Create Every Day

On my walk to work this morning I snapped a few photos.  By and large they were awful. :-)  But I did manage to get one decent one:

Tree Bark Texture

The original was a bit boring, so I darkened the shadows a bit to add contrast and added a warming effect.  Lastly I pushed up the saturation just a little bit to bring out the colors.  The original was also overexposed in the bottom part of the frame and didn’t have much going on, so I did a quick crop which added a lot to the composition.

As far as what I was thinking when I took the photo, I was looking for:

• Interesting texture
• Good lighting
• Some lines that suggested an interesting composition
• No clutter

I actually walked all the way around the tree looking for these elements.  As I walked I pictured a rectangular frame of varying sizes to try to previsualize what the shot would look like.  Some other elements that I had to take into account:

• The light was good strong mid-morning (not too high or low)
• I had on the 50mm f/1.8 prime lens.  I wasn’t going to be doing any extreme close-ups, but I could get reasonably close.
• I was shooting hand held, so my aperture was fairly wide (I think this ended up at f/4 or so)

So how did I fare?  Well, let’s see:

• Texture: Great.  I love how the cracks in the bark pull you in and make you want to touch the bark.
• Lighting: Nice.  The medium-low light gives good contrast and interesting shadows.  I really liked the shadowed upper half fading into the more contrasty bottom.  Adding some warming added very nice colors (if a bit better than in real life) that really pop without being over the top.  (The original colors were very gray.)
• Lines: Good, once I cropped the bottom off of the photo.  The composition has some nice leading lines that draw you through.  Having the focus of the picture in the center works well with the square crop.  Nothing feels cut off, nor are any areas “dead” without any relation to the subject.
• Clutter: Nice.  There is nothing extra in the frame, and no distracting out-of-focus areas that pull the viewer’s attention off of the overall picture.

So overall I’m pretty pleased.  I think I accomplished what I set out to do in this shot, even if it needed a bit of TLC in post.

I managed to squeek squeak [thanks, Mom :-)] off three pictures on my walk to work.  The only one I’m sort of happy with is this one:

Surprise!

The lighting is pretty good, if cool, and I liked the odd position of the fallen avocado next to a couple of what appear to be some sort of bulb plant.  The framing and composition are okay, and I don’t see much of a way I could have improved them. I’m glad that at least there is not a lot of extra clutter contending for attention, and in that respect it works pretty well.

Dore and I had quite a weekend!  On Saturday, we took a walk to the mission this weekend.  It was really nice, but I didn’t expect it to be quite as rigorous as it was.  I took my camera along with us, and managed to snap a couple of shots, but for the most part didn’t shoot too much. The lighting was pretty lame — it was the middle of the day — but despite that I managed to find a couple of shots that worked pretty well.

Santa Barbara Mission

View Down the Hill from Rocky Nook Park

On Sunday we went out for a bike ride.  We finally got Dore’s bike all put together and tuned up, so we rode all around downtown Santa Barbara.  We rode down to the beach and saw the weekly art fair, then we went out to Dargains for lunch.  It was delicious.  Afterwards we went back home and got cleaned up, then went over to Maria’s house for a scotch tasting.  I only took one single picture the whole day, but it actually came out very nicely.

Mmm... Scotch

This one works quite well as a black and white as well.

So I’m starting off the new year with a new commitment to starting and maintaining a web log.  The goal is two-fold:

1. To build and maintain an actual web presense (I’m lame like that)
2. To force myself to keep up with taking photos every day (whether or not they are good) and rigorously self-critiquing my work

So here goes nothing!

Interestingly enough, I just realized tonight that I haven’t heard anything about either HD-DVD or Blu Ray in the last couple of months.  I remember hearing so much about both technologies before they were released, yet now… nothing.

Even more than declarations that either is dead, this to me is the death toll for both technologies.  It seems that in the tech world, even bad news is good news.

I suggest that all documents, websites, etc. should be required to footnote the removed text of any ellipses dots. It just seems to me that too many times we see a quote taken totally out of context that has the familliar … in it. What was deleted? Why didn’t you think that it was valid to your argument? I’d like to be able to do inlined fact checking on such quotes. With the rigorous citing styles that we hold so dear, why aren’t such quotes held in equal regard? Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. Note where they quote “‘it would be almost impossible to make a political decision in the Justice Department. … If that happened we would read about it in the paper.'” Now, I’m no knight of the right, but I’d like to know what they cut out. Inquisitive minds want to know, and such.

Anyway, that’s my rant for tonight. Talk to your congress person and such.

Catch y’all later.

int main() {
    printf("Hello world!\n");
    return 0;
}