4/52

As you may have noticed...or not since no one is reading this, my last blog was a bit short. Well, I wrote a full post for last weeks photo and my computer shut off, erasing my blog. I hate starting over so I left it at that! I'll pretty much reiterate the photoshop technique I use most in this post since it was destroyed last week. It has been a month since I began this 52 weeks project and so far I'm loving it. I'm even considering doing a 365 next year. So this week I took a photo from my fantastic weekend in Denver with Meghan. We spent all day down there, eating at Pappadeaux's, hanging out at 16th street mall where we ate crepes and shopped at American Apparel, and of course went to REI not once, but twice. The photo was taken in a Lodo fine foods store. For those who don't know, Lodo stands for lower downtown and is a block or two from 16th street. If you're in Denver I'd suggest visiting this part of town, especially for the food. Well as you can see, the photo is of some raspberry preserve jars. I opened the image in PS Elements 7 where I duplicated the layer twice. From there I converted both of those layers to black and white, one lighter than the original and one darker. After that step I selected overlay from the layers palette, then adjusted the opacity to my liking. This creates sort of an HDR image that has more depth and brings out much more detail. I then flattened the image and added bars to the top and bottom by increasing the canvas size. Sometimes I adjust color curves and highlights after the HDR technique but I didn't do that for this particular image. Well, that raps up January! February will be much more interesting with new extension tubes, a 35mm Holga conversion kit and a fisheye lens for my Holga!

3/52 Self Manipulation

I took a picture of my hand.

Week 2/52

I'm playing catch up right now with this whole 52 weeks project. I started the photo part on time but didn't think about blogging it until just recently. This week was inspired right before christmas when I went to go buy some flowers for a shoot. The shoot was a set I was doing inspired by the TV series Dexter. I bought some white flowers and dropped "blood" onto it for some pretty sweet macro shots. I went in to buy the flowers and the store owner of Keefe's Flowers in Casper, Wyoming said I could come in whenever I wanted to take some photos. I jumped at the opportunity, going to the shop just a couple weeks later. They allowed me to go in the cooler and take whatever shots I wanted. I probably spent 45 minutes in the cooler trying to get as many photos as I could. I tried to pick up a lot of color and cool tones but I ended up like a black and white photo the best. I was using Robin's(girlfriend's dad) Canon xTi with a 160mm Macro lens. I also had his speedlite(unsure of the model because I'm a Nikon guy) and I used my horrible sunpak tripod. Fortunately I am in the process of getting repair parts for my awesome Slik tripod. Well this is what I came up with!
Settings:Exposure-1/20s
Aperture-f/8
ISO-400

52 Weeks

So I posted one blog and sort of left it at that. But now I'm back with my newly restored passion for photography along with a great way to stay motivated to take pictures all year round. I have recently joined flickr.com which is inspiring me every day. I find myself thinking about photography all the time. I have also figured out more about my camera, equipment, and a lot more about photoshop! Flickr has helped in so many ways so I have decided to do a 52 week project where I produce one photograph per week. I thought this would be a great time to blog about my photos including how I took the photo, and what inspired me. I think it'll be a lot of fun and I'll start with my first weeks photo. The first one was a happy accident that happened while using my girlfriend's dad's camera and his 10mm wide angle lens. My girlfriend hates getting her picture taken so of course she wasn't very happy when I pointed the camera at her this particular time. She became uncomfortable and moved, providing the perfect blur in the photo for a pretty sweet composition. In this photo you can see she is reading her favorite book series, Twilight. She is obsessed with Twilight so I thought this was a perfect moment to capture with that amazing lens. Unfortunately I cannot find this photo so I have provided a link to follow...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/45469383@N02/4255064927/in/set-72157623049714331/