167/365 - Jim - 3 Months Old

( f/11 35mm 1/125 sec ISO 200 Nikon D300 )

Nolan is 3 months old today. I was tasked with getting his photo or else he was going to Sears. So I remembered this little wagon that my mother found. It didn't have a back on it, so I improvised with a box of cereal and the blanket. The background is baby blue, but it looks more teal, so I changed the hue with Lightroom to more of a blue. For the family, I put together the other photos I took today. Click here to view them.

166/365 - Jim - Rocky Raccoon

( f/4 200mm 1/400 sec ISO 200 Nikon D300 )

Matt Smochko (remember him?) and I went for a Photo Walk today. We started at Lake Arthur and ran into this raccoon. He was just laying in the yard and as we photographed him, he got scared and ran to the rocks. Of course we followed him and took over 100 photos each. Then we made our way over to McConnell's Mill since it's just down the road. We went down to a waterfall that comes off the hill and got some nice slow shutter photos. As I got what I thought was THE shot, I turned to show Matt. I heard a tumbling crash that turned out to be his second lens that he had in his hoodie pocket. I reacted faster than I feel is possible for me and grabbed it as it was rolling down a large rock toward the water. The whole thing made us extremely nervous so we left immediately. I got a lot of nice photos, which I could have used for over a week of FotoEveryDay, but I haven't broken the rule yet so I will continue as usual. Here are the other photos.

165/365 - Jim - Robin

( f/5.6 200mm 1/800 sec ISO 800 Nikon D300 )

I saw a bunch of birds outside after work, so I decided to put my sneakers on and see how stealthy I could be. I went into the front yard and hid behind a tree until they flew into it. Seeing the Robins makes me feel like Spring is almost here, which... it is. So birding was kind of fun. I'd like to get the Nikon 2x Teleconverter though so I could get double the reach and not have to be as stealthy. I didn't realize I was at ISO 800 and wondered why I was getting some incredible shutter speeds at f/8. Then I realized, but it was a little too late. Thankfully the D300 does alright with slightly higher ISO, so the noise isn't that bad.

164/365 - Jim - One Hundred Thousand Miles

( f/2.8 24mm 1/10 sec ISO 200 Nikon D300 )

When you drive for years to work and it takes you 45 minutes one way without traffic, you tend to rack up the miles. Since working from home 3 days a week, I have really slowed down on the miles. I knew yesterday that I would be hitting 100,000 soon, so I took my camera with me to work. When I got there I was still about 10 miles short, so at lunch I knew it would flip. Just as we got back to the office, it was at 99,999. So I took a ride around the office park until it flipped, then parked and took some photos. Hopefully this doesn't mean the car will start falling apart...

163/365 - Jim - Sign of Good Weather

( f/5.6 105mm 1/15 sec ISO 200 Nikon D300 )

Hopefully these tulips know the weather is going to change soon and start getting real nice out. I'm sick of the cold weather and ready to be outside more. I'm sure you will see one of these flowers on here once they bloom.

162/365 - Jim - Bubble

( f/11 58mm 1/125 sec ISO 200 Nikon D300 )

I tried to get several shots of bubbles floating in the air, but it was really difficult to blow them and obtain focus and get the shot all at the same time. Right before I was done trying, I caught this bubble and was able to focus on it easily. If you zoom into the sides, the detail is pretty cool. But what is cool one second, pop, is a mess on your floor the next...

161/365 - Jim - Moon gets in way of perfect V

( f/2.8 70mm 1/160 sec ISO 800 Nikon D300 )

It was perfect. I went out on the deck and heard geese in the distance. I quickly set my camera to get a better shutter speed by turning up the ISO and setting it to Shutter priority. The geese went right over top of me and I snapped away. You might be thinking "Wow, and the moon just happened to be there too and you just happened to get an awesome exposure." Nope, I faked you out. I did take a nicely exposed photo of the moon, but the moon is bright, so the sky was very black. But how did you get the moon in there then? My camera has a photo merge feature. I take 2 pictures, choose them, and hit merge. It's very simple and works really well with moon photos because of the sky being all black. Here is a tip for anyone with a Nikon DSLR, zoom in on the moon as far as you can go and take a photo. Then take another photo of a cityscape zoomed out. Merge the two and you have an unreal looking HUGE moon. And unless they read this, they won't know you cheated.

160/365 - Jim - House Foto

( f/11 24mm 1/125 sec ISO 200 Nikon D300 )

Ok, this is my attempt at the TV show House logo. In the show it starts as a head x-ray and then quickly fades to the face of Hugh Laurie and House is displayed across the screen. I modeled it after this photo. I started out by taking a screen shot of the head x-ray from hulu. Then using Photoshop Elements, I did a Gaussian blur and then used layers to put my face in there.

159/365 - Just Nolan

( f/3.5 35mm 1/60 sec ISO 200 Nikon D300 )

My mother took Jameson for the weekend, so we only have Nolan. We took him out for some lunch and shopping and he smiled like this the whole time. When we got home I grabbed my camera and got a shot of him. Nothing special, just Nolan. I added the soft focus blur with Picasa.

158/365 - Jim - Ant Perspective

( f/8 24mm 43 sec ISO 200 Nikon D300 )

It was a nice day, so I went outside and put the camera on the driveway and held the shutter in for a count of 40. I was only 3 seconds off...

157/365 - Jim - Posterized

( f/11 66mm 1/125 sec ISO 200 Nikon D300 )

Well, I wanted to try something different with my studio flashes. I put one on each side of my face about a foot away with a softbox on each of them. This creates a dark line down the center of my face which I have seen done by other photographers and liked. Unfortunately I didn't have anyone to take photos of, so I couldn't experiment very much and had to do a self portrait. It didn't look that great so I covered it up with an effect in Photoshop called patchwork. If ever I want to count the pores on my face, this would be the effect I use.

156/365 - Jim - Gravity

( f/16 105mm 1/320 sec ISO 200 Nikon D300 )

This may boggle your mind, but all I did was drop these boggle letters onto a black reflective paper. It took more time to find all the letters than it did to take the picture. I have 26 more days to hit the mid point of Foto Every Day and it is getting increasingly harder to come up with ideas. This project is truly challenging my creativity, but that's what it's all about so I can't complain.

155/365 - Jim - Carrot Cake

( f/8 70mm 1/125 sec ISO 200 Nikon D300 )

My sister-in-law was visiting over the weekend and brought a carrot cake mix. She didn't get a chance to make it, but my mother did yesterday. For lack of a better photo idea, I cut a piece and took it down to my studio. I'm not the biggest fan of carrot cake, but it was alright. I used three flashes for this shot. One had a softbox and the others were bounced off of the ceiling.

154/365 - Jim - Signs of Einstein

( f/11 36mm 1/125 sec ISO 200 Nikon D300 )

My son Jameson is showing signs of being like Einstein. Though the only sign so far is the tongue thing, we still have high hopes for our little boy :) For my birthday, my parents got me a new paper background. It was supposed to be baby blue, but looks more like a sea foam blue/green. Of course you can't tell from this photo, but you will see it in the future. I rolled it out on my pool table and put Jameson up there to test the background. I tried to get him to make some funny faces, but instead he just laughed hysterically most of the time.

153/365 - Jim - McConnell's Mill

( f/18 24mm HDR ISO 200 Nikon D300 )

I went to McConnell's Mill today to get a photo and take some video with my new camcorder. It was so cold! I lasted about 20 minutes before my hands were frozen. It was very overcast today so none of my photos looked very nice and I knew that would happen, so I put my camera on a post and took 5 bracketed photos. Then I created an HDR with them. If I post a video, I will link it here.