Monday, June 22, 2009

Road to know (where?)

Road to know (where?)

I would give you a decent prize (post card of one of my pictures) as a prize for being able to figure out what road it is, but i don't feel like it. In the future I may do that....I DO have a postcard that i purchased with the leftover balance from a debit card that i used to purchase another year of flickr with (stupid expiration date; could have gotten two years if I knew about it).

But really, if you do a little research this road shouldn't be hard to name.

Well...let's see...

A) leaving for a summer photography camp on sunday! It's a 4 week program (yuck, school in the summer?...) but it will be nice. I'll bring the laptop around, but I'm not sure what my flickr activity will be like while I am there. I may be active on other peoples streams (commenting and what not) but i am unsure how many photos i will be uploading to my account. I will be living on campus so I wont be near my usual backyard suspects or really anything I know well. Well, let's see how that all goes.

B) S.F giants= team's looking good, horrible loss to the A's today however.

C) I'm happy my crab picture I uploaded a few days ago was popular (got to like 224 on explore which isn't a good measure of "goodness" but it is a good measure of how popular the photo was.) Well, maybe one of these days I can get a really "popular" photo taken.

D) hint on picture location= think Maui.

Oh and the post card...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ascirc/3190138846/

That's the photo it is of. I will do a 'studio' shoot of it one of these days when I have good lighting and a bored state of mind. It's a five dollar post card (ok, GREETING card as the website said) and it's printed on EXTREMELY fancy paper. Only downside is the ':(' on the back, which looks like a frowny face (it is) but it was just the title of the picture.

But like i said before, I may give it away as a prize....It came with an envelope and i'll probably just buy a stamp and then send it to someone as a prize for some contest....i'm really not sure what for.

Next photo project= edit my waterfall pics!

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

My photo terms

While it's on my head...i'll make a list of photo terms that I use myself and that i've created.

  • "Reverse Digital Zoom"= interpolarization (In my mind it's reversed because you get the same effect as digital zoom without zooming. Your head is hurting now.) It's also been called " Inter-modual-sensitivy-polarity-polation" before.
  • "HCR"= High Color Range. In RAW, two photos are edited with different white balance settings, then they are mixed like a selective hdr would (like in the case of a fake ND graduated filter)
  • "Qual-check"= I don't use this term much, but it's basically a folder on the computer that I store images that have been deemed "ok but need editing".
  • "j-pegage", "jpegage", or "jpegging" (as in, to jpeg a picture). J-peggage is the negatve and obvious downsides you see in photos that are saved in J-peg file formats, and are usually compressed to the point where you see little dots where dots should not be. Try zooming in (you can do this on fire fox or internet explorer) on a small photo on google images. Soon that picture of a sleeping cat looks like...say, what is that? I usually use it to describe a photo i intentially "j-pegged" for security reasons, or I'll just use it because it sounds cool. It can also be used to describe non-RAW noise reduction.
  • "keep or kill" (not used often) Keep or kill is a game i play to determine what photos go in portfolio. You go through it and either say keep or kill (or maybe) with a post it note. "keeper" also works for naming photos.
  • "Campagins"- used in the same way as an army battle would be. I usually use it to reference a vacation, and in particular summer vacations. On flickr photo descriptions (future blogs?...) i will usually reminence on past summer vacations and my photos as if there were past battles fought in a war. Even if i don't specifically call it a campaign, it's usally told with the point of view of something of that significance.
  • "CPOS" I hardly say it that way, because it's an offensive comment. I'll say it to my own photos some times, but CPOS is just short for "centered piece of ****".
  • "Questionable editing"- usually what i say when I edit something beyond what looks natural or what could appear natural.
  • "Disney land color"- usually not said in that phrase, but it can be used in that context. It's basically the same as saying a "crayon explosion" or something like that...basically describes super saturated photos.
  • "(number) deadly sin" (must go beyond 7). Whenever I say something is a deadly sin and it is above the number 7, i usually am referencing something that is cliche or kitsh in the photography world. Like...oh, this photo has commited the 54th deadly sin= shooting wide open and isolating a blade of dead grass and making it slightly desaturated. And yes, this is more towards the insulting side.
  • "Macro curse"= it basically means you get addicted to macro for an entire trip out, or for a period of time. You find that nothing outside of your macro focus is deemed ok. It just one of those phases.
  • "Sunset Rule"= this is my own rule for photography. It states that when photographing a sunset, you can't simply take a picture of it. The sunset is a background, not a foreground (unless you know what your doing.) At most, it is an extremely glorified background, and should be though of as such. Too many stale sunset go around- while amazing, they need substance. That's where the other object/subject comes into play.

Monday, June 8, 2009

Yeah.

Yeah.

32MB of PURE AWESOMENESS.

Ok, so you may be wondering about this picture. It's not 32MB of write speed it's...well..32MB's of storage. Here's the deal= I started out with a 2GB card...works fine. Great, even. With RAW I get around 200 photos, with large J-peg I get around 500. With the 4 gb...well, it's 2x so you can do the math. I bought the extra card (the 4gb) because I wanted to make sure that I always had room to shoot just in case something happened like I lost a card (I'm usually good about the number of pics I take...If I'm outside I never fill the memory card).

This weekend posed a problem (last weekend that is..) I was going to spend the weekend doing this= spend time with Dad, and take pictures. I spent the later half of saturday scouting the ocean and beach for a good area to do sunset photography. I finally found a place around 7:30, and had to run home to eat dinner and get my camera ready (sunset was to be around 8:30). My dad said he would drive me over...but...when i got my camera ready I realized I didn't have my memory cards! I had left them somewhere else (friend's house) and didn't have time to get them. So I told my dad there was no need to rush out and catch the sunset, as he tried to find some solution to my problem.

Then it hit me. My dad, a few months back, had brought an old, old, old digital camera from work that was no longer in use. Inside was a state of the art 32mb compact flash card (from the 90's or something), so i hijacked the card and went outside to catch the last bit of sunset colors. With RAW I could only get 2 shots off, and with j-peg I could get around 12.

Well, this 32mb card has a little piece of real estate in my heart now...i'll probably keep it somehwere in my bag and KEEP IT THERE jusssstt in case.

p.s= the write speed on these things is slooowww.

Sunday, May 3, 2009

AP TESTS

gnnnn....

do not want to take those things.

But after that, the year finally takes a downhill..uh..path. It'll be easier. :)

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

First step

Guitar


I think I should have changed the f/stop a tad/ It was a "in the moment" picture though. Well, ok, I admit that only applies to moving or changing objects, not static ones.

Well anyways, I kind of like the editing on this/kinda dont. It basically has this slight red overcast to it, that's suppose to make it feel vintage and all. I'm not a huge fan of this style, but I do realize that now that I am not shooting as many living things, I can't really go "all natural" if you know what I mean.

Also, I admit the framing is kind of poor, but I will work on it.

As far as the picture goes, I'm trying to learn how to play it. I don't see myself really doing anything with it (bands or stuff like that) but it is really just something I can use when I don't feel like taking pictures, or stuff like that.

There are going to be lots of other cool shots coming, I can feel it.

-KD