This picture was taken a few years ago with my old Canon Powershot on our most recent family vacation to Yosemite National Park. I really like the hazy mountains off in the distance. I think it makes for a very serene picture. :)
Author: iampotassium
Sunset over Pagosa Springs
This picture is from our first day in Pagosa Springs, CO a few weeks ago. See that storm lurking over the mountains? Yeah, we drove through it. It was epicness. Kind of nice to be safe on the other side. Anyway, we were driving back to our hotel after dinner/exploring the town and looked behind us to see this gorgeous sunset. I loved everything about it – the red mountain, the looming clouds that only loom so far and then disappear, etc. Fun times. We had to stop so I could take a picture. I liked messing with the f stop settings to try to enhance the contrast between the dark clouds and the bright red mountain… :)
Portrait: Peeking out from the shadows
Wow. It has been a long time since I last wrote in here. I got really sick last week and being sick does not make one want to post pictures or do anything at all for that matter. I regret to say that it’s probably going to be pretty patchy for a while still though because I have some family/personal matters to take care of over the next few weeks. Sorry blog friends…
But wait, what am I doing?! There’s a picture of a cute kitty right here! :D This is my friend’s kitty Georgie who is just freakin’ adorable with her HUGE eyes and all her puffy fur. I love her in this picture peeking out of the shadows to see what we are all up to. Shy friend! I also like the way this picture turned out. I was shooting with a REALLY low f number because Georgie’s kitty friend is all black and I was trying to let in all light possible to capture him and Georgie. So I love how only her little face is in focus and everything else is in varying degrees of blurriness. Happiness I’d say. :D
Hope you all are well!
The ghosts are lurking…
Another picture from the disposable camera’s adventures last summer. One weekend last summer, we decided to drive up to see the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, CO and check it out. For those of you who don’t recognize it from the back/have never heard of The Shining (….), this is the hotel that inspired Stephen King’s “Overlook Hotel” in The Shining. The Stanley Hotel was not actually used for the movie BUT it still has haunted rooms that you can stay in (one of the coolest sets of wedding photos I’ve seen was from a “haunted” wedding done at the Stanley). If you can’t afford to stay at the Stanley Hotel, you can always go on their ghost or history tours. Oooooo…
I think Cobalt took this picture. That’s another fun thing about the disposable camera – both of us stole it at various times and took a few pictures here and there. So now we have a vast collection of very different photography styles on the same roll. Fun times. :)
Black and White: Bird off the Wire
This picture is from Pagosa Springs. Cobalt and I were on a picture adventure on one of the many little creek paths one morning when I got bored with shooting landscapes and turned to the birds. These birds were really cute but so hard to approach without them flapping away. This picture comes from the fact that the picture is overexposed and the bird was moving. It’s messy but I like it. I had so many crisp pictures of other flying birds but I just kept coming back to this one. I like the whole messy/bubbly nature of the whole picture. Sometimes life is messy and bubbly, you know?!
Btw, today is my dad’s birthday! Happy birthday dad! I love you and miss you but I hope you are having a great birthday! :D
Only 850 miles to go!
Cobalt and I have rediscovered the disposable camera. It’s funny in a day where people are obsessed with trying to get their crisp digital or phone pictures to “look old” when really, all you need is a plastic disposable film camera to get the same effect. Of course finding someone to develop the pictures for you is a bitch, but it’s worth it I think. Remember when disposable cameras were the in thing? I remember packing 2 or 3 of them whenever we went on band trips. Then as soon as I got home, I’d use up the rest of my film taking pictures of my cats/family before running the cameras over to the 1 hour photo (double prints were a must). The next day at school, we’d swap pictures so that everyone could have a full story of the hilarity that happened. It was so rich and so fun and now it is so gone… It’s weird to me.
Anyway, nostalgia over. Last May, Cobalt and I bought a disposable camera on a whim and it followed us around as we went various places over the summer. And then we forgot about it until we went to Pagosa Springs last week. Obviously accidentally dropping a plastic disposable camera into a hot spring would be not as bad as dropping a digital camera in so the disposable camera got to go to the hot springs! We finished the roll and got the film developed in Pagosa Springs. And then we got to have the joy of looking at our prints. Look at the colors! Look at this hilarious thing that we did that we forgot about! Look look look! We immediately went out and bought a new disposable camera…
Anyway, disposable camera story over. This picture. This picture is from our epic road trip from Colorado to California (This is in Wyoming) to visit my family last summer. Looking out at the long road ahead. I like it. I like my stuffed octopus (his name is Nico and he lives in the car) at the bottom. I like his reflection. I like the clouds. I like the colors. So much fun.
Portrait: Yeppers… Let’s get hitched!
This weekend, I had the honor/pleasure of photographing my friends Paul and Pearl. They are getting married next year and they wanted a few pictures to choose from for their “Save the Date.” So we went up to Chautauqua this weekend to see if we could snap some good photographs! I was a bit nervous because it was my first time taking “engagement” portraits and I was worried that we wouldn’t get any fun pictures for their “Save the Date.” Luckily for me, Paul and Pearl were easy going and fun and I think we got some good shots – including this one which occurred after Pearl “fed” Paul a piece of grass… Hilarious. We of course got some more serious and romantic pictures too to make for an eclectic set of pictures for them to choose from. I hope they pick out a good one! :D
As for me, I know that there are definitely areas for the budding portrait photographer in me to improve. I think that I need to move around more to capture one shot from a variety of angles because I noticed as I was going through Paul’s and Pearl’s photos that I would capture one of their faces but not the other’s. I think it would have been interesting to see the contrast of the other person’s face in a different picture. I also just want to get better in general at determining good places in Boulder for portrait photography. Chautauqua is not the best place for afternoon portrait photography as the subjects are either backlit to the extreme or squinting into the sun. Hrmmmm…. more research…. more portraits… yessssss…. I hope you all had good weekends. I had a spectacular one! :)
Cell Phone Picture: Sharks on Vacation
This week was spring break here at the school so Cobalt and I decided to take a little vacation. We went to Pagosa Springs, which is in Southern Colorado, to go relax in the natural hot springs there. Although we had a hell of a time getting over Wolf Creek Pass both coming and going, it was worth it just to spend some time in the healing waters of Pagosa Hot Springs. The springs ranged in temperature from 86 degrees F to 111 F (there was one at 115 F but that one was closed because… well, that is hot!). Cobalt and I tried out each hot spring (going through 23!) before picking out our favorites and lounging in them for awhile.
When we weren’t relaxing in the warmth, we were eating… a lot. Pagosa offers such a wealth of delicious restaurants so we had one awesome meal after the next. This picture comes from where we ate lunch before leaving town (to go battle the pass for the second time). Well I love sharks and as soon as we determined that The Chivalrous Shark was indeed a restaurant (took us awkwardly looking in the windows because we couldn’t find it online), we decided that we had to eat there before we left. Anyway, it was your typical fish and chips shop with a New Orleans feel. Plus they actually served shark…….. which I tried. And then felt really bad because of how much I love them… >_< Anyway, it was a confusing moment for me but it turns out that I didn't actually like the taste of shark all that much so maybe that is a good thing. All the more energy to love them and not wonder if they are actually delicious… ;) And with that, I hope you all have wonderful weekends!
Graveyard Apparition
I looooooove this pic. First of all because it is a bit creepy and second of all because it was taken at 11 pm. No joke. It was daaaaaark outside. You see those white things in the sky? Yeah… they’re stars… So what happened here? Well, this was the night of the epically sized moon that I talked about on Tuesday so it was pretty bright out as far as night goes. And then I was playing with ISO and F numbers with a 30 second exposure time so I could have time to be crazy in front of the camera. Turned out pretty weird I think but I still like it. I like my ghostly see-through appearance.
Black and White: Fence Post
This pic is from a few weeks ago when the 50 mm lens was still a novelty and I couldn’t get over its awesomeness. Oh wait… I am still not over its awesomeness (Poor 18-70 mm lens… though it did get used for yesterday’s moon pic so it should be happy! :D). Anyway, this here is a fence post. Yes… Haha. I like all the details of the wood on top and then the nothingness of everything else…
Potassium Photography 