Welcome to Tuesday! For today’s picture, I have a frozen twig tear drop from Oklahoma for all of you to see. When Cobalt and I took a walk after Thanksgiving dinner, all the twigs and remaining leaves had these perfect water droplets frozen to the ends of them, as in this picture. They were all pretty hard to photograph because there was a slight breeze but this one came out pretty perfect! I think that it is pretty neat that you can see me reflected in the tear drop!
Author: iampotassium
Portrait: Wakey Wakey!
Wow… these weeks are just flying by! Now we’re back to Monday again! Today’s portrait Monday is Cobalt’s adorable but crazy niece. She sat in front of me on our epic road trip to Oklahoma and at one point I broke out the camera. As soon as the camera came out of the bag, she hammed right up in her seat and was so cute that I couldn’t help but take some pictures of her!
Now to be fair, I am also going to post a picture of her brother who was playing his DS at the time but I snapped a sneaky picture of him anyway:
I hope you all are having wonderful Mondays! :)
Cell Phone Picture: Ready to Go!
Because Cobalt and I just got back from an epic road trip to Oklahoma and because we seem to enjoy going on epic road trips in general, I thought I would share some of our road tripness with you guys. On every road trip we take, we take Poncho Same (the blue cow colored shark in the picture) and Ed (the skeleton hiding behind Poncho) with us. They get to hang out on the rearview mirror and watch the road go by with us! :) On this last trip we took, Poncho and Ed were hanging from a coat hanger hook in the back of the car with us. I learned that Ed’s dancing is actually kind of hypnotic when viewed from the side…. awesome…
This picture was taken when I just got this cell phone in August of this year. We got the phone and then hopped in the car to go visit Cobalt’s family. I was so excited about my new phone that I took pictures/played with the sketchpad app pretty much the whole ride down there. I really like the way this picture turned out. Poncho looks so excited to be in the car and the clouds in the sky look nice too!
Guilty Cheese
While Cobalt and I were in Oklahoma, we got to go to this delicious Italian deli. It was amazing! So many wonderful smells… Ahhh… salami… pepperoni… and oh, did I mention cheese? (Potassium’s note: SHE LOVES CHEESE)
Speaking of cheese, I was worried that these cheeses in my picture had done something wrong. Look how they are hanging there (and look how many more unoccupied nooses are waiting for more cheese convicts)! Yeesh! Luckily, Cobalt explained that these cheeses are actually caciocavera, a type of provolone cheese that needs to be aged before it gets eaten. So those cheeses are getting all ripe and delicious! Happy! And may I tell you that caciocavera is definitely a delicious cheese. I highly suggest that you try it if you can. :)
Black and White: Snow Flower
Today I am posting a picture of my Venus Fly Trap Severus Snape from earlier this year. Last winter, I let him live in my windowsill. Because of the way the sun shines in my room in the winter, the window sill gets really hot. So it would be snowing outside and Severus would be like “wooooo spring time!” and start flowering. Ha. I thought it would be fun to take a picture of him all ready for spring with snow outside.
Travelin’ North…
Today’s picture comes to us from Oklahoma! Cobalt and I went on a walk to work off some of that delicious turkey we ate for Thanksgiving and stumbled across these train tracks stretching out as far as the eye can see. It made for some really neat shots. Anyway, the focus of this picture was to play with an idea I learned about in my Creative Digital Photography class. Our teacher suggested that pictures composed to draw your eyes from the right of the picture to the left of the picture (as in my picture here) are viewed as “negative” or “offputting” for anyone who reads from left to right (i.e. Western culture). Take for example, the famous painting The Scream.
On the other hand, a picture that draws your eyes from left to right is “positive” or “pleasing” for the same folk. We all seem to really like the waves in this painting from the Thirty Six Views of Mount Fuji collection. Of course, you might guess then that if you read from right to left, then a picture drawing your eyes from right to left would be pleasing while a picture that draws your eyes from left to right would be offputting.
What do you guys think? Is that true here? I do kind of feel that this picture makes me a little uneasy. I’m not sure why really. There’s certainly nothing wrong with the train tracks and but for some reason they just don’t seem right. Maybe I’m just biased because I took the picture…
Portrait: Centennial
Welcome back from Thanksgiving break! I hope you all had wonderful Thanksgivings! I definitely did. Cobalt and I went to visit his family in Oklahoma and it was a lot of fun. I took many pictures so you can look forward to seeing some of them in the near future…
Anyway – today’s picture: this is a portrait of my mom’s mom from 1981 (so I wasn’t around to take this picture). Today would have been her 100th birthday which is crazy epic. Unfortunately she died in 2001 so she’s not physically around to celebrate her huge accomplishment but she’s here in memory. Happy 100th birthday, Grandma! I love you and I miss you!
Night Ride
Last Saturday night, there was this really cool fog outside. Everything was blanketed in this cool misty atmosphere. I stood outside waiting for Cobalt to pick me up and I just stared at my breath joining in with the rest of the misty fog. It was as if there were a bunch of people outside breathing and our breath just stayed there and turned into an epic fog. Anyway, enough description. So while I was waiting for Cobalt, I pulled out my DSLR and tried to take pictures of the fog blanket. Then as he drove around the corner to pick me up, I snapped this picture of his car. I love the fog in the headlights. Looks so awesome…
Just a reminder – no pictures for the rest of this week (so sad, I know!). I will be back next Monday though. Have a Happy Thanksgiving!
Photoshop
Not much. Cropping and Shadow/Highlights to try to bring out a little bit more of the car.
Portrait: So emo…
I think it’s time for a self portrait. Also, this is one of my favorite pictures that I’ve taken of myself. This was taken in October 2009 with my DLSR a few weeks after getting it. I did NOT use autofocus so I had to focus on a cup on my desk that was about the same distance away as the camera would be away from me/my tear when I set it down and took the picture. I took this picture partly because I was procrastinating on my biophysics homework (you can see it lurking under my arm) and partly because I was actually really frustrated with my biophysics homework (hence the emo picture). For the record, that is not a real tear (it’s water) but I can pretty much guarantee you that that emotion on my face is still genuine. Anyway, I just love this picture because it is so nicely focused even without using autofocus.
No worries, I am not feeling emo right now. I am really excited for this week. Should be a lot of fun. Speaking of fun, I will only be posting pictures today (obviously) and tomorrow this week. I figure that I should be spending my time enjoying the Thanksgiving season (/getting more exciting pictures) instead of worrying what to post every day! I hope you all have fun things planned for your Thanksgiving weeks too!
Photoshop
I don’t think I did much to this picture besides crop it and then desaturate the colors a bit to make for a more dreary picture. Goes with the emo-ness.
Red sky in the morning…
Sailor’s Warning…
For those of you wondering, no I did not take this beautiful sunrise picture with my cell phone so yeah… no cell phone picture today. Wow… I am breaking all sorts of rules right now. I just want to point out the plasticity of this blog. I had pictures planned for both yesterday and today that just got totally pushed out of the way by this picture and the orca picture yesterday. I guess it’s good – keeps the blog current and up to date. No worries… You’ll see those pictures soon.
Anyway about this picture. Funny story as I am not usually one to be awake during the sunrise (unless lab requires it, which it didn’t this time). So yesterday, I was happily asleep when I woke up because I heard a strange sound outside my house. I got up and looked outside the window to see if I could find the source of the sound (pretty sure it was just the wind trying to blow my house down… it does that a lot) and saw this gorgeous sunrise instead! Forgetting that it was about 6:30 am and I still had an hour and a half until my alarm went off, I grabbed the DSLR and started shooting pictures of the prettiness. Freakin gorgeous… I love the oranges and the reds… and how the trees are just silhouettes. I also like how you can tell that it was a bit windy outside because the tree in the center of the picture is a bit blurry. Awesome.
Photoshop
Haven’t done this much this week as I really haven’t had that much to edit. I just wanted to tell you about it today in case you are wondering if I severely photoshopped the orange colors. I did not. If anything, they are a bit paler than they were originally because I used “Shadow/Highlights” to get the sky a little more blue. Otherwise, that is as shot.
Craziness today! Harry Potter 7 (part 1) comes out (I saw it last night at midnight… Ha!) AND my friend Janet is giving her thesis defense! Woooo GO JANET!!! :D
Potassium Photography 