Category: Artifacts

A couple months ago we got some crayons for the baby.

It didn’t take long for her to use it on more than just paper. When the paper hit the floor and the crayons did too.

I tried some close up photos, most of which were kind of meh, but I really really like this photo. Its just a nice simple composition.

OTP 158 had an assignment abstraction. Its been hanging over my head for the past couple months as I’ve been taking different abstracts as I pass through the world, but I finally decided to go ahead and upload them. I might keep doing it…or maybe not…but it was time I shipped.

This is what I uploaded to the OTP group. The swatches came out really well and was just a strong graphical item.

However I did a whole bunch of other photos I want to upload so here you go:

Window Blinds really create some nice effects.

Like the shadows, I found that some of the photos were much more interesting with just a little insertion of people into the picture. Of course my dughter always wins for me, but so do strangers.

While at Jack in the Box, I also came across a really interesting situation at the dining counter. I tried several views but I am quite partial to this one with a perspective…but cut dead horizontal.

Close ups of the glass espresso cup at the coffee shop up the street also worked nicely.

And while looking at closeups, here is one of something that is so familiar that I can barely think of something more banal…my car seat cover.

Interesting assignment all in all…but I’m happy its out the door now.

I find that the context often tells a more interesting story than the nominal subject.

This week’s OTP assignment was stack. Given our girl’s recent development, I thought it would be a slam dunk since she now does actually stack stuff instead of running around and knocking things over. By was I wrong. Given the indoor light, I was running the shutter slow and just had a bad run of manual focusing last night. But in the end I was able to get two decent images, but only by going black and white and totally cranking on the contrast.

This second photo was also heavily cropped. Playing with these images brought back memories of my first architecture studio, ED11a with Joe Slusky and Chip Sullivan. It wasn’t really even an architecture studio but a drawing and visual studies class and we started with a lot of abstract studies which these photos start veering towards when you push and pull on them so hard in the computer.

It seems that a lot of these podcasts are playing with assignments. For June TWiP family had “water” as their assignment and more specifically playing with different shitter speeds. We don’t do much with water around here, the baby is a bit young and the summer a bit hot for water parks, and it didn’t seem right to hit up bath photos. But I did get a couple shots of her while grandpa was watering the plants.

This week’s On Taking Picture’s assignment was #change. This was such an open ended word, I ended up going with the erased chalk board because I liked its almost abstract composition.

However a close second for the assignment was just down the block on the door of a furniture store that is slowly being remodeled.

Its been brutally hot out here.

When the OTP guys first assigned “favorite movie” I was at a complete loss, partly because I was thinking about Spirited Away which is my favorite movie. But on Thursday night I had sudden flash of inspiration. Partly because one of the hosts dislikes the movie, but also because I really love Bladerunner. And somehow the connection between that movie, video culture, the ipad, and a baby playing with it all kind of made “sense” to me.

Due to the low light, I had to push my camera to ISO 3200 which was really, really noisy, so I ended up going black and white. I liked the up close and amorphous nature of the baby’s body in the dark, so I selected this photo.