and finally added the yellow glowing things. This is what they show sometimes right before they go to commercial.

043/365 - Jim - Green is the Winner

( f/11 52mm 1/160 sec ISO 200 Nikon D300 )

Theme is tricolor. This was a tough theme for me. I could not think of anything really creative, so looking around the room I found this part of a race track that my sister got for my son as a birthday gift. Thanks to my guest entry for his creative photo. If you would like to be a guest photographer, pick a theme and take a photo on that day. Then send it to me at crankball@zoominternet.net along with a name and description of your photo. Also, please let me know the theme you picked beforehand so I don't change it. If you don't find a theme you like, remember that every Sunday there is no theme. I would love to have a guest every week.

043/365 - Guest - What if?

( f/11 40mm 1/160 sec ISO 200 Nikon D300 )

Today I have a guest entry. My dad came to watch my son and took this picture for the theme tricolor. Here are his comments about the photo:

The theme of tricolor really had me thinking and that is always dangerous for me and for those around me. I thought briefly about an American Flag picture since this is Veterans Day but my mind wondered away from that spot and I started thinking ,"What if?" What if we could draw using a pen with the same three colors found in most color printers. I couldn't think of a better subject than Jameson so here is my representation of "What if?"

042/365 - Jim - I Love Cards

( f/4 70mm 1/160 sec ISO 200 Nikon D300 )

Theme is letters. I saw this on Flickr one day and wanted to reproduce it. It is a very cool idea and I can't take credit for it. All I had to do in post processing was remove a tiny amount of red from the Queen and Ace to make them an O and V. Using the 7 and 3 as letters reminds me of my childhood and typing things on the calculator, then flipping it over and giggling.

041/365 - Jim - Blue Smoke

( f/16 27mm 1/160 sec ISO 200 Nikon D300 )

I went to the Steeler game today and took my point and shoot camera. If you saw the game, you'll know why I was disgusted and didn't post any of those pictures. Instead, right before midnight I set up a candle and a flash. I lit the candle and blew it out then snapped some photos. To make the smoke blue, I changed the white balance to tungsten. The glass holder was desaturated to black and white in post processing.

040/365 - Jim - My Dad

( f/11 56mm 1/160 sec ISO 200 Nikon D300 )

Theme is portrait. Today we had a birthday party for my son, and invited the family. My Dad wanted a portrait taken for his blog, so I told him I would change the theme today and post his photo. I used 2 flashes with softboxes and feathered them toward each other. A little post processing was necessary to remove old man hairs that were later removed by hand :)

039/365 - Jim - Lemon Wheel

( f/22 200mm 6 sec ISO 200 Nikon D300 )

Theme is wheel. I almost changed the theme because I couldn't come up with any interesting ideas for a wheel. I started thinking about back lighting and then it hit me. A backlit lemon slice looks kind of like a wheel. I tried a few shots with a snooted flash but didn't like them very much. So I just used the model light in the flash as my back light. The background is Translum and I used one of those Glade plugin things that have 3 led lights on it and does a little light show. I stopped it on red and waved it around behind the Translum for the 6 second exposure. I cropped and tilted the image in post processing.

038/365 - Jim - Bokeh Rose

( f/2.8 200mm 1/60 sec ISO 200 Nikon D300 )

Theme is bokeh. You might be asking yourself "What is bokeh?" Well, it is a word derived from a Japanese word (boke) and is a photographic term referring to the appearance of the out-of-focus areas. This is produced by adjusting the lens to the highest aperture, in this case f/2.8 which results in a very shallow depth of field. The background circles are actually Christmas lights that I hung on my Translum background and put the (fake) rose in front of it about 10 feet. Then the camera was about 8 or so feet from the rose. I pointed two flashes at the rose. One from below with a snoot attached and the other from above with a grid spot. No post processing adjustments were made to this image.

037/365 - Jim - Happy Second Birthday Jameson

( f/2.8 200mm 1/13 sec ISO 200 Nikon D300 )

Theme is candle. My son turned 2 years old today. I took a vacation day to spend time with him. We went to Giant Eagle and I got him some cupcakes to put candles in. His official party will be on Saturday so I wanted to let him blow candles out on his actual birthday. I put this cupcake on my roll of Translum and it is only lit by the candles. I took some photos with flashes, but they weren't as dramatic as this one.

036/365 - Jim - New Shoes

( f/10 10.5mm 1/160 sec ISO 200 Nikon D300 )

Theme is new. These are my new shoes. You may look at this and say "hey, I only see one shoe." Well, they are actually both there. I put one on top of the other and used a tool in Lightroom called a Graduated Filter which added a black gradation over the bottom shoe and makes it look like a reflection. Pretty slick eh? I took this shot with my fisheye lens because I was originally trying to get some crazy fisheye look, but then this idea hit me and I was too lazy to change lenses.

035/365 - Jim - Rochester Cycle Poco

( f/8 200mm 1/160 sec ISO 200 Nikon D300 )

Theme is old. My grandpa gave me a bunch of his camera collection a while back. For this theme I knew I wanted to find one of the oldest ones and photograph it. I sat down and researched this camera for a while. My best guess is that it is a Rochester 4x5 Cycle Poco from 1896. That makes it 112 years old. The label must have fallen off the front because I saw photos of similar cameras with a label. The photographic shutter was made by Bausch & Lomb Optical Company and patented on Jan 6, 1891. To take a photo using this camera, one had to load a glass negative plate into the back and then take the photo. I'm not real sure how they were able to determine what shutter speed and aperture to use. Photography has come a long way since then.

034/365 - Jim - Golden Spiral

( f/2.8 200mm 1/640 sec ISO 200 Nikon D300 )

Since there isn't a theme today, I thought I would give a lesson. In photography there are some rules of composition. The most common method is the Rule of Thirds. This is where you divide the photo into thirds and end up with nine equal parts. Then you put the features of the subject at the intersecting points or on the lines. Another composition technique is the Golden Spiral. This photo is not an exact golden spiral, but is close enough to it. Flowers are a common subject for this technique. One other technique is Framing. This is where the main subject is surrounded by other elements of the photo. A common example is where foreground trees are used to box in the subject. These are called rules, but rules are meant to be broken and if you break the rules and end up with a nice picture, that is really all that counts.

033/365 - Jim - Layered Texture

( f/9 75mm 1/320 sec ISO 200 Nikon D300 )

Theme is texture. I read about a method of taking photos of textures and then overlaying them onto photos. So what I did was take a picture of the back side of a leather belt. Then did a multiple exposure of the texture along with this photo of the Mellon Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. This produced an old weathered looking photograph. I could have done this in a graphics program with layers and toned down the texture in the center which would have given it a better look probably, but you get the point. This is the first time I have tried this and I like the effect, so I'll probably try it again sometime.

032/365 - Jim - First Chocolate

( f/5 70mm 1/60 sec ISO 200 Nikon D300 )

Theme is Halloween of course. This shot is just a quick point and shoot. My son Jameson dressed as Bob the Builder and went trick or treating for the first time. He only went to four houses, and did ok considering. This is also the first time he has had chocolate and you can see by his reaction that he liked it.

031/365 - Jim - Pocket Sevens

( f/11 70mm 1/250 sec ISO 200 Nikon D300 )

Theme is seven. I staged this on my pool table so I would have the authentic felt look. I wish I had clay chips, but oh well... I used my 70-200mm lens with the Canon 500D close-up lens on the end of it. This let me shoot very close and get a better depth of field at a lower f stop. Two of the flop cards are sevens too, but you can't tell.