Well, in the fall it wasn’t so tough. Everywhere you looked outside, there was plenty of color available.

Green on green on green

But in February? Color? Ha!

The white measuring spoons hanging against the white wall in my kitchen caught my eye the other night, though, so I determined that for my purposes, white could be called a color.

White is a color, right?

And when I saw this little cutting board next to the yellow knife at Target, I knew I had a winner.

And it was all yellow

Hopefully the next challenge will be just a little less challenging.

I understand why people just want to cut to the chase. I’m generally just as bad as the next person about reading manuals, since I’m always too eager to get to the job at hand instead of delving into details. But after spending time this morning gazing longingly at web sites about the camera of my desire, I decided to revisit the manual for my Canon XS to see if there might be a few more tricks that I could get it to perform.

Well, well, well. It turns out I had forgotten all about “Picture Styles”, which allow you to adjust sharpness, contrast, saturation, and color tone in-camera instead of relying on a program like Lightroom. Once I saw them discussed in the manual, I remembered that I had first come across them when trying to capture the nesting herons last spring. After that, though, I had semi-permanently set my camera to Landscape mode.

I thought it might be interesting to take multiple pictures of the same subject to see what the difference was. I created my own Picture Style and set it so that the sharpness and contrast were all the way up on the dial.

Here’s the before version, taken in standard mode:

Before (standard)

And the after version, taken in user-defined mode:

After (user-defined)

Both of these are “SOOC” (straight out of camera), except for a little cropping. I really prefer the user-defined settings, but I understand that it’s a question of taste. Last year in Jackson Hole, I remember hearing a disagreement between the pro-that-works-for-Nikon and the pro-that-works-for-Sports-Illustrated, with one saying that it was better to sharpen in-camera and the other saying it was better to sharpen with software after the fact. Right now I’m leaning towards the in-camera sharpening.

In case you’re not seeing much of a difference, here’s a close-up:

Close-up with standard setting

Close-up with user-defined setting

Like a couple that is told by the marriage counselor to start dating again, I’ve found that I’m re-discovering things that my camera had all along.

So I asked my brilliant and resourceful hubby, who suggested that I drive 45 minutes to the tiny hamlet of Triangle, NY to get a picture of the sign. That’s pretty much all there is to take photographs of out there, but it’s a pretty drive.

Triangle

Having all this free time meant that I was able to stop to take pictures of anything that looked interesting. What luxury! I took several shots that could only be interesting to me, so I won’t bore you with them here. (That’s code for: they’re now digital dust.)

As I drove along some back roads high in the hills, I was suddenly caught in a snowstorm. In the past, pre-camera, I would have thought: “I must get home before I drive off the road and kill myself!”… but instead, a little voice inside my head screamed “photo op!”.

So I pulled over and took some shots of the snowy field. (Please note: I chose to shoot the side of the road away from the wind!)

Snowy field

Driving back down out of the hills, I happened to spot an apple tree that still had several apples attached to it. In the first few shots I took, the apple came out too dark because the camera was trying to compensate for the white snow and the light gray sky… so I used the camera flash for some fill light.

The problem with this choice was that some of the water drops on the apple – from the melting snow – ended up being overexposed.

Spotty

Spotless

I didn’t even notice the problem until I cropped the picture, and then it seemed glaringly obvious. To fix the problem, I used the “spot healing brush tool” in Photoshop… the one that has a band-aid icon in the toolbar. From the application help:

The Spot Healing Brush tool quickly removes blemishes and other imperfections in your photos. The Spot Healing Brush works similarly to the Healing Brush: it paints with sampled pixels from an image or pattern and matches the texture, lighting, transparency, and shading of the sampled pixels to the pixels being healed.

The resulting shot looks like this:

They say the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. This apple didn't fall, period.

There was no snow on the ground when I got home… and that’s quite alright. I got a triangle picture… and some snow and an apple, too.

But I put together a mental list of goals, things to aim for if life moved forward as expected.

I managed to check off the first item on the list during the first week of the year: several months ago, I had heard about the idea of having some business cards on hand for those times when you’re out and about shooting, and someone asks about your photography. So I went ahead and ordered some cards through MOO… and was delighted with the product.

MOO Cards

Fast forward a month. While I was drinking my tea and playing online word games this morning, I suddenly had the impulse to take care of resolution #2: setting up an online shop. I worked feverishly through the day, creating a Zenfolio account, picking a domain name, choosing photos, and working on the site settings.

Open for business!

So now the site is ready! There’s lots more I can do with it – such as uploading a logo, writing descriptions, and so on – but it’s presentable as-is. I’m not crazy enough to think that having 17 photos for sale will generate enough income that I can quit my day job, but I feel like I’ve taken a big step forward.

Now I’m going to have to replace those lovely MOO business cards with the new web address:

bfriedmanphotography.com

(Please stop by!)

My next resolution? I’m not saying, but it should be completed by the end of the month.

But how to make the pictures interesting?

I knew I’d have to use flash… and would probably want to use the light tent. Wait! What would happen if I tried light them from the back? The remote flash trigger / receiver might come in handy too.

As the photo session took place, I felt like a pro trying to get good portraits of family members. Each flower had its own personality, and none of them behaved like the others. Some refused to behave at all.

The carnation was just too thick.

The mum seemed shocked by the idea…

Shocking!

The pink daisy was a little on the aggressive side…

In yo face!

And the purple daisy refused to let its true colors show through.

He was feeling blue, so I warmed him up.

We had fun, though, the flowers and me.

Unfortunately, I am still grappling with the concept of negative space as it applies to photography.

A long time ago, probably about 10-12 years, I heard about the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards, bought a copy, and worked my way through about half of it. Just that half was amazing, and I’ve kept the book with the intention of working through the whole thing some day. One of the topics in the book was, you guessed it, negative space – and I totally understood the concept as it was presented there: by drawing around the subject of the picture, you drew the picture. The example given was a chair with a slatted back: you draw the floor, the walls, the space between the slats, and voila – you get a chair.

I’m not getting it with the photography, though. Most of the examples that I’ve found online are blue sky with the top of a building, or a big blank wall with a little person in the bottom corner, or… . It’s just not the same, and as much as I’ve been trying to identify my style, I know that that’s not it. I spent this past week in search of something, anything, and ended up feeling as lost as when I started.

But that didn’t keep me from posting some pictures anyway. Here are the not-really-negative-space shots I came up with.

This first one was taken looking up at a skylight in the Clark Hall breezeway:

I'm calling it Partially Lit, but I was tempted to call it Half Lit

After going through most of the week without finding much, I decided to pose a shot:

Negative mum

And finally, I wandered up the 161 steps to the top of the clock tower, and took this picture looking out through the clock. To do it right, I would have had to use HDR, but unfortunately I wasn’t thinking that far in advance… so I elected this shot that’s overexposed in the middle.

Does anyone really know what time it is?

Heh.

Well – my camera (the S90) does automatic exposure bracketing in such a way that the user only pushes the shutter release once, so with the help of Photomatix Pro – for HDR – I managed to complete the assignment with 5 shutter release clicks and 7 photo files. It involved spending my lunch hour at work hiding in my office and thinking.  And thinking. And thinking some more.  I don’t love any of the resulting pictures, but I’m not too embarrassed by them, either.

So here goes.

In the leading lines category, we have a stack of notebooks (plus a box of labels):

These notebooks are actually just leading you to another shelf.

Next up, representing colors, we have a little tin container:

Here, kitty kitty! Hold my paper clips, will you please?

My electric kettle and the mug that I use for tea produced some nice shape contrast:

Nice hot tea on a yucky winter day

My original intention for this next shot was to show negative space. But that’s not it, I believe I misunderstood the concept (and I think I have it now), so instead I’ll offer this up as an example of perspective:

Candy is dandy

And finally, although I spent a lot of time composing this picture, I’ve decided that it doesn’t really incorporate any of the elements of composition. I’d throw it out, except that I do think that it is an example of one of the compositional rules: that the eye tends to be drawn to light areas first, then darker:

It was too wet to play. So we sat in the house, all that cold, cold, wet day.

The exercise of restricting the number of clicks was the aspect of the assignment that really made it worthwhile. I proved to myself that I can think my way through a project instead of using the “spray and pray” method. My hard drive thanks me.

I’m seeing that in my photography now. A year ago, when I was new to the Ithaca group, there was an assignment for finding naturally-occurring letters – i.e., not printed. For a month, I looked and looked and just didn’t see anything.

Fast forward a year: the weekly theme for “Creatively Challenged”, posted this morning, is the same: naturally occurring letters.  I went down to the marina this afternoon and found them everywhere:

The letter A (twice!) in the pier unsafe sign:

Pier unsafe

… the letter O in the wheel of this abandoned bike:

O the Snow

… and the letter T (or F, or I) in the weathervane.

Winds from the west at 10 mph

I appear to be seeing things with a new eye.

A note about the weathervane. When I loaded the pictures into my computer, I noticed some serious lens vignetting. I’m not sure the term “vignetting” was exactly new to me when I started this blog, but it’s something I never really thought about. Sometimes I’ll read a review about a lens and they talk about vignetting. What they’re actually talking about is this:

Weathervane with vignetting

See how there’s all that dark blue around the edges? The sky wasn’t really like that. Sometimes people will add vignette to their photographs for effect (think “old-timey”), but it wasn’t wanted in this case.

Luckily, Lightroom has a Lens Vignetting slider in the Lens Corrections section, so I was able to get rid of it. There’s also a place where you can add post-crop vignetting for if you want to add it in after the fact. It’s not cheating… it’s just correcting.

Last year, it it was the bi-weekly challenges in the “EOS Projects” flickr group that gave me photographic purpose through the long winter months. Alas, the owner of that group closed its shutters in November. After an extensive search, though, I found another group – “Creatively Challenged” – which I joined a few weeks ago, I think during its first week of existence.  This time around, the challenges are posted weekly.

So today, during our brief interlude of sunshine, I went outside with 3 goals in mind: 1) find a shot for this week’s Creatively Challenged assignment, “Shadows”; 2) take a picture of Sackett’s Bridge to compare to the snowy one I took last week; and 3) take pictures of people sledding in the snow that fell this morning.

I managed to accomplish two of these; the 3rd will have to wait until I actually find some sledders. (Note: goals 2 and 3 were self-inflicted.)

Goal 1: Take a picture to fit the assignment of “Shadow”.

Snow Shadow

Snowy Bridge

Goal 2: Take a picture of Sackett’s Bridge during sunny / snowy weather, to compare to last week’s snowy photo. What struck me most in comparing the two was that in last week’s, the bridge and the water are the darkest things in the picture; in this week’s, they’re the brightest. Also, now you can see the little white house beyond the bridge.

Sackett's Bridge

Goal 3: Missed this one. There were sled marks on the hill that I visited, but the sledders were gone… so here’s one that I took last year.

Airborne! February, 2011

Of note this week:
I signed up for Kent Weakly’s online composition class which began yesterday.  I have high hopes for this class – besides being very friendly, Kent seems to pay a lot of attention to his students’ work. I’ve promised him that in blogging about his class, I won’t give away any of the material that he’s worked hard to create, but I believe it’s fair game to say this: it bodes well that the first topic is a discussion of the question, “what is good composition?”.  Seems like I just asked that same question in this blog a couple weeks ago.

December was an average of 5 degrees warmer than normal in Ithaca, according to data collected by the Northeast Regional Climate Center at Cornell University, and produced only 1.3 inches of snow all month. This month has been more than 7 degrees warmer, with 6 inches fewer than normal snowfall for this point in January.

On Thursday, Ithaca experienced weather more than 10 degrees warmer than normal for Jan. 12, with season-to-date snowfall measured at 24 inches below normal.

1.3 inches of snow in December… a trace last week… it’s been almost impossible to capture any wintery scenes! So yesterday morning, when the sun rose and I saw white flakes descending from the sky, I grabbed the S90 and flew out the door (taking care to get dressed for work first.)

First stop – before work – I walked a little way around Beebe Lake to capture this shot of Sackett’s Bridge:

Sackett's Bridge

Second stop – lunchtime – I took a few pictures of the tower, but liked this tree better:

Tree in winter

After work, I caught the sunset. Here I’m cheating a little by showing you a similar shot that I took last week (yesterday’s shot is here):

Winter Sunset

And finally, I took this shot on my way to the car:

Blue and White

Although I’m not a big fan of winter, the snowy landscape provides some special photo opportunities. Now I just wish it was a little warmer and drier!