Otherwise known as the, Thank God This Is Almost Over edition.

Hello again blog. Another 100 days have passed (and then some) and I was looking over my Project 365 pics trying to make sense of what flickr thinks is interesting and what it does not. Still doesn’t make sense to me. I was also marveling at the fact that I’ve somehow managed to take a picture every day for the last 310 days. Only 55 more to go.

While it’s fun to look back on, and I’ve learned a good bit about taking photos and maybe a teeny bit about being disciplined, it’s not been all that I hoped. Initially, it got my creative juices flowing, and gave me an excuse to get out more in search of interesting photos. But, as time has worn on, I’ve started looking on it as more of a chore. I really don’t want to look at my camera with dread. I am still determined to finish the year however. It would be a shame to have come all this way and stumble at the finish. But next year I think I’ll find another project to occupy myself with.

Three photos dropped out of the top 10 list over the last 100 days, replaced with three new ones. Leaving the list are Day’s End (112 / 365), The Globe (78 / 365), and, ironically, Will I Ever Make Explore? (75 / 365). Day’s End and The Globe are actually two of my favorites. Sad to see those two go.

C is for Coronary (218 / 365) enters the list at #5. I love this picture. You can get a sense of my sense of humor from it, along with Video Game Violence (55 / 365) and Empty Headed (251 / 365). They all make me smile.

Raw Hammer: Anger (246 / 365) at #6? Really? 41 views, 1 favorite. Just below it is Icons! (161 / 365) with 1,184 views and 2 favorites. Just another mystery of flickr’s interestingness rating. It’s a bowling ball people!

Lastly, Stones River (195 / 365) enters the list at #10. Actually this one was supposed to be used in a hotel guest guide for Rutherford County along with an article about the Murfreesboro greenway. I’m not sure what happened with that, if anything, but it is a pretty good shot and it’s nice to see it getting a little recognition.

Wow, look how long it’s been since I’ve written anything here! My blog gets pretty neglected what with Facebook and Twitter. Usually I don’t have, or am too lazy, to compose any thoughts longer than a few sentences and those two services provide an adequate outlet for my micro thoughts. If it seems lonely over here, well you know where to find me.

This is supposed to be about my Project 365 though. But it’s kind of related. I set out on this project, taking one picture a day, every day for an entire year, and it was supposed to help my with several things. Learning about photography, taking up something and sticking with it, partitioning my time, getting out more, etc. And it has helped in some of these areas. We’re 204 days into the year and I’m still taking pictures.

On the other hand there have been some negatives as well. I’m starting to look at my camera with dread and count the days until the end of the year. This doesn’t seem like a good thing. And you can see, as you go through all of these pictures, that I’m just not putting the effort into it that I did initially. Of my top 10 most interesting pictures (according to flickr), 5 of them were taken during the first 2 months of the project. Only two were taken during the last 100 days and of those, one just happened to get linked to a very popular blog.

Part of the problem is that this project has worked a little too well in some ways. For example, I’ve started exercising and trying to watch my weight. So now I weigh myself daily, and go to the gym as often as I can. What’s happened is that now it’s usually very late before I have a chance to think about a photo and not only is there a time constraint, but also an environmental one. Limiting myself to a picture between 10PM and midnight doesn’t afford quite as many photo opportunities as you’d think.

So, I need to work this out somehow and try and raise the quality of my photography again somehow.

In the meantime, the list hasn’t really changed much since last time. Sylvan Stream, Night Settles on LP Field, and Fillin’ Station are gone from the list. New on the list are:

• Icons is a picture I took out at WWDC this year. It’s really of my icon for Lucky 7 Slots, and isn’t amazing or anything. What happened was it got linked to a Skype blog post and has gotten lots and lot of exposure and has zoomed all the way to #5 and is still getting lots of views each day. Thanks Skype!
• No Way Out is a pretty old picture actually and the only Photoshop composition in my Project 365 set. I really had fun making this and wish I had more time to devote to stuff like this. I’m not sure why the sudden burst of interestingness, but it’s jumped up to #6
• Day’s End is one that I’m really happy with. It squeaks in at #10. I went out to Hurricane Creek Recreation Facility on Percy Priest lake a few months back and took some pictures around sunset. And really liked the way it turned out. This one was even linked to by Nashvillest for their photo of the day. Thanks Nashvillest!

That’s about it for my photography update. Until next time then. Perhaps I won’t wait 3 months for the next update. Or maybe I will.

I’m jumping the gun a bit since I’ve not posted or taken my 100th Project 365 picture. That will happen sometime today. But I was curious to look at my progress, so there.

Having gotten used to Aperture and its features, I coughed up the dough to Apple so I can continue using it. I still haven’t really spent time getting to know all of its features, but I can find my way around well enough to crop, straighten, adjust exposure, levels, etc. The less I do to a pic the happier I am, but occasionally I spend a bit more time trying to get a photo just right.

Looking over my 99 pics, one thing that makes me particularly happy is that I try not to focus on a particular theme. While I do tend to take a whole lot of pics around the house because I still have a hard time making time for my hobby, there is still a good bit of variety. Mostly still life around the house, but several of flowers and naturey bits thrown in, as well as sports, architecture, and even a portrait or two. This is a good thing I think.

Taking a look at my Top 10

1. Evolution is still #1 and my only Explored pic. I still don’t get what’s so special about it.
2. Moonlight makes a well deserved move from #3 to #2. It’s still one of my favorites despite a smattering of hot pixels (not newly discovered red stars).
3. Video Game Violence moves from #4 to #3. I really had a lot of fun making this one. And so did my son. He regularly presents ideas for my picture of the day that include assorted toys meeting an untimely demise. Perhaps I should worry. I need more stuff like this. Not necessarily blood and violence, but like this and No Way Out (43 / 365) that require a little thought and creativity.
4. No Photos Allowed falls from #2 to #4. I took this for the perspective, but its popularity is also party attributed to the security guard, standing to the left in this photo, who came and told me that photography wasn’t allowed in the mall. The admin for the Photography is not a crime group stumbled across this pic and invited me to add it to the group whereupon it received many views. It actually has more views than any of my other Project 365 pics.
5. Assimilation jumped from #8 to #5. Still shocked that I was able to capture this on the first try without any sort of assistance.
6. The Globe is one of my favorite little bits of serendipity since I started this project. I knew I wanted to take a picture of this glass globe but wasn’t quite sure how to pose it. I laid it on a magazine and found the words were magnified nicely. Even better when I found words like “depression”, “uncertain”, “the globe” and “I don’t know” and managed to magnify them within the globe.
7. Will I Ever Make Explore? is another new one and a bit of a joke. Flickr’s Explore contains some fantastic photography. And while I don’t expect to see my pics on there everyday, I’ll admit I have uploaded more than one image thinking this might be the one. Sadly, Scout remains silent.
8. Sylvan Stream. Speaking of stuff I thought had a shot at Explore. In any case I enjoyed my little drive out to Burgess Falls where this photo was taken.
9. Night Settles on LP Field drops from #6 to #9 which is just as well since it is a painful reminder of the Titans loss to the Ravens in the playoffs.
10. Fillin’ Station drops from #7 to #10. While I like it, it also demonstrates the quirkiness of flickr’s interestingness calculations. Within moments of posting it, it had 1 view and 1 favorite and was therefore, somehow, immediately among my most interesting pics. Right now it has 46 views and 1 favorite and is my 24th most interesting pic overall. While Uppercut (59 / 365) taken the day before has 86 views and 1 favorite, but is my 30th most interesting. Strange.

That’s it for this time around. I am having a harder and harder time trying to find things to point my camera at, but so far so good. Just two hundred and sixty-five more to go. Thanks again to everyone for your encouragement and feedback.

I’ve managed (somehow) to keep taking a picture a day, every day this year. Just 303 more days to go. Sigh. Anyway, I think I’m getting a little better. And I’ve made the switch from JPEG to RAW. Although using RAW means that I spend a little extra time fiddling with my photos before uploading them to flickr. I made almost no adjustments to my first 40 images and now, at a minimum, I crop, straighten, and check the white balance. And sometimes quite a bit more. Those that require almost no adjustment in Aperture make me happiest, so hopefully Aperture won’t make me lazy.

I’ve also started adding a small watermark to the bottom right of each image. Aperture makes this stupid easy. I don’t mind people using my images, but I would like credit. This hasn’t been a problem with my flickr images, but I noticed that someone took a bunch of scans that I posted on my genealogy site and uploaded them to Ancestry without acknowledging the source. Not sure what I’m going to do about that, if anything. But it is aggravating and thus the watermark from this point forward.

Anyway, I was going through my most “interesting” (as determined by flickr) pictures to see if the newer images were more likely to be more interesting than the older ones. In other words: Am I taking better pictures? My top ten most interesting Project 365 pictures are displayed to the right. I have two pictures from the first 30 days among my top ten and eight from the last 30. That’s encouraging. Also six of the top ten were processed in Aperture. So, even more incentive to continue using Aperture after the trial expires.

I’m not sure this has been interesting to anyone but me, but I wanted to make note of my progress regularly so I can see how my photography evolves (or devolves) over the course of the year.

Oh! And before I forget, thank you so much to everyone who views, comments, or favorites my pictures. I really appreciate the encouragement.

No Way Out

Once again last night I was struggling to come up with a subject for my Project 365 photo. I’d been thinking for some time about an taking a picture of me looking through a window with my hands against the glass or cupped around my face, cropping it, and using it as a desktop picture and then taking a picture of what would hopefully appear to be me peering through my computer screen. I was thinking of this again last night on the way home from bowling. Then I thought, what if the edges of the screen were bars that I was holding onto and the portion of my hands in front of “the bars” appeared on the outside of the computer? That might be cool. Especially if it were subtle enough that it caused a double take.

Image 1

When I got home I figured I’d give it a try. The first step would be taking a picture that I could use as the desktop picture on my computer. I needed to create a frame to serve as a guide for the edges of the computer screen. And it might be helpful if these edges could be chroma keyed so it was easily selected later. I took some bits of green construction paper, overlaid it on top of my screen and marked the edges that defined the screen and its frame. Then, since that was going to be all floppy, I glued some bits of wood around the edges and cut out a hole for the “screen”. Once that was done, I setup the camera and took a few pictures of me peering out of the “frame”. I could’ve used an assistant here to tell me when I was holding the thing straight and completely in the photo. Oh and I had to make sure my arms were tucked in so they would appear to originate from behind the computer. Very tedious.

Image 2

Once I (finally) got a half way decent photo, and by halfway decent I’m talking mainly about alignment and perspective, because it wasn’t very sharp. Anyway, once I had that, I transferred it to my MacBook, tweaked it very slightly, corrected for perspective, cropped it, and set it as my desktop picture. Then I brought the computer over to the wall where the original picture was taken and propped it up on a stool which wasn’t tall enough. So I placed the stool on a chair. And then the light switch was in the way, but by this time it was close to 11 o’clock so I said screw it. The color of the wall and the desktop picture background seemed to match pretty closely, but the camera didn’t think so. I guess the backlighting from the LCD perhaps? After fiddling with it for a bit, I gave up and decided that maybe this change in color would make an interesting transition from the computery bits to “real life”.

Next, I took the original image and superimposed it on the photo of the laptop using the edges of my green frame to guide placement. Once that was done, I copied the portion of my hands that were in front of and beyond the edges of the screen and got rid of the rest. After that, I added a bit of shadow and I was pretty much done. It could’ve been better, but I’m not at all unhappy with the way it turned out.

35 days in and I’m still going strong with the whole Project 365 thing, despite my wife’s initial skepticism. There were several reasons for starting this little project. First, to try and learn a bit more about taking photos. While I don’t know that I’m any better a recognizing what makes one composition better than another, or how to effectively use light, I do think that I understand the technical details a bit better, and I’ve really gotten to know my camera much better. The other goals were trying to have the discipline to see this through and apply it to other “projects”, and learning to make time, even if it’s just a little, for all the things I should be doing rather than focusing on one hobby or interest to the exclusion of everything else. So far so good on that front. I’m still taking pictures, and I’m also making more time for my kids, and I’ve geocached a bit, and put some time into my blog here, and my genealogy, and well, quite a variety of things, and it’s been really good. But, the more time I spend doing this, the more things I’ve discovered that I don’t understand and maybe there are some things the more experienced photographers among you could help me clear up.

Black and White

I’ve started following people more closely on flickr and one thing I don’t get are black and white photos. That’s not to say that the black and white photos I’ve seen are bad, in fact some are quite good, but I have no idea if they might have been better in color. So what are the rules to determine when an image might be better in black and white? I’m a programmer, so I’d very much like a definition that says: if A and B or C then you might want to convert the image to black and white. And what is a black and white image supposed to convey that a color version would not? I’d love to understand, but personally I really like color and, if anything, would like for my photos to be more deeply saturated, not less.

Night Settles on LP Field

RAW versus JPG

I’ve looked at a couple of articles discussing the pros and cons of RAW versus JPG and apart from RAW offering a wider range of post processing opportunities, I really don’t see much advantage over JPG. At the highest quality level I’m not really seeing any compression artifacts using JPG and I also don’t have to worry whether other people have the necessary tools to view a JPG image. And of course there is a minor file size consideration. So, are there other reasons I should be using RAW? To me, post processing isn’t yet a valid reason, because the way I figure it, if I have to do more than slight cropping or rotating, then I failed to do something correctly when I was taking the picture and need to learn what I did wrong instead of having this crutch to fall back on. Once I feel confident in my abilities, maybe I’ll rethink my opinion of RAW, not so I’ll be able to fix mistakes, but perhaps to give myself more creative opportunities later on.

Tiny Pics / EXIF

A little annoyance here. For some reason, there are lots of people that use flickr, but will not post anything larger than a little preview of their photos. I don’t understand. Perhaps they don’t want people stealing their work? But why bother to use flickr at all if that’s the case? There have been many times I’ve seen what looks like it may be pretty good, but there’s not a lot of detail that can be made out at 500 x 333, or whatever. To all you that allow larger views of your photos, thank you so much. I really enjoy studying the details of some of these great images. Likewise to all the people that leave the EXIF data on their photos. As someone trying to learn, I really appreciate being able to see exposure, aperture, ISO, etc., etc.

No Photos Allowed

White Balance

Drives me crazy. And maybe for this reason I should make the switch to RAW. But it’s not just that. Maybe I need to re-read the instruction manual for my D40, but even when I’ve tried to preset the color balance with a white piece of paper, it doesn’t seem to turn out right. This is isn’t a really huge problem since most of the time leaving the color balance set to AUTO works just fine. And those times that it doesn’t, giving it a clue if I’m in the sun, shadow, under incancesdents, etc., will solve the problem. But every now and again the camera insists I’m on Mars or something.

That’s all I can think of at the moment. Thank you everyone that has viewed my photos and especially those that have left compliments. I really appreciate it. Here’s hoping I’ll eventually take something worthy of Explore.