Yay! More fun with Color Accent mode on the SD1400IS camera! Today’s picture is done with color accent and macro mode. Whoa. This one isn’t as nicely put together as the sharks from Tuesday I think. Parts of the flower that were in the sun were apparently not red enough to show up as red here. Oh well… still looks kind of neat. Looks like the flower got a little dust on its petals…
Category: Nature
Black and white: Dry
Also from my walk with Cobalt last weekend (see! I took some landscape pictures and I used my old(er) zoom lens!). I really like this picture. I think the trees and the clouds in the background are pretty ominous. I also like the pokey guys in the left hand corner of the picture, just peeking in to see if it’s safe.
It Still Lives!
Hahaha I like this pic. I love the mountains in the background and the crazy twisting of the plant in the foreground. It looks like a zombie plant. Dead but oh still very much alive with all that curling and twirling. Ha.
By now, you guys are probably used to my love of taking pictures of pokey things but in case you are unfamiliar, I love taking pictures of pokey things (that should clear things up…). Particularly plants that stick out of nowhere like this guy. I also really like the golden field behind the plant. I can’t wait for the spring when it gets all green. I am TOTALLY going to do a Sound of Music photoshoot (The hilllllllllls are alive… with the sound of muuuuuuuuuuuuusic…). Can you see it?!
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…
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…
Caterpillar Dance
This is Bobby the woolly bear caterpillar! My sister and I found him when we were at the beach last week and he was just so cute and fluffy looking that we had to take a bunch of pictures of him (and name him Bobby). He is actually pretty pissed in this picture. I think he didn’t like the flash… Sorry Bobby… But you were moving too much for me to take the picture without a flash! :-/
Anyway, it turns out that many people think you can predict what your winter will be like by looking at the stripes on a woolly bear caterpillar! Apparently, the fatter the brown stripe, the milder the winter will be. In fact, there are many woolly bear festivals across the eastern US where people celebrate the coming of winter with these little guys (Here’s a link to one of the bigger festivals). In North Carolina, they even have a caterpillar race. The caterpillar that wins the race is then used to predict the winter weather. Looks like Bobby’s predicting a fairly mild winter…
Black and White: Time for a Tea Party?
Ooooo I love this pic. I love it when I am going about my day and something pops up already perfectly composed for me to take its picture. That’s how I felt about this shot. Basically, I’ve been going for little runs/walks around my neighborhood and every time I passed this sight (it’s what it looks like, benches under a tree in the middle of an abandoned horse pasture), I was so enchanted by it. I kept picturing one of those paintings you see of fairies having a tea party under a tree in the middle of some valley. Okay, maybe I am reading too much young adult fiction but that’s what I thought of every time. So one day after my run, I got the DSLR and walked back down there to try to capture the image I saw in my head. It was a fun exercise to try to get everything to match what I had envisioned. Do you see it? If not, what do you see? :-/
Black and White: Pokey Flower
For those of you who don’t know, I love taking pictures of pokey things. I don’t know why. I guess I just really like the effect of something coming out at you while everything else is a blur in the background. So generally, if Cobalt and I go on a walk with my camera, I will take at least one pokey picture on our journey. Actually, that is pretty much the story of this picture.
Black and White: Now we’ll never know
For today’s black and white picture, I have this crazy picture for you. I like it because it looks like I took a boring picture of bars until you look at the stuff in the background…. which seems to not be oriented correctly. Actually, this is a good time to point out one of my favorite features about black and white pictures – the fact that you notice so much more of the details that you might not notice if the picture had color. For example, if I post a picture of me with green skin, you will probably notice the fact that I seem to look very sick but you might not notice the finer details of the picture besides my green skin. If the picture were black and white, you might not notice that my skin was a different color and you’d content yourself with looking at the rest of the details. That’s my theory at least…
So… today’s picture: So sneaky. So confusing! What is going on?!?!
Well… if you must know, then I guess I can tell you. I took a picture of a railing that was diagonal… but then I tilted the camera so that the railing appeared horizontal… thus tilting everything else in the picture and confusing you. Ahahaha…
Potassium Photography 