Tag Archives: photography

Silhouette Photography

One of the photo groups went out to a park at sunset to do some silhouettes. I’d never done this before so I made sure to attend.

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There were twenty of us, so we were always asking the two models to move. We pretty much needed them between us and the sun.

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A few of these I cropped and a few I tweaked a tiny bit in iPhone on the iPad. When I say tiny bit, I mean one click and a drag (not a dozen adjustments).

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I cropped a few too. When the contrast was just right there was too much black below the figures.

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If I’d gotten a little lower on this one, I think she’d really look like she was floating.

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I was surprised at how much red you could still see in the ribbon in this shot.

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The bicycle was tricky because she needed to go slow and also not accidentally ride down the hill she was atop of.

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This one I think I cropped too much, but maybe I was cropping something out. Regardless, she’s too much of the image but I love this one, I need to find the original and take another look at it.

I took hundreds of bad ones. Why? Because they kept moving. We didn’t have control over them moving, so we just kept snapping. But I got lots of good ones too!!!

What hobbies would you pursue if money was of no concern?

I like the Friday Question #98 for this week: What hobbies would you pursue if money was of no concern?

The first thing I thought was “Does travel count as a hobby“? But since KIm listed travel as hobby I figured it was okay to use…

Clouds Treo 111008 001So I’ll talk about travel as my topic. For me, the most expensive part about traveling is the getting to the destination. I can be pretty happy about staying somewhere cheap and out of the way but it’s getting there. Even when I get to Costa Rica and I can usually pay about $300-ish for my flight it’s still the getting around in country that costs money.

So even when I get to my isolated places and find a cheap place to stay. It’ll cost me more to rent a scooter or 4-wheeler for the day compared to the hotel; heck a bicycle rental is half the price of a hotel. Some other things to do on a trip like a horseback ride of out to an island where you can snorkel is more than the hotel too. As vacations go, these are cheap things to do ($35-$40 a day) but when that’s exceeding your other big costs you start to notice.

I guess if the money was of no concern I might stay at nicer places and in bigger cities but I’m pretty happy in some little town by the water or up in the mountains somewhere.

I guess photography and videography would be another hobby, since I love to do that. The problem is that just ends up with more stuff for me to carry around with me when I travel. And I guess for $5,000-$8,000 I could buy more than everything I need (multiple cameras and lens of different types and two different sized video cameras) and be done with it for more than a few years. Travel is a lot more expensive over the long haul.

I guess I just need a job that lets me travel, write about it and shoot lots of photos and video!!!

Kensington Metro Park

Pict2734.ThumbIt was a beautiful day yesterday! The forecast was supposed to be great so I went to Kensington Metro Park (still only $4 to get in). I think it got up to about 79° F so it was a great day for wandering around the paths. Never did find the one observation platform, must have walked the long way around it.

Can anyone identify the bird in the photo? (Comment below)

Here’s a bunch of photos I took at the park (8 photos).

A lot of my photos from my nice Canon Digital Rebel XT got a little washed out but I can’t figure out why. The best ones came out from my old pocket camera (Minolta Dimage XT).

Park was quiet and lots of stuff was closed (boat rental, etc.) but it is kind of late in the season. But it sure didn’t feel like it :)

I’ve just starting playing with 12Seconds.tv so here’s a test from my phone at the park. It’s abruptly cut off but that’s because videos can only be (you guessed it) 12 seconds long.

Kensington Metro Park on 12seconds.tv

London Photos – Day One

So I got some more photos up. London Day one, not a lot, but I did do some okay descriptions :)

Photo Times

So when you take digital pictures, it records the date and the time with the picture. I’m a little slightly obsessive compulsive about the settings on the date and time and when my two cameras are both set for different time zones and neither of those are the correct time zone it tends to annoy me.

So from now on I’m keeping my camera’s set to GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) so it’ll always be consistent. If you don’t know, this is the time zone where the clocks are set at “0”, for example when you set you clocks to EST (Eastern Standard) it sometimes says “-5” hours, that’s 5 hours off from GMT. I’m not sure how this will work for me in the long run but for now it seems like it will be consistent for me.

The biggest problem I see for now it is that other devices like my camera phone will till record in the current time zone. But since its a phone, the time on that should always be correct, unless of course I’m traveling in a country where I don’t have reception and the clock would be wrong…

Digital Camera Time & Date Settings

So I’m always trying to adjust the date and time on my camera, making it fit the time zone I’m in / adjusting the time changes (DST) and it’s pretty much just turned into a pain to keep correct. I’m thinking of just using GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) and then it’ll always be right and if I even need to know when I took a picture it’ll technically be right and I’ll be able to figure out the difference (if I need to).

I’ll have to test a few photos to Flickr and a few other places to see if they adjust or do anything to offset the time from where I say I am. Anyone who’s also been annoyed by this have any thoughts on the matter?

26 Things Photographic Scavenger Hunt for May 2007

So there is a new 26 Things Photographic Scavenger Hunt for May 2007, they only do this every few months so I’m glad to catch it in advance.

It’s a photo meme-like thing where they list 26 things and you need to take/post photos related to the topics. It’s way open to interpretation and I like the idea of it so take a look and take some photos…

Flowers – LensDay

2006-04-20 15-10-44.Img 0735So today’s LensDay dealt with flowers so this week so I submitted this photo that I took in Egypt. I thought most of the flowers from there seemedso bright and beautiful. The other people on the trip compared it to flowers in Hawaii but since I’ve never been there I attributed it to the Egyptian mystique…

I just thought they all seemed so bright and beautiful….