photography – Page 11

May 20, 2013

Copper – Photo 52 Project [Week 20]

Springfield really does have some great places to visit. One of these places being the Dana-Thomas House designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for a spoiled socialite. The estate is gorgeous, modern, dark, and outdated all at the same time. The beauty of the house is timeless but it still comes with all of the pains of its time.

The most apparently beautiful feature of the house is the custom stained glass. Unfortunately, no photography is allowed inside. We could take all the pictures we wanted outside and that is what I did. The custom copper gutters have a century worth of green patina and they are fantastic.

May 13, 2013

Fire – Photo 52 Project [Week 19]

This was another desperation shot. I realized at 10:30pm tonight that I had not gotten my picture this week and so began my looking around the house for something interesting to photograph. I have been keeping this Zippo lighter in my pocket for a while now and decided to give it a go. I slapped on the 50mm prime, set the shutter to 1/250, the aperture to 1.8, and fired an external flash in low light. The hardest part was getting the timing right. I was holding the camera and had to delay the lighting until just after I fired the shot. I missed the spark of the flint quite a lot.

Then, it was off to Lightroom to develop it into something the popped out. I edit all of the pictures for this project. I shoot in RAW mode so I can get a little better white balance adjustments.

See the above example of how the camera’s white balance was not very true or appealing? I also manually changed a number of other settings to give it the feel I wanted and there we have it. This is an art project, not photojournalism. I feel retouching things is just a natural extension of the process.

May 9, 2013

Turtles – Photo 52 Project [Week 18]

I finally opened a box of my old toys from when I was little. They were sealed in a very large Bekins moving box that had remained sealed until this week. I was not really sure what to expect from the UN-boxing. I find it amazing how your brain stores information. I could only name a handful of toys before I opened that old box but as soon as I did, they were all familiar and I instantly remembered playing with them in the basement of my Carlyle home.

For some reason though, I was expecting a bunch of toys in near new condition like they were when I was so excited to start playing with them as a kid. They were dull, marked, and had a lot of little parts missing. Then I realized that I actually played with them and that fact was quickly visible.

This picture was taken in my homemade light box. They could barely stand up by themselves so it was a challenge to not knock them over while positioning the rest.