Droid photography @ Wrightsville Beach, NC

Posted on May 10, 2011 by bahgheera

Greeting fellow photographers and photography lovers. This blog is not yet dead! The photography fire is being re-kindled in me due to the fact that I actually sold a picture a few days ago. I spent most of March and April working for GE in Limerick, PA, but I am home for the summer and I intend to excersize my photography skills quite a bit during this time.

For starters, I went with a photographer friend of mine to Wrightsville Beach. It’s a great area chock full of photo ops. I took my trusty Rebel XSi on the journey, and guess what? The battery was DOA. What a bummer. I had my Motorola Droid X with me which takes pretty decent pictures with the standard camera app, and with a couple of specialized camera apps I have for it I still managed to come away with something interesting. So without further adieu, here are the results of the trip. (Click the image below for the gallery.)

Droid photography expedition – Wrightsville Beach, NC 4/2011

Poor Mans Macro 2.0

Posted on March 8, 2011 by bahgheera

I wrote a few days ago about a method of using a standard lens for macro photography. I shared only a few photos that day, but there were many shots that turned out well. I thought about going through the whole set and picking and choosing which ones to share with you, but then I decided to just upload the whole batch, all 81 images. So without further adieu, here they are.

[Show as slideshow]

And here are a few notable images that stood out to me.

Human Contrast – Jim Bryant Photography

Posted on February 20, 2011 by bahgheera

Jim Bryant, a photojournalist and master of photography, shares a blog article called Human Contrast. His images are fantastic, and one in the series stood out to me. It is a street scene, two young boys holding tennis rackets between their legs, face to face, discussing whatever it is that little boys talk about. To their right, and farther away in the picture, are two men, discussing the things men discuss, drawing a perfect parallel with the two boys. An amazing shot to be sure, and one that makes me think.

As these two men are, so will these two boys be.
As these two boys are, once were these two men.

Jim Bryant Photography – Human Contrast

Poor man’s macro

Posted on February 17, 2011 by bahgheera

Macro lenses are hard to come by if you’re on a shoestring budget. Luckily, there is a trick for us DSLR owners. Simply turn your lens around backwards. I experimented this evening with the technique, and got some surprising results while shooting a bouquet of roses that I gave to my wife on Valentines day. It took some experimenting to get just right – you must focus by moving closer to and farther from the subject, and the position of the focus ring, as well as the zoom, determines the focus distance. But once you get the hang of it, it’s fairly easy and makes for some fantastic results. The photos you see here are straight out of the camera, except for being resized.
Give it a shot, then leave a link to your result in the conmments!

Dark Sky in the Middle of the Day

Posted on February 17, 2011 by bahgheera

Today was such a nice day; the sun came out (it’s been rainy for weeks), the temperature rose (mid 70′s!), and I found myself with some time to do something creative. I haven’t had my camera out since before Christmas, so I came up with a little plan for myself. I’m going to try to take at least one picture a day. Hopefully there will be one interesting picture each day, but a picture there will be nonetheless. We’ll see how long I can stick with it. So for today’s photo, I went into the woods behind my house and started shooting in black and white. This is something I never do – I figure why not shoot in color, then convert to b&w in photoshop? But I realized I am shooting myself in the foot by trying to preserve the color – I can be more creative if I’m doing something different. Anyway, it occurred to me that the EOS 450D, when in RAW+JPG mode, captures the color in the raw anyway. Bonus!

9

Posted on February 9, 2011 by bahgheera

Here is one of my own images. I like minimalist images, especially if there is an unknown element to them. What is the number nine signifying here? Why was it printed so large? Who was intended to see this? Who put it there? All kinds of questions can be asked about this image.

Junkstock – Clifton Paint 31

Posted on February 8, 2011 by bahgheera

The word for the day is simplicity. And Junkstock captures the idea behind that word extremely well with this photo. This image, while containing almost nothing – a few flakes of paint peeling from a worn wall – manages to still present us with age, time, history, a feeling of ancientness. The simple and sparse colors and tones, as well as the gloomy, almost despondent, lighting help to back up the effect.

But there is detail here as well. Each crack represents a ray of fading sunlight, a gust of wind, an element of decay. And it is the process of decay that tells the story. It is the crumbling disrepair that is the story itself. What we see here is a life that was once happy and vibrant, now withered and disappeared. What we see here is a person, maybe a family, someone who cared about this structure enough to cover it with a color that suited their mood. And we see how time marched on and caused the decline of whatever situation caused that person or family to care about this place. And it brings the realization that we all will have to abandon our current little corner of the universe one day, and that perhaps in the future someone will come along with a camera to snap a picture of what we’ve left behind, and share our story with the world.

Chris VenHaus

Posted on January 1, 2011 by bahgheera

Hi folks, sorry I haven’t posted anything here lately – the end of the school year brought me the toughest set of exams yet, but I somehow made my way through and now I am an honest to goodness official college graduate, with an AAS degree in Nuclear Technology. So now that school is over and done with, I will have a lot of time to get back into the photography habit, more time to spend with my music blog, and more time to spend on playing my own music.

So while prowling around on photo.net tonight, I came across a photographer whose work with landscapes is phenomenal. Chris VenHaus captures so much color in his lens, so much expression, and his star / astrophotography is downright incredible. Chris shares in his gallery a diverse set of photos that span the American Midwest, from Arizona to Colorado to Michigan, etc., and always keeps an ethereal mood in mind whether the image he produces is black and white or color. For example, his image titled Tufa Sunrise conveys a mood of calm serenity at first glance, but when you focus in and start to examine the individual elements of the picture you start to realize what a startlingly alien landscape he’s happened upon. Volcanic rock formations project from the completely flat surface of the water to create an image that is simple, yet easy to stare at for periods of time and think about what this place must feel like when visiting in person. All of Chris’ photography is exactly like that, so go ahead and check out his gallery on photo.net – take my word for it, you’ll be delighted.

Chris VenHaus @ Photo.net

Lunar Eclipse 2010

Posted on December 30, 2010 by bahgheera

In December of 2010, most of North America was presented with the spectacle of a lunar eclipse. It started around 1:00 am, and lasted til around 3:30 am, so I didn’t last til the end, but I did get a few meager shots of it that turned out ok. It was extremely cold, and I spent more time bringing the kids out to look at it as it progressed than I did taking pictures (ok, ok, I’m a wuss!). At any rate, here is one of the better results that I got from that night.

Flicker of the day: SX-70 Time Zero photo manipulation

Posted on November 25, 2010 by bahgheera

The SX-70 is a fascinating little camera made by Polaroid back in the early 70′s. One of the things that makes this camera interesting is that the film it uses, Time-Zero, can be manipulated after the picture is taken using your fingers or other things like pencils or toothbrushes. Even without the manipulation, the film has a unique look to it – strangely tinted skies and color-cast subjects, with a hazy, unfocused look combine for an overall effect – dark, ethereal and morose, almost archaic. Today, there are still people using the SX-70 to create these heavily artistic images that take you back to a time when the world was a little more innocent, yet much much stranger and exotic, with shadowed mysteries around every corner and things you wonder about all around.

Here is a shot by tobysx70 on flickr that demonstrates the photo manipulation technique.

Here’s a nice shot of London done with Time Zero film.

It really is amazing to me how creative you can get when the technology in your hands is limited; would I get a shot that conveys as much emotion and feeling as the above if I was using my crystal clear Canon EOS? I wonder what would happen if I took the shot with an SX-70, with its dirty rollers and its inclination to distort and discolor the image as it develops. I have an SX-70 with one pack of Time-Zero film. That’s ten exposures. I wonder what I should shoot with them.

See the Time Zero Collective group on flickr.com for more.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/8426916@N04/5016660084/in/pool-timezero#/photos/8426916@N04/5016660084/in/pool-58144320@N00/

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Main Sequence Photography

The Photography of Brian Morris