Hardly Harley

... gets hammered down" or so the Japanese proverb says. I'm not going to get into what the meaning of this is on society, but it was the first thing that came to mind when looking at this shot. Though technically it doesn't fit, as there are no other nails in the shot.

At first I thought this shot might be a throw away; a lot of colorful elements distracting from the subject of the photo, but with such a simple subject sometimes less is more. Played around in Silver Efex to get the right tone for the black and white conversion, and I'm pretty pleased with the shot.

This week's theme was the kitchen. Now I don't have what I think is a very photogenic kitchen; there's no hanging high quality pots, or state of the art oven, but occasionally I'm able to make use of the kitchen to make something good. These are always good, and are some of my earliest kitchen memories.

These are pillow cookies. The recipe is here: http://www.bakerella.com/pillow-cookies/

One of the first things I wanted to do when shooting after having deleted everything was to re-shoot a lot of my favorite photos. Since many of them found their way on these pages, in smaller form and in JPEG form, I was able to look at them and try to replicate the shot. I don't think there's anything wrong with this, but I found I was limiting myself. I would get so concerned with framing things the exact same, trying to set the camera up the same, that I forgot what photography is. It's take a shot of something as it was at that time. How something looks today isn't going to be the same as it looked a year ago. So yes, I could frame it basically the same but the shot would be different no matter what. Which is probably why I wasn't too happy with these shots of my local waterfall that didn't turn out like the shots from previous trips. So I decided to change it up.

Focusing on the main part of the falls I wanted to play with shutter speed. The shot on the le…

This shot is from the first batch of post apocalypse photos. The Photo Purge of 2012. I think I need a name, or some kind of different date format for photos pre and post purge. Following the loss I had little desire to shoot, or even pick up my camera, which is itself kind of odd. I caught myself wishing this had happened before I got the GF2 as I'd just let photography drop off. The timing would have been great; no photos and no working camera. I mentioned this to a friend of mine, and he of course pointed out what was probably obvious to him but I couldn't see it, I was grieving. Yeah, I knew I was mad that I'd lost five years worth of photos, but to be sad about it? Knowing myself I knew if I didn't get back to shooting I might not do it again for a long while. So, here we go. Photo One post Photo Purge of 2012.

For the most part the GF2 feature wise is a minimum step up over the old Canon. One area though that I find it lacking in is in the ease of tacking panoramic photos. The Canon has a shooting setting where after taking the first photo it would show the right edge of the previous shot photo so you could line up the next shot. This aided in making sure you didn't miss areas. The GF2 has no such setting. In a segment of cameras where the competition has a cool sweep panorama (press the shutter and slowly sweep across the scene) I find the lack of a panorama function to be annoying.

Shooting a panorama is obviously not impossible; try to frame shots with a marker on the edge to help line up the set shot. And of course USE A TRIPOD. Photoshop Elements 8, which came with my extremely useful Wacom Bamboo tablet, did an excellent job of piecing together the 5 shots. This is a shot of Trinidad Bay.

Believe it or not I'm kind of paranoid about data loss. My music is backed up in at least 2 places (physical hard drive and in GMusic). My documents see the same treatment between a physical backup and Google Docs. The same goes for movies and TV shows. The same went for photos, until I stopped using SmugMug in search of a different photo hosting site. Then Google+ and Picasa got in on unlimited photo storage and I made the decision to hang my photo hat there. Problem was I only made the decision, I didn't actually come up with a workflow to make it happen.

As you should know by now I run a Mac system. As such I make use of their excellent Time Machine back up service that takes snapshots of my system every hour of every day. For the most part everything is great. Then a couple weeks ago the hard drive I was using for my Time Machine back ups failed. Not a huge problem though since it was still under warranty. I packed it on its way expecting nothing bad would happen during it…

The theme for week 15 was Easter or fire (for those who don't celebrate it). One of the features of the GF2 (and any other larger sensor camera) that I enjoy playing with is the ability to intentionally blur parts of a photo through the use of depth of field. So for this shot I came across an Easter bunny, laying his goodies. Focus is on the head of the bunny.


You can view this, and the rest of my Project 52 photos here.

One of my favorite things to get in an HDR shot is beach grass. I'm sure there's a better name for it, or even a correct name, but I'll stick with beach grass. In photos I like the texture and look of it. The shot itself is a 5 exposure HDR, handheld. I'm really trying to get away from handheld HDR shots, but that would require bring a tripod everywhere, and sometimes bringing a tripod just isn't practical, or desirable.

The theme for week 14 was night. It would have been helpful if I had looked at the list more carefully as I had taken photos for next week's theme Easter. I only realized my mistake Sunday afternoon as I was looking at what other participants were submitting, so I only had Sunday night (photos are due Monday 8pm) to take a shot. And of course Sunday night was a rainy night. So using a Ziplock freezer bag with a whole cut out for the lens I made a quick rain bag.