What. A. Boring. Day.

I took a walk to the grocery store and I was lucky enough to avoid any rain, but it was still wet and disgusting. I was trying to take photos on the way there and back. Everything was muddy, all the snow piles are super dirty, and it was just generally unpleasant walking around out there. I’m also trying way too hard to make every day’s photographs better than the last.

Quantity over quality! I have to keep that in mind. Some days I’ll have really interesting things to shoot, other days I’m taking pictures for the sake of taking pictures. Though, that being said, I’m still attempting to take interesting photos. I mean, something jumped out at me with this pile of old bricks and the plants entwined with this fence. I thought it would make a semi-interesting photograph 🙂

I loved this image today. The tree is all spiral-y!

I was chatting with a friend of mine today via Twitter, and I was showing her some of the other photos I took today. She liked this one here quite a bit! Maybe if you’re not from around here, pictures like that one in the link there are more interesting. It’s something I haven’t really considered all that much, and it really made me second guess my choice to use the spiral tree there as today’s photo!

Let me know which one you like better. Of course the one in the link hasn’t been edited at all, but I don’t think I would have done much to it if I had of chosen that one. It was so rainy and swampy today that I didn’t think that photo had enough going on that was interesting!

Today’s picture is more Photoshop than photograph! Well, technically that’s not true, but was just fun to say!

I think I’m going to make a lot of these tree pictures. I snapped a bunch of pictures of trees from the trunk upwards, then I toss them into Photoshop when I return home. I look them over and decide which ones look best, and have the highest quality (a lot of them are out of focus, or just terrible shots in general).

Today, I took the photo I liked best and used the “levels” option in Photoshop, which I’ve always been very fond of. I made the tree really dark, and the sky really bright. I then tossed a basic gradient over top and put that layer on Overlay. Then I played around with a few more settings and colors 🙂

Hey, everyone. It’s Chloe!

I was at my sisters for a spaghetti dinner tonight, and decided to take my tablet and get a few pictures for the day. She owns two dogs (and a cat) and this here is Chloe. She’s pretty small, so I made sure to get the camera down on her level. She was a whole lot easier to take a picture of than the rest of the animals there. She’s very patient, and also listens quite well.

I decided to take most of the saturation away from the image because that plastic fence on the right (to keep the animals in the yard and away from the driveway) was just so red, it was a major distraction in the photo. I wanted to keep just a touch of Chloe’s brown fur though, so I think I mostly accomplished that.

I’m going to fiddle with it on Instagram, so come take a peek! Let me know what you think 🙂

Hey there! Happy Saturday.

Now that I have these two weeks of taking photographs under my belt, I figured it would be about time to start taking some more interesting photos. Most of the pictures I’ve taken so far have been relatively boring and safe, in general. Considering that I have more than 350 days left to go, I’m going to have to start finding new things to shoot.

I liked this picture because it kind of has a lightning looking effect. If you don’t think of what is actually happening in the picture, or how it was shot, it just feels like streams of lightning moving from the “top” to the “bottom”. Where in fact that’s not what’s really going on. It’s things like that that are likely written in photography books anyways, I’m just kind of figuring this stuff out for myself.

I’ll start reading more stuff on photography when I have a camera that can actually make use of the settings they all recommend.

I found an airplane today. I’ve lived in this city for over 10 years and I didn’t know there was an airplane over there. Maybe it hasn’t always been there? I dunno. It’s not like super hidden or anything, I just don’t think I’ve ever ‘really’ looked around and tried to find interesting things. Today I found a frickin airplane!

Continue reading →