Month: December 2012

The IceMan14 Cometh…

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Yesterday, the day that Cobalt and I already had to get up at 4:30 am to catch a plane to leave for the holidays, was the day when Colorado finally decided to give us some snow. Needless to say getting to the airport on time and then actually leaving the airport was a bit of an adventure. First of all, we had to walk to the bus stop with all our luggage in the snow. Then we had to ride the crazy crowded bus on the crazy slippery roads to the airport. Once there, the jetway to get to our plane was not heated so we had to bundle back up to get on the plane. We boarded the plane on time but then we had to wait for people from connecting flights to land and get on our plane. Then we had to wait for their luggage to get on the plane… I watched it all happen sleepily from my window seat at the front of the plane while Cobalt grumpily tried to sleep. By the time we FINALLY had all the passengers and their luggage aboard, we had to take the plane to get deiced. I am from California so plane deicing is not something I see very often. I thought it was crazy to watch and sneakily snapped a few photos of the plane next to us and our plane getting deiced. Craziness. The title comes from the fact that the truck that was involved in the deicing of our side of the plane was IceMan14. I think the truck on the other side was IceMan4…

It’s supposed to snow on the day we head back to Colorado too so you might get to read about more snow/ice traveling adventures sooner than later…

Anyway, Cobalt and I are officially on holiday break for a while so if my posts aren’t regular it’s probably because I am reading/eating/sleeping/doing crafts/spending time with Cobalt and family/etc. I hope you all have wonderful holidays! Stay warm and dry! :)

A Beautiful Sight

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I’ve been working a lot recently in preparation for taking time off for the holidays. Yesterday morning, I got the pleasure of watching the sun rise and hit the flatirons over Boulder just right. It was breathtaking…

Thanks Instagram for helping me capture the moment (PS – I’m doing a photo a day challenge this month on Instagram. Want to follow my pictures? It’s easy! I’m Iampotassium of course…) :)

I hope you all have lovely weekends! Anyone getting snow?

Stars!

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Today’s fun with lights post involves stars! So now basically, I turned all my out of focus light into star shapes (instead of those pointy starbursts from Tuesday’s post). This is also done by messing with the aperture on a prime (non zoom) lens. Basically, I cut out a star shape on cardstock and taped it in front of my lens. Then I used a really wide aperture (refer to this lovely picture from Wikipedia if you need to refresh your memory from Tuesday – the top is a wide aperture and the bottom is a narrow aperture) to take all these pictures. This wide aperture + the star in front means that all of the out of focus light turned into the shape of stars instead of circles.

Anyway, below are some other fun examples of stars. The top is my Christmas lights again.

So I’m not sure how many of you know that I play trombone but I do (I used to play it a lot more in high school and college… boo grad school eating up all my time)! Here is my trombone covered in stars:

Fun with tealights and mirrors, part 1:

Fun with tealights and mirrors, part 2:

Yay! Shapes! What shape should I try next? My friend Jem has done this with music notes! Super cool idea! Do you guys have any fun plans for this weekend? This is my last full week in lab before Cobalt and I escape for the holidays so I will probably be working… :p

Fun with Christmas Lights!

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I’ve decided that today’s and Thursday’s posts will be full of fun with lights! Today we focus on Christmas lights! I bought some purple Christmas lights (though they look red in these pictures…) this weekend and put them up around mine and Cobalt’s office. So immediately, the camera came out and I had to play with various settings. Today we are exploring starbursts! I briefly talked about them last week in my post about A but here’s how it works. If you have a prime lens (so it doesn’t zoom) and you set your aperture really narrow (= a small hole in the lens), any out of focus light will be the shape of the petals of the aperture (Click here for a picture of a large (top) and small (bottom) aperture from Wikipedia). So the smaller the aperture, the more starbursty the out of focus light becomes. It’s kind of fun to play with…

Anyway, here are a few more pictures of me playing with my Christmas lights…

Those of you who are my friends on Facebook have probably seen this one by now (It’s a self portrait taken with my awwwwesome remote control for my camera… TOTALLY worth the extra cash btw for those of you who are thinking of purchasing DSLRs… makes family pictures during the holidays SUPER fun/easy):

More starbursts:

Getting these Christmas lights was actually one of the highlights of my weekend. Life has been fairly ridiculous for us lately so anything that I can do to make our office/house more relaxing/comforting/etc is a huuuuge plus.

Tell me how you feel about Christmas lights! Do you like them? Hate them? How much is too much? I’ve seen a lot of people wrapping Christmas lights around just the tree trunks in their front yards this year… I’ve gotta tell you that I’m not so sure I’m a fan. It looks like a lit up post in the middle of a dark yard… :-/

Speaking of Christmas lights, here is my favorite picture I took with Instagram in downtown Denver this weekend:

Mountain Girl

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When my friend Jem was in town a few weeks ago, we went up to Chautauqua Park in Boulder with our friend A so that A could model and Jem and I could practice taking portrait shots. Chautauqua is awesome for photography because it’s snuggled up to the base of the Flatirons that look over Boulder (so it’s very picturesque) but it’s also annoying because if you don’t get there at exactly the right time of day, the sun makes taking pictures really hard (it’s too bright or it’s already hidden behind the Flatirons)! The lighting was definitely a bit frustrating when we were there but it made for a good challenge to get good pictures of A! Yay portrait practice! Can’t wait till you get a DSLR too A so that we can model for you to return the favor! :) Anyway, it was really fun and A did a great job being photogenic so I’d have to say this was a success.

I love the picture above because the rock A is standing next to mirrors the giant Flatirons behind it. I love the pictures below too… Take a look!

This one I am proud of because I just learned to make that reflection of the sun in her sunglasses into that starbursty shape. I love it. It makes the pic look super epic.

For some reason, I love the dramatic backlighting and A’s windblown hair in this picture. Plus you can see the Flatirons in the background.

This one is fun because you can see me and Jem in A’s glasses. Hi Jem! :)

What are you like in front of the camera? Are you an absolute ham like I am (sometimes it’s seriously really hard for me to decide if I want to be in front of or behind the camera…) or do you run from the camera? Is there something you really hate about yourself in pictures of you (I always feel like I’m slouching in pictures :p)? What about something you love?

By the way, don’t you love how beautiful and sunny all those pictures of A are? Yeah… it’s been ridiculously warm here… So much for December being wintery. Though I guess we are supposed to get snow this weekend…

Dropsy Turvy

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Yay! A post! And one with crazy water droplets! The pictures in today’s post comes from last weekend when my friend Jem was in town and we gave each other various photo challenges. This one was by far the hardest because it requires dropping water into a bowl full of water and capturing the droplets falling and landing in the bowl. You have to have a lot of light so you can use high shutter speeds (so the drops don’t look blurry) AND you have to take hundreds of pictures so that you can at least get a few cool pictures. So the set up is pretty much as complicated as taking the actual picture. Jem and I made an impromptu light box and pretty much filled it with all sorts of lights. I think the best way to do this type of photography is to use an external flash but Jem and I didn’t have one so we had to improvise with a couple of desk lights, an overhead light in the room, etc. Anyway, then we set up the background behind the water (in the picture above, it is the sheet music – this picture was inspired by this one taken by Patrick Latter). Then we played with a variety of camera settings (longer and shorter shutter speeds, smaller or larger ISO and F numbers, her camera vs my camera), backgrounds, and the water itself (we added blue food coloring to the water at first and then some milk). Fun times.

The picture above and the pictures below are some of my favorite pictures from my camera.

What do you think? It’s craziness! I love how the pictures (which have been adjusted only for white balance and shadows) look ridiculously 70’s… So many colors…. How are you guys? It’s getting to be holiday season so I’ve been thinking a lot about traditions. Do you have any awesome traditions that you do every year? Is it something you’ve done forever with your family or is it something you and your spouse/significant other came up with? What’s the story behind it? I want to know everything! :D