it’s something…

I have been thinking a good bit about how to bend light to make it do my bidding. Part of that is playing with the shape an color of the light. Water bottles seem to make a great subject for these experiments. Here are a couple examples…

So how about another shot from my Saturday night shoot? This is one of the shots from earlier in the night. I wasn’t sure how well it worked, but after I tweaked some of the levels a bit I think I managed to get it to pop.

Oh yeah, when I went out to take these pics, I didn’t do much planning beyond grabbing my camera gear. Stuff like not wearing my new shoes, and putting on long pants. Fortunately the shoes cleaned up easily…unfortunately the mosquito bites I driving me crazy.

Last night as the sun was beginning to set I went out hoping to get some shots with the evening light. I went over to an area I have shot in several times but this time went in from a different spot. I got some decent shots but wasn’t feeling like I had something the blew me away (except the moon…that is a pretty good shot). The sun had gone all the way down so I figured I was done and headed back to the car. As I am walking up to the car I happened to look back and see this incredible silhouette of an oak tree.

I realize I have already done a very similar shot, and in fact that tree is just to right of this tree, but really…how could I not take a picture of this?

I have tried to shoot the moon before, but I am not sure that I have ever shot it as the subject before. I have always tried to include it in a shot of something else, but it doesn’t work because the moon is actually too bright, so the exposure gets all wonky. I read something online a while back about how to set up the camera to get the perfect moon shot, so tonight when I was out taking pictures and looked up and saw the moon overhead I figured I would give it a try.

And it works pretty fucking good! The downside, you need a lot of lens to fill the frame with moon. I think if I try again when it is lower on the horizon it might be a bit “bigger”.

Oh yeah I had to crop this down quite a bit to “zoom” in more.

That’s right no animals where harmed to bring you tonights picture. No eggs stolen from chickens. No milk robbed from a cows tit. No bees displaced for their honey.

So you are thinking…if it doesn’t have any good stuff in it then it must suck right? Well it does in fact not suck. It isn’t dry, and it is sweet (it does have sugar). The mind boggling part is fucking cream cheese icing with no fucking cream cheese.

If you are interested, the basic recipe came from this cookbook, but my wife hooked up the recipe to make it a spice cake.

So it’s that day. You know that day that those of us single people get it thrown in our face about how great it is to be in love and shit. Fuck that. I think I am too fucking cynical for all this lovey dovey bullshit, or something.

Anyway, here is a fucking rose for all you romantic fucks…

Oh yeah I forgot…I am not single…crap.

I wanted to test out a new lighting setup so I just grabbed something handy. We have a bunch of old cell phones sitting, and we keep saying “we really need to donate these somewhere”, but we never seem to do it. Anyway the lighting works, but I do need to tweak things a bit.

And B&W…just cause.

Couple of years ago my wife says…”I would like to have one of those African drums”. I don’t remember if that is exactly what she said, but that was the general idea. It was one of those things that she kind of said in passing and I stuck it in the back of my head to get one for her. So Christmas comes around and I find an authentic one carved by hand in Africa and stuff. So I order it.

Now here is the thing…at the time my wife was a vegetarian (she is now full on hard core vegan) so when I started looking into and found out they all had leather heads, I made the assumption that she knew this, but was cool with it cause it was Africa and shit. Well I was wrong, so it has just been sitting around since then. Recently she told me she wants to put it on eBay and needs a pic…so here is the pic.

The kids on this merry-go-round were freaking right the fuck out…good thing they were strapped onto the horses.

Last night Tommy said that today was going to be like perfect weather. So I figured on getting up early to take advantage of some of the good early morning light. I am not sure what Tom’s definition of perfect is but over cast and windy isn’t exactly perfect in my book. Maybe I am being a bit critical, because nice weather and pretty picture weather are not nessacelery the same thing.

Since the weather was shit by the standards I was using, I changed up my plans a bit, and just drove around a bit to see if I could find interesting shots that didn’t include the sky. I didn’t have very much luck, but I was able to pull out at least one interesting pic. I am not sure that it is great, but it is kind of interesting.

The other problem I had with this location was “shit” on the other side of the lake. Construction equipment, piles of dirt, half built houses, and other crap. In the upper left side of the shot there is an old shed or something that I am going to try to get a decent shot of when I have some better weather.