I know, this is not a black and white picture and this is black and white Wednesday but I need to post this picture today. If you remember a few weeks ago, I posted that amazing (seriously, it’s one of my all time favorite pictures that I have ever taken) picture of my cat Blackberry? Well, today Blackberry, who has been struggling with cancer, died… and I am really sad. Obviously she was really old (18 years old!) and she was such a good cat to our family for that long. I have all these happy memories of her from all those years too. So I can’t hold it against her for dying. But it still makes me sad.
Cobalt took this picture of me saying goodbye to Blackberry in person last month right before we came back to Colorado. The whole way to the airport and back to Colorado, I couldn’t stop thinking about how soft her ears were and how happy her purring in my arms made me feel. I don’t think I will ever forget that. I’m going to miss you Blackberry… I love you.
Author: iampotassium
Can’t…stay…still…
This is a continuation of yesterday’s picture with a picture of both the cute birds who visited me while I was skiing this weekend. I love this picture because that bird on the bottom is super blurry while the bird at the top is in focus. It’s like the bird at the bottom is on a caffeine high or is just feeling so jittery that he just can’t stay still while the bird at the top is like “Wat? Gimme crackers!” Ha… Cracks me up. Of course what really happened is that the bird at the bottom was about to take off and my camera caught him in motion but that is not as fun to think about. ;)
Portrait: Could I have another cracker?
This weekend I went cross country skiing again. It was amazing up there this weekend; it was warm (40 degrees F!) and the sky was clear and blue. Freakin’ gorgeous. I stopped a lot to take pictures… Hopefully I didn’t annoy anyone coming up behind me. But everything was too amazing to go unnoticed.
As for this little guy, he and his friend (you’ll see the friend tomorrow) popped up when I stopped to take a break and eat crackers. I was eating my crackers next to these girls who were eating all sorts of delicious looking muffins and such and well the birds wanted in on the sweet deals. I soon found that if I threw the birds a cracker every once in a while, they’ll stay still enough for me to get some cute pictures of them! This bird even hopped up on my backpack! I love how you can see the snow on his beak… Awwww!
I took these pictures on my baby camera (obviously not lugging the DSLR to go skiing…) and I think I put it to the test here trying to capture these wiggly birds. It has a setting on it that captures a bunch of frames in a row (so I could see the birds in motion) but I didn’t have time to remember how to get to that setting. (I know it works pretty well. I took a series of pictures of Cobalt kicking a kickball using the mode when I first got the camera but of course I had ample time to play with the camera then.) So for this time, we stuck to the plain old auto mode. Next time, cute birds…
Cell Phone Picture: Sun Fish
Welcome to Friday everyone! I hope it has been a good week for you guys… I know I am definitely looking forward to this weekend! :) For today’s cell phone picture, I have this fish light from Wahoo’s Fish Tacos. I was eating the delicious bonzai burrito last week with some friends when I looked up and saw these super cute fish lights! I love them! I also love this picture – it looks like the fish is radiating light in all directions! Nice job, Wahoo’s!
Here we are, two across a river
(Today’s title is from Lucy Wainwright Roche’s song “Bridge”)
So yesterday I talked about how black and white is good for composing photographs (and inspiring creative pictures) but today I am going to tell you that color can be awesome too! Once I saw those red bushes, I knew I needed to use them in a photograph. They are just so vivid! In this picture, I like that there are red bushes on one side of the creek and brown bushes on the other. I also like the fact that the creek is flowing from the left hand corner of the picture and then it wiggles its way through the picture after that. If you recall my post from November when I talked about composition and how the lines draw your eyes can give you a certain inherent ease or unease about the picture, this would be an example of something pleasing. The post from November, if you don’t remember, was an example of something that should give you a sense of unease.
Black and White: Icy Reflections
This was another picture I took this weekend with photographer’s block weighing heavily on my brain. I got the idea to shoot this picture in black and white from this article, which I mentioned yesterday as well. In the article, she suggests taking black and white pictures so as to draw the viewer’s attention to something else besides the colors in the picture. I talked a little bit about my feelings on black and white photography before in my picture of the sideways gate. I think that shooting in black and white makes you think harder about the composition of the photograph and what you really want as the most important part of the picture. All that thinking and crafting is definitely good for jolting your creativity, especially when you have a half frozen creek in front of you to photograph. For this picture, I decided I would use black and white to try to draw people’s attention to the water, with its lazy ripples, as it flows through the iciness of the creek.
Photographer’s Block and Geese
Sooooo this weekend… I wanted to go out and take some pictures just to practice taking pictures and to find some fun pictures for this week’s posts and I found that I really didn’t feel like taking pictures of anything at all. Mostly what I usually do (unless I have a planned photosession like last weekend) is wander around a certain area of Boulder (downtown, a graveyard, etc) and take pictures of things that interest me. Or Cobalt and I will go on a trip and I will take pictures there of things that interest me. But we weren’t going anywhere and I was tired of randomly wandering around Boulder. And I was tired of just taking pictures of random things that I saw. In short, I was feeling a bit of photographer’s block.
This is when this blog becomes really important I think. I think that without it, I could have easily just stopped taking pictures, writing it off as “well, I’ll take pictures later…” but as we all know, the way to get over any form of creativity block is to try to gently ease yourself back into it. So I reluctantly began thinking of ways to get me excited about pictures again. Cobalt told me that when he has writer’s block, he likes to look up writing exercises. So I looked up photography exercises. I found two good websites with interesting suggestions. One contains suggestions for “new photographers” although I thought that her suggestions would be good for anyone who wanted to work on their photography or who felt like they needed a boost in creativity. The other directly addresses photographer’s block. I really like the 100 steps idea which I actually did not end up using but hope to try soon!
With those ideas in mind, Cobalt and I jumped in the car and drove one town over to the town of Superior, CO. I am not really sure what we were looking for in Superior but when I saw these geese, I knew I had found it. I think this picture is neat because all the geese except two or so are headed in one direction, clearly with some important task in mind (probably getting away from me…) and yet those two are sitting there like ???? What’s goin’ on friends?! Haha… I think it’s fun. Thanks, geese for being awesome…
Cell Phone Picture: Tilt Landscape!
Whoa… This picture turned out crazily. I took this picture on Monday morning on my way to work. I really liked the clouds hanging low over the houses in the background and the wet streets (all that snow from last Friday’s post had finally melted… although it snowed again yesterday so we have a fresh coat of snow everywhere) just looks really nice to me. It felt very “new” to me and it made me wonder if it was secretly spring and we’d just had a nice spring rain (oh wait… we get spring snow here in Boulder… :p). It was a good feeling and a good way to start out the week, I think. Part of me wonders if I was half asleep when I took the picture though… That might explain why everything seems strangely skewed (especially that lamp post)… Cell phone pictures are supposed to be easy to take, right? :) I hope you all have great weekends!
Yeah… my friend is crazy…
This picture cracks me up. I love how Meghana is popping out from behind the pillar and Janet is standing there like yeah… I know… She is ridiculous… ;) I also really like Janet’s hair in this pic. :) Not sure what else to add to today’s post… I guess if you want to know more, you should leave me a comment! :D
Can’t believe today is already Thursday… Does anyone have fun plans for this weekend?
Black and White: Waiting for the Elevator
When I post black and white pictures on here, I like them to be pictures that I have actually taken with the black and white setting on my camera. Sometimes I cheat and use Photoshop to turn one of my color photos to a black and white photo but usually I am pretty good. This picture is another from my photoshoot with Janet and Meghana last weekend and I actually did shoot it in black and white. I decided to try switching between black and white and color once we got to more of an urban setting just to see what I could get. Plus, I definitely need more practice shooting in black and white anyway so it gave me a good excuse. Now that I am looking at this picture, I’m sad that I didn’t have them actually press the button on the elevator and at least pretend to ride it. Oh well… more ideas for future photoshoots…
Potassium Photography 