Self-Portraits and Still Life

Two things I have a new found appreciation for in the photographic world: Self-portraits and still lifes.

Anyone who’s been following my Flickr would know what I’ve started: A 365 day project. One picture of myself every day for 365 days. No two pictures can be the same, although once every other week or so I’m trying to do a regular, serious, legit portrait so I can see a real personal change in myself over the next year. I want to see how much I change- size, hair style, facial features, anything.

It’s getting hard. I finished my 26th day today, and I’m really running out of ideas. I’ve never been a photographic guy, and trying to come up with a different facial expression for 365 days is a challenge!

12-15-2009, Day 26

Something else I really want to start doing more of: Still life. Just random assortments of objects on desks, or pieces of furniture, or anything. I took one today that I put on my site, and I took a few more I’m probably going to put up soon. They’re just fun… An image to capture a second of life. That second, frozen forever. It’s awesome.

Blackberry on notebook

Christmas – Not For The Faint Of Heart.

Well, Christmas is officially here, be it to your liking or your dismay.

Personally, I vote for the latter. Christmas is far from what it originally was- a holiday full of joy and festivities to celebrate the birth of our lord and savior Jesus Christ. Everyone was to be nice and ‘jolly’, and to keep kids in line the greeting card companies created a big man in a red suit with a beard who breaks into your house at night, stealing milk and cookies and leaving you presents if you’ve been nice. A white sheet of snow would cover the ground and the air would be cold, giving you a reason to sit around the fire with your friends and family and roast chestnuts.

Well, nowadays, everyone is an asshole to everyone, the season is full of stress and anger, and courtesy of Al Gore, we don’t even have snow anymore. Department stores make outrageous sales to scrape in as much money as they can as gullible saps spend money on people they don’t care about, while at the same time suicide and crime rates are at a yearly high. Maybe you’ll spend the holiday with your family, maybe you won’t. If you choose not to, you can blame it on expensive airline tickets, a climaxing gas price, or the inability to raise the money to fix your car.

Christmas tree sales, however, have increased from 2000 to 2008, with a high between 2006 and 2007. At least one market is booming this time of year, which is ironic despite the efforts to save the environment and ‘be green’!

So, celebrate it or not, Merry Christmas. Try to find some joy in these hard times, and at least make the effort to spend it with those you love.

A Brief Insight Into The Male Perspective On Engagements

My site jumped from the normal 150ish hits per day, to about 630 in one day, then to over 2500 hits the day after that! While the numbers are dropping due to no recent updates, it’s still exciting!

I took the pictures of my fiance down the other day to watermark them, which is why they aren’t showing in the previous post. The entire set can be found here. The set was a lot of fun to shoot, and I’m more than happy to see the results.

Fiance Portrait

Yesterday was Thanksgiving. It’s always a crazy time at my house, and this year is already looking to be even crazier than past years have been.

A Brief Insight Into The Male Perspective On Engagements

FX is having a “That 70’s Show” marathon right now, and I’ve forgotten how amusing this show is. They just played the episode where Donna and Eric got engaged, and it’s made me rethink how I did my own proposal- not only that, but how cliched the whole thing is.

For starters, where does it say that there has to be a ring involved? It’s a symbol, yes, but where is it written that it has to be a ring? Why not a necklace, or… a rock? Maybe the guy should try to tattoo his name into the back of her neck, so that way not only does everyone know she’s taken, but they will know his name and can base off of that if he’s a mean motherfucker you wouldn’t want to mess with or not.

I don’t think anyone except for men who’ve been through that really understand the pressures. First off, picking out the ring. It has to be perfect. It has to be exactly what she wants- that’s a lot of pressure. Secondly, asking the parents. It’s a tradition that’s fading out of our culture, but it still shows respect for the girl and her family. When I did it, I was hoping to ask her father alone, but her mother was there as well. It was nice to see her cry, but it added that much more pressure to have her there.

Then, there’s the proposal itself. How are you going to do it? Where are you going to do it? When? What are you going to say? What if something goes wrong? I had it all planned out, and it was going to be great. I was sure she would cry- at the top of a ferris wheel at a county fair at night. Well, during the day we’d gotten food poisoning, it had rained, and when we finally made it to the fair, there was no ferris wheel. So, what now? I winged it in a parking lot at an Applebee’s (we started dating in a parking lot, and our first date was at an Applebee’s). I didn’t give the big speech I’d thought of, and she didn’t cry. But I still at least had enough to work with that it went over well; a lot better than it could’ve.

Holiday Pictures

Anyways, it’s officially the holiday season. Here’s a few random pictures to spread the feeling.

Cat eating Thanksgiving Dinner

2009-11-22, Ashland University Choir Concert

 

More portraits.

My fiance and I went for a walk back in the woods tonight, and she agreed to let me take a few pictures to test the 500D. These were all taken on an auto setting. I didn’t use a tripod, which kind of explains the slight amount of blur in some pictures.

Fiance 1

Fiance 2

Fiance 3

Fiance 4

500D Test-shots

I finally upgraded from my 350D last night. I picked up a Canon T1i (500D) last night for about $900 with a super nice bag from Best Buy. I haven’t gotten to shoot a lot with it yet, but I can’t say that I’m not happy with the results.

Stump

Chair

Cat

A Semi-Intelligent Post

I was notified last night that Volkswagen is officially the world’s largest automaker.  Obviously, being a big VW tuner/nut, I can’t say I’m not thrilled about that. Buying Porsche was a great move on their part.

However, we have to take into consideration that VW is now both VW and Porsche, which are two companies, thus their sales have been combined to beat out Toyota by over 400,000 cars sold. We also have to take into consideration that Toyota cut their sales in half last year and shut down over half of their plants in February.

These numbers may not stay the same. Toyota has reported that they can make over 10,000,000 vehicles in a year, and they expect to make seven million in 2009 as production picks back up, reported by The Guardian.

A picture of one of my VW’s to accompany this:

VW Corrado's

Inactive.

I guess I’ve been pretty inactive the last few days. I took the 35mm out for like, three shots a few nights ago.

Friday night I had two events to shoot. First was a women’s volleyball game on campus. There was notihng super spectacular about it. The second was an open mic night on campus. The music was decent, but I didn’t stay long. The lighting was poor, so the shots didn’t come out amazingly.

Since I have nothing new to post, here’s a random cityscape from last March.

Cincinnati, OH. 2009

If I come up with something good, I’ll post it later. I just wanted to put this up to make sure everyone knows I’m not dead.

Sick day.

I’m feverish, congested, and my throat is scratchy, so I’m taking a sick day today.

Sick Day

I think I’ve forgotten what the point of a sick day is. I’m sick and stayed in bed until around 11 a.m. this morning, but I’m still getting a surprising amount of things done. I went over to our Financial Aid office (which, let me tell you, is full of morons) and cleared myself to register for my classes next semester.

I’ve also just finished contacting agencies for our school’s United Way project. We’ve recently teamed up with them to put together a booklet of all of their organization’s requirements. One of my companies went fine, but the other, the Senior Citizen Center, took me over two weeks to contact. I’d go in and nobody would be there, or the phone would be busy. But now it’s done, and that weight is off my shoulders!

I’m also going to go get a haircut today (or that’s what I’m going to keep telling myself, anyways) in preparation for my court appearance in the morning. Sparknotes: Some guy thinks I cut him off, causing him to crash his truck. I got a ticket for improper lane change, then it got raised to street racing without question.

This brings me to argue that cops do, in fact, abuse their powers. I’m not saying all of them do, just a select handful. This officer barely asked me a single question and barely gave any thought to my statement, now I’m facing a license suspension and possible jail time. I met with a few attorneys yesterday and they seem confident that we can drop it, although the judge sounds like an old man who hates college students, from what I gathered.

That doesn’t seem fair. This town is a college town- a town that lives and thrives because of the local university and it’s students. We pay over $30,000 a year to attend this school, and a good part of that goes into helping the community. The town has a population of 55,000 people, of which about 4,000 are college students. But our school also employs a large number of people that also reside in Ashland. Obviously our university helps the economy in the area due to all of the paid faculty, but because most of the students at the school are from wealthier families and have more spending money.

During the summer, this place is a ghost town. There’s no festivals, fairs, or anything. It’s just a bunch of sour old people. During the school year the town is alive- The county fair even takes place in September, after the students have all returned so as to keep attendance rates higher. Even on weekends, when all of the students are gone, the town is dead.

So, should the college students be hated for keeping a dead town alive?

Random

I took this last night when I was out looking for pictures to publish in this week’s paper. Unfortunately this one didn’t get run.

Schaar College of Education

It’s one of the buildings on our campus. I used an ISO speed of 100 and a shutter speed of ten seconds on a tripod.

Crosswalk Sign

This is what we ended up running as our Editorial Picture. For some reason unknown to everyone, our crosswalk signs on campus now have popsicles.  This one also used a tripod and a 100 ISO speed, but the shutter speed was a full 30 seconds.

For both of these I used my 350D’s “Mirror Lockup” function, which moves the mirror before the shot is taken to help reduce blur. In all honestly, I can’t tell a difference between pictures taken with it and without it.

More 35mm

I got another roll of 35mm developed from the old Minolta today. I had a much higher ISO setting than the last set as most of them were taken indoors.

My fiance

Self-portrait

These two both have a strange bluish tint to them. The first one of my fiance is a bit foggy looking almost. I think both of these problems are from the fluorescent light.

DVD's

This picture was in a different building. The lights were a bit darker, but it still has the strange blue tint.

Cat

Sizing Up

The first picture is of my friends cat, Drew. It was shot last night with an ISO of 3200 and a shutter speed of 1/60, if I remember correctly. A lot of the color definition on his back was lost as a result of the higher noise levels and lack of white balance.

The second picture are two of my friends. It was shot at the same setting. There isn’t as much color definition lost, however there is still a very high noise level.

Fall in Ashland

This final picture is most likely the only one that was presentable from the set. Obviously, being taken outdoors, I was able to use a much lower ISO setting and a faster shutter speed, greatly reducing noise. The natural light also helped with the white balance.

I really enjoy using this 35mm. Once I got used to having to wind the film after every shot and not being able to review, I started having a lot of fun with it. I enjoy pushing the boundaries with it and then looking at the results, thinking about how much better the images would have been if I’d used my 350D.

Minolta vs. Canon

1. Functionality – Obviously I have way more options when setting up the 350D. I can control metering, filtering, ISO, aperture, shutter speed, white balance, mirror, exposure, and several other little things. With the Minolta all I can set is the aperture, ISO, and shutter speed.
2. Results – Since there are so many different options to counterbalance almost any obstacle with the DSLR, the results are typically a lot more defined.
3. Noise – The Minolta has a much higher ISO setting than the 350D (6400 vs. 1600), however the 350D handles noise much better at the 1600 setting than the Minolta.
4. Color – Since I have a customizable white balance on the 350D, the colors quite often come out much better than they do on the Minolta.

All in all, I’ll probably keep shooting with the Minolta in my spare time. All of my equipment came from it, so I have flashes and different lenses that I can use. It’ll be fun to see what else I can get from it!