365/36 All you need is love ... and twinkies

Ok, so I wanted to do something different. Love is different, right? And twinkies? Everyone loves a good twinkie. Especially those cherry red, coconut-covered twinkies. I can hear your arteries hardening right now as you read this. Remember, when the zombie apocalypse comes, the only food that'll be left and edible will be the twinkies. BILLIONS of twinkies. In warehouses and shops all over the world.

But I digress.

This weekend is our latest Austin Strobist meetup. We have a contest going right now to depict love in one of it's many facets. My wife bought the twinkies today and when I saw them, I started thinking about how they would look cut into the shape of a heart. I played with the idea most of the evening. I kept stumbling over the fact that twinkies aren't very ... heart-shaped. Even if you cut them in the right way, they still look a bit wonky.

Once I accepted the fact that I really wanted to use twinkies for this idea, I started looking for other things to go with it. Crushed chili peppers! Red and orange ones! Pepper flakes! Sadly, I didn't have those. But this got me thinking about spelling the word "love" out with herbs we have laying around the house. We've got this large shaker of paprika from a few years back. Paprika isn't a commonly used spice in our home, so the spice is well aged. My wife and I debated it for a moment and came to the conclusion that it would be clump in a non-uniform way. In other words, it would look like shit.

So, next plan.

We didn't have crushed chili flakes, but we did have chili powder. Nope ... too orange. Rosemary? Coarse, but the bag we have is full of pale and extremely dried out rosemary. It didn't look good. Next? A bag of dried lemon balm. This has a naturally darker color than the rosemary, so we used that for the "L". The "O" was dried tea leaves that had been sitting around waiting for a use. I liked the dark and uniform layering of the tea. The "V", was our heart made of twinkies. I ate the right ventricle after shooting. It was tasty. And finally, the "E" was a heavy arrangement of jasmine flowers. I wanted the light straw coloring to give the photo a bit of different texture from the other ingredients.

After arranging it all and making sure I didn't do something stupid like misspell the word "love", I started in with the lights. The 15" Lastolite Ezybox Hotshoe came to the rescue! Initially, I didn't like the shadow it was casting on the butt-side of the twinkie. The more I look at, the more it grows on me.

As of today, I'm 36 photos into this 365 session. I was talking about this with a friend this afternoon and we were discussing how difficult it is to come up with unique photos the farther along this project goes. There's only so many times I can photograph the same building, the same squirrel, the same goofie self-portrait, the same ... whatever. You get the picture. 36 days, 36 photos. I feel somewhat accomplished. I'm not entirely happy with some of the photos in the 365-set, but that's ok. This is an effort in self-improvement, not an effort in getting 365 good photos. I know that some will suck and that's ok.

For now, I'm going to clean up and leave this idea where it's at. 36 photos, 36 unique viewpoints. All done and accounted for. Here's to 329 more days. Somewhere around day 100, I know that I'm going to hit a wall on this. Hopefully I'll be able to push onwards and upwards. After all, that's what this is project is about: self-discipline and improving my photographic eye.

Fun stuff. Fun indeed.

365/35 Starbucks Sheep

A slice of pumpkin loaf and a white chocolate mocha was what I needed this day. Ordinarily, I would steer clear of such an overpriced and carbo-bomb, but ... I needed it. I had a craving for something sweet and decadent tasting. Had to take the obligatory iPhone photo to tease friend who isn't allowed coffee right now.

So.

Baaaaa. Coffee. Starbucks? A momentary lapse of culinary reason.

I do apologize!

365/34 On the porch

"What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing; it also depends on what kind of a person you are."

C.S. Lewis

I was standing on the porch tonight for a bit, listening to the rain and thinking about the idea of visualizing a scene before photographing it. I'm still reading VisionMongers and need to re-read Within the Frame to soak in some of the more salient points that I hi-lighted. Only, when I say I'm doing these things, I mean I haven't touched either book in about two weeks. Slacker. Go me!

So, tonight, after writing this, I will redouble my efforts towards refining my visualization and go back to reading those books. Then maybe I'll pick up Joe McNally's The Moment It Clicks again and page through that to find the interesting bits again.

This 365 project has been interesting visually and ideologically for me because it's forcing me to pick and choose my subjects in a way that I hadn't before. I find myself thinking more about the image that will work, even if it's but a momentary pause before making the photo. As well, it's making me play with ideas that I wouldn't have thought about before. For example, one of the things that I've toyed with recently was the attempt to capture motion in frame.

The blurring of bodies seems powerful to me, like a hummingbird's wings moving faster than one can normally see. Sometimes I don't want to capture the crisp detail of the image, but rather the unfocused reality of it.

I can see where each of these photos is making me think more specifically about the photo, the intent of it. Yes, intent. Something that's lacking for a lot of my photos. I can be super critical about it because I can tell what's crap about them. Well, at least, what I think is crap about them. For good or bad, this mood is also bleeding out to the photos of other photographers. I can't look at a photo now and appreciate it for exactly what it is. Or rather, I have a very hard time doing it now. I seem to be evaluating everything at the moment and looking for the good points, the bad points, the boring points, the outstanding exquisiteness of it, so I can incorporate, bend, mold, and change into my vision.

Frankly, there's a lot of crap out there. And like I said, I count mine in there as well. But, even though it's crap, it still makes me stop and think about it. I guess that's the point of all this. To make you stop and think. Re-evaluate, decompose, reconstruct, and stand there in front of it so you can see how it might be better.

Meanwhile, I stand out on the porch, in the rain, continuing to struggle with that idea of seeing because, frankly ... much of the time I look, I'm just blind, too focused on the wrong parts to see the right ones. Eventually, it will all pull together. Until then, I keep shooting. Even if it's raining.

365/33 In the Mist

"Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term art, I should call it "the Reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the mist."

Edgar Allan Poe

It was another frigid day in Austin. I long for the warm spring days where I can walk to work wearing the cool comfort of shorts and not worry about bundling up in gloves, woolen cap, and heavy overcoat. Today, the rain continues to come in a bad drizzle. Annoying. It should either rain cats and dogs or not at all. Drizzle is nothing but a weathered tease that makes your wipers smear and drag. So, I long for the days when I can drag my camera out without fear of getting it drenched in sprinkles and wet.

Today, the weather was dank. And overcast. And utterly drab. We've got chilling towers that run coolant for the power generation systems, amongst other things. On days like today, the dew temperature is high enough to let chillers create swirls of ground-level cloud banks. It's very wispy and voluminous. When you get close enough, you can feel the droplets of fine mist that hang upon the air.

It's very pretty when it occurs. It just covers everything in the area. You can feel the mist for blocks around. Feel it before you see it. Normally, I don't get up early enough to take photos of mist. It's always boiling off in the morning sun by the time I'm up and out the door. There's a few photos I'd like to make with the mist, but I have to get over the hurdle of waking up first.

Like the windmill that I pass everyday on my short drive to work. With it's water tower beside it, overgrown with ivy and hornets' nests.

I've been paying attention to little things like this and watching how time changes it's makeup in a photo. One of these days, I will watch as that windmill collapses and cuss at myself for not having spent the time to photograph it exactly as I want. This isn't a matter of a missed photo opportunity. I have the opportunity everyday.

What matters now, is waiting for the time to be right, the light to be right, the wildlife living in and around it to be right. And it never is. I suspect, with this one, my standards are just too high for me to ever be satisfied with the final outcome of the photo.

Looking at the chimney, this morning, I knew the moment was right when I saw the lightning rods poking out from above the man-made cloud front and all the surrounding buildings were under a complete white out. I've only seen this happen half a dozen times. A rarity, really.

So, I took the photo, took it again, took it once more, and finally, settled in on the mist-filled moment that you see above. I like it. It works.

365/32 Ball in Hand

"My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements."

Ernest Hemingway

I know. It's not a great photo. I've always loved the lighting in this pool hall for some reason. Every light down low, at eye-level. But not blinding you. It's focused and directed at the movement at hand: the balls, the cue, the felt, the chalked hand, the strike.

There's a particular photo I would love to get in this place: someone suspended above the tables while everyone ignores and continues on playing their game of billiards. But, all you would see of the players is there ghostly impression capturing the movement of their games. The one act of stillness coming from the suspension above it all.

That's my vision. That's what I see when I come into this place.

365/31 Body Paint

"Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?"

Pablo Picasso

Another day, another interesting and new photo concept for me. Spent the afternoon with the guys from Curvy Canvas to do some promotional photos for their body painting work to seed the upcoming Mardi Gras and Carnival celebrations here in Austin.

We'd been shooting email back and forth every few weeks since last September. "Hey, you know, we should shoot!" "Yeah, that's a great idea!" You know, the basic song and dance trying to get things worked out to where we both had a free afternoon to get it done. Well, that was Sunday.

Now, having said that, I have to mention that we've had another cold snap in Austin. It was in the 30's today so we ended up shooting inside the entire time. I wish it had been a bit warmer. More like the 60's. The house we were shooting at had this wonderful gazebo and hammock out in the back yard that would have worked in a most complimentary way with the first model (above) and the celtic design that was airbrushed onto her.

Sadly, it couldn't work out the way I wanted. Blue, frozen models don't work so well when you're trying to photograph them. Unless, you know, you're going for that morbid corpse look. But I digress.

After finishing up with the two models, we began packing up and someone mentioned doing a quick shot of the first laying out across the bamboo floor. An excellent idea! So, we had her lay out and a quick arrangement of the softbox and her hair and ... voilà! Instant hotness. Pushed the softbox around after a few more clicks until I got the shadow arrangement that I wanted.

This was one of my favorites from the shoot. And, if you ever need any bodypainting, you should definitely check out the Curvy Canvas folks. Excellent attitudes and artistry.

365/30 OpsCamp: The Beginning (or, what geeks do on weekends)

"Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn."

C.S. Lewis

I'm a big believer in trying to push the envelope when it comes to learning new things. This is especially true when it comes to my photography and my current career (I'm an IT geek by profession). So, whenever the opportunity to learn something new or be surrounded by people doing unique and interesting things arises, I'm all for jumping in and getting involved.

This occurred on Saturday with the running of the bulls ... ok, not really. What occurred on Saturday was OpsCamp, an extension of CloudCamp, here in Austin. I won't really get into the nuts and bolts of what occurred here; others will do a far better job than I.

Basically, OpsCamp was an intellectual get-together of systems operations folks, programmers/developers, and vendors. It was an unconference. No one knew, going in, what we'd really talk about, the direction we'd go, or the final outcome, if there even was one. I don't know that anything concrete came out of this, other than a need for further work in this area.

We certainly got to ask some difficult questions, talk about some difficult subjects, and figure out who else was out there doing the things we were doing operationally. Oh, and we got a chance to tell vendors where they needed to improve their products.

In the end, I met some good people and have forged a few more relationships in my technical network that could prove useful as I move further a long in my career.

Oh, and here's a few more photos of the event. Nothing special, just some things I found interesting that caught my eye for one reason or another.

The organizer.




The session lineup.



The Audience



The AfterCamp