Last week, I went to see a bunch of my friends graduate with degrees in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology! Two of them got bachelors degrees and two of them got PhDs! This is a picture of my friend Chris, who is now a Doctor of Philosophy. Yes… He is now Dr. Chris! Anyway, I brought my Nikon D80 and 18-70 mm lens to the ceremony and worked on my people photography skills. In general, I have really been trying to work on my photo composition skills so the graduation ceremony was good practice for that too!
While shooting the graduation, I realized I get lazy with my autofocus setting on the D80. Sometimes, I try to rearrange my shot so that I don’t have to change the focus point on the lens instead of changing the focus point to match my shot. That seems a little silly when you think about it! I wonder if I should make myself go back to manually focusing all my pictures in order to get myself in the habit of composing a shot and not worrying about whether I can get my subject exactly in the middle of that “focus here” dot… :-/
Author: iampotassium
Fluffered
For today’s picture, we have this lovely cute puffball of a bird chillin’ on this bike basket. I love that I caught him in mid wing fluff. So cute! :D
Black and White: Revenge of the Spider Beast
Don’t worry, no Cobalts were actually harmed during the making of this picture. For today’s lovely black and white photograph, Cobalt told me that I should take a picture of him being attacked by his giant foam rubber tarantula, Rocky. I think that is pretty much the whole story for this picture because as you can see, Rocky is doing a pretty good job attacking. And Cobalt is doing a pretty good job of being attacked! It was fun to take this picture because I had to decide who I should focus on? Rocky? or Cobalt?
Feeding the hungry
For today’s picture, I bring you this gem that Cobalt and I took this last weekend. We have been excited about working on our photography techniques and composition by emulating other photographs/film screen shots that inspire us. Today’s picture comes from heyitsclay13’s “A Pigeon of a Moment” photo on DeviantArt.com. Cobalt found this awesome picture and I thought it would be fun for us to recreate it using our favorite “creatures,” sharks and skulls… and one strange bright orange fish monster. It was a lot to fun to have the picture in my head and try to get the composition juuuuuuuuuust right. That’s pretty much the story here. Btw, you should definitely tell heyitsclay13 that his picture is awesome because, well, it is.
Portrait: Duplicity
Ahhhhhh fun with mirrors to start out our week today! Cobalt and I had a bit of fun playing around with our (D)SLRs yesterday. This picture came out of playing with the mirrors in his bathroom. Of course mirrors are awkward to photograph because if you use a flash, you get that crazy bright speckle all over the subject. So you have to take pictures with really low f numbers to try to allow as much light in as possible. Remember that the consequence of low f numbers is that you have a smaller depth of field. So check it out. My eyelashes are in focus here and the rest of me is in various shades of blur. Kinda neat, huh? I also like that my reflection looks sly but my actual eyes look a little shy… Ooooo…
Btw, today is my sister’s birthday!!!! Craziness, wee! I hope you have a wonderful day… :D
Cell Phone Picture: Rodrigo y Gabriela Concert!
This week I went to see the band Rodrigo y Gabriela in concert! It was amazing! We were jumping up and down and dancing by the end. I already loved their music but the concert took my love to a whole new level. For example, they played my favorite song, 11:11, and all of their energy made the live version of the song incredible. They were super awesome and fun with their amazing Mexican/Irish accents and their funny stories. I love their love of metal music mixed with traditional fun acoustic guitar music. It makes for an amazing and fun sound! Plus it was just so fascinating to watch them play (Gabriela’s fingers were moving so quickly over the strings!). Definitely an awesome experience. If you have never heard of Rodrigo y Gabriela, I highly recommend their music.
Just a reminder…
Potassium LOVES sharks… and these sharks are adorable! They look like best friends! :D I love that the one on the right looks like he’s saying “HAI friend!” to his friend. Happy. I could be really obnoxious here and tell you to go say hi to all your friends… and I think I will. So go do it. Friends need appreciating. I’ll start. Thank you friends for being my friends! :)
Anyway, I obviously did not take this picture. My friend Paul sent it to me! Thanks Paul for remembering my shark love! I hope you are all enjoying your Thursdays. :)
Black and White: Whoa… wide angle
For today’s picture(s), Cobalt and I played around with strange wide angle shots. We were inspired by the neat wide angle shots from the movie The King’s Speech. If you haven’t seen it, you should check it out (it won like 4 freakin’ Oscars!). If you have seen it but you never even noticed the crazy shots in that movie, you should watch it again. Some great examples are when Colin Firth is on the couch in Geoffrey Rush’s office during their first meeting…
Anyway, I actually like Cobalt’s version of the wide angle shot better than mine (and kind of copied him with that shot up there). So to be fair, here is his shot. Thoughts?
We’re chained…
Title comes from the Pixies song “Hey.”
Depending on how well you actually know me, you may or may not know that Cobalt and I got engaged last week! It came as a pleasant surprise (though we were planning on getting engaged this year so I was not completely surprised) during a pretty crazy busy time so it has taken a while for the news to get to you! So yeah! Woo.
This picture actually comes from way before the engagement happened; it is from our trip to Pagosa Springs. When we went to the hot springs, we decided to pay the extra $5 to have access to the quiet adult-only pools overlooking the rest of the pools. It turned out to be an amazing idea as, once we got there, each one of us found a favorite pool to lounge in for a good while. In order to get up to these special pools, we got VIP wristbands. In the evening, before clawing off said wristbands, we decided to try to take a picture of our wrists and wristbands in a manner that would make it look like we are chained together. It was actually pretty hard to have our two hands holding each other and then use our two other hands to try to blindly take the picture with the DSLR but I think it turned out pretty neat.
Portrait: Egg Dog!
Annnnnnnd we’re back (I think)! Barring any complications from crazy busy weeks, I think we can get this blog up and running again! Woot! So let’s dive right on into it with this hilarious dyed Easter egg. :)
This past weekend, we had an epic party. It consisted of 1) eating tasty snacks, 2) playing an Arrested Development trivia quiz (the Never Nudes Unite, my team, ended up winning by TWO points! COME ON!!!!!), and 3) dyeing Easter eggs!!! Wow… it was a full night. I believe no one even had a chance to think about getting bored. So this picture obviously comes from the Easter egg part of the evening. This is my friend Ali’s egg! Ha… I love that it looks like an egg dog, especially with its tongue sticking out like that!
Potassium Photography 