Day #32 - Best Place To See A Sunset

Well, this is one of the places to see a great sunset.

At work there is a dry erase board with the question, "Best place to see a sunset". I was asked to add my thoughts to the question and I answered, Siesta Key, Florida.

Today I never pulled the camera out of the bag. Just too tired to do it, and we had dinner over at my in-laws house to welcome home my brother-in-law Matt who lives near Siesta Key, Florida. In fact, over Spring Break we flew out to hang out with Matt for a week and this picture was shot on the first night there. We still long to be there especially on hectic days. We start a 6 day "Staycation" and won't see anything so nice as this location, but hopefully the feeling of being there on that beach at sunset will somehow filter into our plans this week.

Shot spex: JPEG Image, Pentax K10D, ISO 400, 24mm, f6.7, 1/500 sec., no flash.

PhotoShop spex: Smart Sharpened (as always), and adjusted the Contrast and Saturation just a little bit. Cropped a tad bit.

Day #31 - Moon Over Easy

Anyone who has ever shot a picture of the moon will know that it's not as easy as one might think. It took me a while to dial in the right exposure as I was leaning toward a long exposure (started at 20 seconds) and in reality, the exposure time was quite short (1/4 second). This is kind of a lazy shot, but I wanted to see how well my camera did on this type of shot with my limited range (18-200mm lens). I've been noticing the moon the past few nights and decided I'd give it a go tonight (in part because I waited too long to start shooting and couldn't think of anything indoors that sounded interesting).

Gotta get to shooting before night fall tomorrow!

Shot spex: RAW Image, Pentax K10D, ISO 100, 200mm, f22, 1/4 sec., no flash, tripod (of course).

PhotoShop spex: Smart Sharpened (as always), and adjusted the Contrast barely.

Day #30 - He Keeps Her Shiny, Shiny

The other day I was out in the front yard with all my camera gear set up and was trying to do a self portrait of me with my Jeep. I hated the pictures and ended up using something else that day. My neighbor across the street must have seen me because she asked me today if I was selling my Jeep. I of course blurted out, "no way"! I then asked her why. She mentioned she had seen me shooting pictures of the Jeep and thought that I was shooting images to use for the ad. I explained my project and then she proceeded to ask if I would mind shooting pictures of her husbands car that he wanted to sell. I remember seeing this beautiful car a few times as Ed (my neighbor's husband) would take it out for a spin. I was excited to see it up close! So today after the chores were done I grabbed all of my gear and Ed pulled his 1958 Austin-Healey out of the garage.

I shot about 30 pictures for his ad and of course worked in a few creative ones for my pic-a-day project. This car is really sweet! Wish I had the $$$ to buy it! Watch Craigs List soon for it!

BTW - the title of today's post is a reference to a song by one of my favorite bands, The Rainmakers.

Shot spex: RAW Image, Pentax K10D, ISO 400, 33mm, f11, 1/60 sec., flash.

PhotoShop spex: Adjusted Levels just a little, Smart Sharpened (as always), and adjusted the Contrast up +39 for the effect, added a layer and used it to blur the upper right corner to get rid of unwanted elements, then decided to BW that portion of the picture. Added some lens flare effects for fun.

Day #29 - Dog Days Of Summer

I don't know when the Dog Days of Summer officially start, but we started celebrating today - by staying indoors in the AC while being very lazy.

I saw Chewey finally settling down and was wishing I had my camera handy for a few shots. Dionne said she thought he'd stay calm as long as I carefully left the room to get the camera. So I walked very quietly to my office and grabbed the camera and flash.

I made it back to the living room where Chewey was still being very calm and quiet. I was able to snap these without rousing him too much.

Shot spex (top picture): RAW Image, Pentax K10D, ISO 800, 200mm, f6.3, 1/30 sec., flash.

PhotoShop spex (top picture): Cropped to a square, adjusted Levels, Smart Sharpened (as always), and adjusted the Contrast a tiny bit.

Shot spex (bottom picture): RAW Image, Pentax K10D, ISO 800, 90mm, f5.6, 1/45 sec., flash.

PhotoShop spex (bottom picture): Cropped to a square, adjusted Levels, Smart Sharpened (as always), and adjusted the Contrast a tiny bit.

Day #28 - Oh to be a kid again...

What a life it is to be a kid. Playing outside all day long at summer camp, then coming home and wanting to play outside some more - in 100 degree weather! Then you and a friend pull all kinds of top grade building supplies out of your dad's garage - like card tables, card board, tarps, folding chairs and masking tape. You proceed to build a killer fort where the temperature inside is a nice steamy 120 degrees and you sit inside it blowing out sweet melodies on your trusty harmonica.

Sounds like fun, doesn't it? All I want to do it go inside and stay there. I can't remember when I ever really wanted to be outside that much. It was probably back when I was 8 years old - like a certain boy I happen to know and love.

I decided to post two pictures today. I just really liked them both and couldn't pass up the opportunity to share.

Enjoy!

Shot spex (top picture): RAW Image, Pentax K10D, ISO 800, 24mm, f8, 1/45 sec., flash.

PhotoShop spex (top picture): Adjusted levels, Smart Sharpened (as always), and adjusted the Contrast quite a bit for a creative look.

Shot spex (bottom picture): RAW Image, Pentax K10D, ISO 800, 40mm, f8, 1/45 sec., flash.

PhotoShop spex (bottom picture): Cropped way in to just get the feet, Adjusted levels, Smart Sharpened (as always), and adjusted the Contrast quite a bit for a creative look, Desaturated (not completely to BW) enough to create a unique look, added Fresco filter.

Day #27 - Music For All Time

So what a day! The King of Pop, Michael Jackson passes away at the way too young age of 50. I don't know if this inspired me to listen to a LOT of music tonight, but it might have had some subconscious affect.

I went over to my buddy Donovan's house tonight and we ended up just listening to tons of songs while loading up my iPod and trying to figure out the name of a specific Led Zeppelin song. It was kind of a nice time of tunes and chilling out. Upon reflection I thought it was kind of cool how we were listening to music fairly current and then spent a fair amount of time listening to music that was almost 40 years old. Good music really doesn't ever become irrelevant.

So I got home and was pondering what to shoot while fighting with my computer. I had to re-boot about 3 times, got a blue screen of death, and was just about to give up when it came back to life. I decided to set up a shot of some Cd's from my collection. To go a step further I made sure one of the disks that was showing was fairly current (anberlin - Blueprints For The Black Market) and one was more of a classic (The Police - Synchronicity). The I shot a few with flash and realized that unless I got real creative, the flash was just going to cause severe reflections off the jewel cases. I then went to long shutter speeds and worked until I had a good histogram.

Then I listened to one of my top 10 favorite albums while I edited away! Any guesses? Probably only Donovan and Dionne would know. Bonus points to anyone who can post up the answer! Not sure what the points are good for but...

Shot spex: RAW Image, Pentax K10D, ISO 800, 33mm, f13, 2 sec., no flash.

PhotoShop spex: Adjusted levels, and darkened up the mid-tones a bit more than normal. Smart Sharpened (as always), and adjusted the Contrast quite a bit for a creative look.

Day #26 - Spare Some Change?

Well, I had planned to be somewhere to capture a nice sunset tonight, but Mother Nature had other plans! So I had to look to the indoors to find a subject.

I have this jar of change on the desk that I had this lofty goal of filling to the brim before we cashed it in. Sadly, it gets raided quite often and so it never has more than an inch of coins in the bottom. I decided to see what I could make of it.

I placed the jar on the floor and aimed the camera directly down into the mouth of the jar. I then proceeded to take some pictures and quickly realized that unless I had a ring light flash, I was going to get a hard shadow to one side of the jar. It was then that I decided to put the flash on my cord and I laid it on the ground next to the jar and shot through the side of it. I liked what I saw and after tweaking the exposure just a little bit I had a workable image.

Shot spex: RAW Image, Pentax K10D, ISO 100, 50mm (prime lens), f2.0, 1/90 sec., flash used as outlined above.

PhotoShop spex: In PS I decided to get rid of the office carpet by creating a duplicate layer which I proceeded to apply a radial blur to. A little eraser work to bring out the part of the image I wanted back in focus and I was done. I Smart Sharpened (as always), and slightly adjusted the Contrast.