7/52 - Week 4

Not a very exciting week on the photo front, but here we go...

The first was shot for a DailyShoot and turned out pretty good. I have a tube of rare earth magnets that doesn't have much purpose, so I put a couple of them to use. This was a tricky shot, even with using a tripod. I had to hold my hand out in front of the camera pretty far and it wasn't easy to hold my hand still. I had to rest my arm on a chair to get it steady enough for the shot. The magnets really are holding themselves on my finger — they're that strong.

Another DailyShoot shot. This is one of our many TV/device remotes that reside in our living room. Exciting, eh? :)

I've shot this next one before, in B&W. I can't remember if I ever posted it anywhere. We have three of these hanging on the wall in our dining area. For this particular shot, I enhanced the color a little using one of many picture styles for Canon's Digital Photo Professional that I downloaded from the web. I really like it. I took quite a few shots of this, and had a difficult time trying to decide which one I would use for the DailyShoot that day.

This is one of my DailyShoot rejects for the same assignment as the last photo. I couldn't seem to get the lighting the way I wanted. I like the colour though.

This is an origami star(?) that one of my daughter's classmates made for her. She said she makes them for anyone who asks. I shot it for a DailyShoot and never used it.

Another DailyShoot reject. A wooden coaster. I thought it would be cool, until I saw how much my macro lens exposes and didn't like it.

I shot this one moments ago to round off my seven photos for this week. These are books that I have read or am in the process of reading. Talk about diversity. :)

 

7/52 - Week 3

Thank god for the DailyShoot, or I might not have anything to post. :)

My cat. My trusty model. She looked so comfortable. I only managed too shoot three or four shots before she woke up.

A book that everyone must have. I liked it so much that I bought the newer edition, even though most of the content was the same as the last edition I bought and read. I had a bitch of a time trying to get my glasses to stay in a triangular shape for the shot. They kept wanting to close or open.

I love our stairs. Coincidentally, I think it was around this time last year that we began our five or six month long renovation project of the stairs, main floor, kitchen floor and ½ bathroom. Dig through my blog and I'm sure you'll see some before pics. This shot was originally landscape but I cropped it to portrait to cut out something that was hanging on the hand rail to the right. And then I wasn't sure if I should convert the entire thing to B&W. It looks good in B&W, but I wanted to keep the colour... because, I think we did a great job of staining them. Like I said, I love our stairs. :)

My scale, that I am somewhat obsessed with using in the last couple of months. I thought it would be cool to take a shot of my weight as I stood on it, but soon realized that having my camera in hand would throw that way (weigh?) off. ;) I suppose I could have gotten the tripod out...

My Xbox 360 controllers. I shot them because... well, I couldn't find anything else to shoot. Besides, they were a part of our Sunday activities -- my wife and I played a few games of Yahtzee. :)

This was more of an accidental shot. I was messing around with the autofocus on my camera, aiming it on my feet, and fired off a shot just as the picture on the TV changed to an advertisement. It kinda looks like my feet have a halo.

Last, but not least -- and also a DailyShoot shot -- homemade chocolate cookies. It was a new recipe that my wife decided to try and they are goooood. :)

That's it for this week. I'm still not completely up to speed on this seven photos per week idea. I keep finding myself running around looking for things to shoot. Being winter with windchill warnings certainly doesn't help either.

Hopefully I can get my shit together soon. Dammit.

7/52 - Week 2

Still not up to speed on shooting often enough, but did manage to get seven for this week. :) A couple of them are from my DailyShoot contributions as well.

This was one of the DailyShoot shots. It's my rarely played acoustic guitar that I got a long time ago... like pre-1982. I never did learn to play more than a few notes, unless you count "Michael Row Your Boat Ashore". :) Everyone once in a while I get in the mood to try and learn more, get it all tuned up and stick with it for a few weeks, then it ends up sitting in the corner of my den. For this shot, I sat it on my lap and placed the camera on the strings, looking down the neck. It looks like I strummed it for the shot, but I didn't.

Another DailyShoot shot; the label on my camera bag. It pretty much holds everything I have for my camera. It's an awesome bag.

I shot this at work one lunch time, for the DailyShoot. It's a Hot Wheels dragster pen that my wife put in my Christmas stocking. It took me a dozen shots until I got one that looked pretty good.

I had a difficult time finding something for this particular DailyShoot. Find two complementary objects. How hard could that be? I think this turned out pretty good. I thought about making it B&W, but decided to leave it as is in the end.

I shot this on Saturday while I was snowing outside. Our bird feeder hangs just outside our window so our cat can enjoy watching them. The colour wasn't too great, since I had shot it through the window, so I decided to make it B&W. I guess I should refill it, eh? :)

My favourite model, our cat Samantha. This is where she spends most of her time, either sleeping or watching out the window. If I move the automan anwhere else, she won't sleep in her bed on it. It must be in front of this window.

I shot this one this evening, for today's DailyShoot assignment. It took me about half an hour to find something blue that I could make a decent shot out of. I spotted the bottle of Dawn dish liquid at the back of the sink. At first I thought I would try to shoot it as I poured it onto a plate. That didn't work out too well. I then made a bunch of bubbles in it and fired off a half dozen before switching to my 100mm lens for a couple like this one. You can see my reflection and other things in the kitchen. I had to make a few small adjustments to the RAW file, with the tone and saturation to bring out the blue a little better.

7/52 - Week 1

Not off to a very good start for my Project 7/52. Due to my slackitivity, my seven photos are from two different shoots. It's allowed, of course, but I was hoping for a better mix. We'll see what the next week brings.

Anyway, here we go for this week.

This is me holding my new nephew, Jaxson Edward Wilson; my sister's second child. He was born on January 5th of this year.

Here we have my son holding his new cousin. My son is very unlike me when I was his age. He loves babies and little kids. I guess he gets that from his Mom. :)

My daughter holding her new cousin. She too loves babies. I just hope they remain other people's babies for a long time! :)

My wife, holding her nephew. She commented that he looks so round. Not chubby or fat, just very... roundish. :) He was born via C-section, so his head didn't have a chance to become temporarily deformed like some newborns. His ears are really tiny too. He's a cutie.

I received a few Hot Wheels cars over the Christmas holidays and decided to take photos of them to post in a couple of the Hot Wheels Flickr groups. This, unfortunately, isn't one of them. :) I've had this one for some time. I like it because it's different.

This also isn't one of them, but it's a Mustang and that makes it one of my favourites. I started mostly collecting Mustangs years ago. It has expanded a little to to include cool looking muscle cars or any other car that happens to catch my eye. I don't go crazy buying everything in sight.

This one is one that I got for Christmas, in my stocking. A 2010 Camaro.

And that's that for week 1, with about ten minutes to go. Yeh, technically I'm probably a day late since week 1 ended yesterday, but it's far easier for me to update this and post them all on a Sunday... so there. :) The week begins on Monday and ends on Sunday for this.

New Photo Project

I've been toying with the idea of starting a new Project 52, but the fact that I've already done it sort of makes it seem "ho hum". I'm fairly certain that I couldn't handle a Project 365. It takes more commitment than I think I have and I've seen more than a few fail after a few months.

While reading about the return of DaniGirl's Project 365 on her blog, I read a suggestion in the comments about doing a "7/52".

A quick Google search later and I discovered that this might be something I could handle; post 7 photos per week, for 52 weeks. The photos can be taken all in one day, over a couple, or even daily. The only "rule" is that it's 7 photos per week. During my Project 52, on more than one occasion, I had to choose one from many. This makes me a little more confident that this idea could succeed.

Since this is the first full week of the new year and I have half a week to decide. :)

"Out with the old. In with the new"

I had planned to write about this past year, and what I hoped the new year would bring. Like every other blog out there, I guess. After an hour of trying to formulate something that didn't sound corny, I gave up.

Screw it. Keeping it simple always works.

Goodbye 2010; it's been a slice.

Hello 2011.

Resolutions? Who needs them? I quit smoking without one. If you've read any of my previous blog postings, it should be obvious what's next.

Clean slate. New experiences. New goals. New determination to reach those goals. And maybe a little fun thrown in.

I'm ready.

I think.

After the weekend thoughts

We went for a family walk along some rural forest NCC paths to feed the chickadees. The parking lot was packed with the cars of others who had the same idea on such an awesome day. We, and others, had to park along the shoulder of the road. Not a big deal, but if people wouldn't leave 3/4s of a car width between their cars in the lot, more people could park there.

The next disappointment was finding bagged dog shit hanging from trees along the path. In total, we noticed three or four other bags of dog shit hanging from trees.

It's puzzling. Why do some dog owners even bother to pick up after their dogs, when all they're going to do is hang the plastic bag on a tree? What's the point? Yes, it's the law to pick up after your dog, but it doesn't get you off the hook if you're just going to leave it anyway. You inconsiderate ass-hats.

Anyway, as I mentioned, the weather was awesome today. Clear, sunny skies, cool enough that you needed a light coat, but wouldn't break into a sweat in the direct sun. We had a lot of fun feeding the chickadees and sharing some seeds with families who didn't bring anything for their kids to feed the birds. I'm pretty sure they'll be bringing some the next time they show up. Their kids seemed to have a lot of fun.

My 10.10.10@10:10AM GMT Worldwide Moment

I set my alarm clock for 5:30AM so I could be awake for 6:10AM to shoot my "Worldwide Moment" shot. I rarely hear the alarm clock; it's usually my wife who wakes me up during the week.

5:30AM arrived and I actually heard it. In my half-asleep state of mind, I remembered exactly why it was going off so early on a Sunday morning. I turned it off and slowly crept out of bed and hobbled to the washroom.

Why would I ruin a perfectly good sleep to join thousands of other people worldwide, to take a photo at 10:10AM GMT on 10/10/2010?

Because it seemed like a good idea. It was fun. *yawn*

I needed coffee and I needed it NOW.

As I walked back to the bedroom, my wife woke up to go to the washroom. I asked her if she thought Tim Horton's might be open. She said she thought so, and suggested trying a few different ones. I asked her if she wanted one. She munbled "Get me one just in case..." and crawled back into bed.

I now had ~35 minutes to find coffee and return home.

I put on track pants, grabbed my wallet and keys and off I went.

It was still dark. And cold.

Two of the three Tim Horton's I checked seemed open, but only the third one had the drive-thru open. There was no way I was going to get out of my truck for this, so the third one saved me.

I now had ~15 minutes to get home, figure out what I was going to shoot and actually take the shot.
With 10 minutes to go, I was home. My wife was still in bed. I put her coffee on the kitchen counter and started looking around.

I looked out my back window at all of the leaves on the patio. Leaves. Leaves it would be. And I would add my Timmy Ho's coffee in the shot as well. How Canadian. :) But it was still dark and I didn't want to screw this up, so I grabbed my Gorillapod and attached it to the camera.

5 mins to go.

I quietly slipped out the back door, coffee and camera in hand and set up the shot. I fired off a few test shots while waiting for "the moment" to make sure it was focused.

10:10AM GMT arrived.

*click*

A couple more.

*click* *click*

Done.

I think my neighbour was sitting in his backyard having a smoke. Not sure what he thought I was doing out at 6:10AM, in the dark, taking pictures on my patio.

I managed to get two pretty good, focused, shots. This is the one I used.



Yay me. *yawn*

My coffee has been done for a while now and I think I'm going to need more.

Oh ya, Happy Thanksgiving to all Canadians.

(Edit: here's my photo in the Worldwide Moment gallery)

10.10.10@10:10AM GMT - Worldwide Moment

Can you imagine everyone in the world taking a photograph simultaneously?

Can you imagine the feeling of peace, connection, and excitement this moment would bring?

Can you imagine the impact? … We can … Please join us on October 10th!

Worldwide Moment is a not-for-profit simultaneous photography event to create international peace, art, and cultural awareness.

Don't forget, this Sunday, October 10th, is Worldwide Moment @ 10:10AM GMT! If you have a camera, you can participate. Do it! It'll be fun. :)

Be sure to check out what time you need to shoot for your time zone since it's GMT! There's a link on the Worldwide Moment page, or click here.

For my time zone, I have to be awake for 6:10AM.

Gatineau Park

Sunday turned out to be a really nice day. My wife, daughter and I drove up to Gatineau Park to check out the colours. It was crazy busy.

Our first stop was the Mackenzie King Estate. When we arrived at around 10:00am, it was just beginning to get busy. The professional photographers were out in full force, doing family photo sessions, each waiting their turn at the various deformed trees and monuments for that "perfect" shot. Some of the tourists were shooting photos of the photographers as they shot photos of their clients. I was tempted to shoot a photo of the tourists as they did that but thought it might start a massive chain reaction.

We then made our way up to the Champlain Lookout, stopping at too lookouts on the way. We actually had to park the second lookout and walk the rest of the way because the NCC was stopping vehicles from proceeding all the way to Champlain. It turned out that they were doing that because the Champlain parking lot was full.

The views from all of the lookouts was spectacular. This was the first time I had ever been there in the 28 years I've lived in Ottawa. If you're planning on checking out the autumn colours, the next week or two is probably the time to do it. There's still a fair bit of green, especially below the tree line, but there's enough colour to make it worth the trip as you can see in my photos here.

After walking the trails at the Champlain Lookout, we headed home, but not until after we made a quick stop at the Byward Market to pick up a whole whack of veggies and apples.

All in all, a great 6 hour outing on a crisp fall day.

A visit with Jupiter

According to NationalGeographic.com, jupiter is the closest to earth since 1951. Mother nature cooperated and gave us a clear sky tonight so I decided to finally try out the T-ring adapter for my Canon T1i/500D.

I power my wife's laptop from my truck's cigarette light adapter and connected my camera directly to the laptop so I had a decent LiveView, rather than having to stare at the tiny LCD on the camera. This worked quite well.

I started with using just the T-ring adapter on the camera and fired off a few shots of the moon.

Next, I went looking to get jupiter in the scope. It was easier than I expected. Focusing, on the other hand, was not as easy. Lots of trial and error, but I did get a few decent shots.

I tried adding a 10mm eyepiece between the adapter and the camera, which turned out not to be such a good idea. I could't get jupiter in my sights, not could I even find the damned moon.

I then gave the 2x barlow lens a try.

I found the moon and got some good shots.

I then managed to find jupiter. Focusing was hell, but I ended up getting a couple of nice ones.

That shot is cropped, which makes it look a little larger than it was in the original shot.

Overall, it went pretty good. I would have really liked to use the 10mm eyepiece though. If we have any other clear nights this month, I might give it another shot.

Oh yeh, I was pretty happy about was the tracking motor. I managed to get the scope lined up pretty good and the tracking stayed pretty true which made it easier to tweak the focus on the telescope without losing jupiter.

DIY Lightbox Project

I picked up a pair of clamp-on desk lamps today from Canadian Tire for $7.99 each, along with two GE Energy Smart 26W Daylight Compact Fluorescent bulbs (equivalent of 100W each) for $12.99/pair.

I set up my lightbox in the basement and grabbed a few Hot Wheels cars to shoot. For my first attempt, I think the results were pretty good.

I'll take a little tweaking until I figure out the best location for each light, and possibly change the paper (or even remake the lightbox from scratch) Regardless, I'm happy with it and plan on finding more things to shoot in the coming weeks.

 

RedBubble

I came across another site that lets (i.e. helps) you sell your photography on different types of media: RedBubble.com

So, I thought I'd give it a shot. I uploaded some of my fav shots and we'll see how it goes.

You can find my "gallery" here.

Again, I'm not thinking I'll get rich off this. Just hoping to make a few bucks to add more toys to my collection. :)

On a different note, I built my light box last night. I'll post a pic or two of it once I start using it. First, I need to pick up a couple of small lamps for lighting. We checked them out at Canadian Tire this evening and I found one that I liked, but there was only one and it was an open box.

We'll have to try another location or see what other stores have to offer.

Light Box Photography

I've got a new project in the works.

I'm going to try my hand and light box photography. There's all sorts of different DIY instructions on the web. I'll probably try one of the more disposable ideas using a cardboard box ideas first and see how it goes.

Trailer-Sized Camera

I can’t believe the amount of work this guy puts into taking a single shot. The end results are pretty cool though, and unique.

John Chiara and His Amazing Trailer-Sized Camera 

Be sure to check out the video of the entire process.

What is this?

If you arrived here using www.scottpaterson.org and are surprised that the entire layout and colour scheme has changed, there's a reason for that. (if you got here with that address and the page is black with grey text, then there's a problem...)

This is the same blog, but now hosted on Posterous.com. After a month or so of playing around with Posterous, I decided that I like it enough to switch my domain to point here.

However, if you prefer the old location on Blogspot or wish to purchase any of my photos via Fotomoto (which currently does not work with Posterous), the old blog location still exists and is synchronized with here. You can get to it by using http://blog.scottpaterson.org or its Blogspot address, http://spaterson.blogspot.com.

RAW Processing

Ever since I bought my Canon T1i/500D a little over a year ago, I've gotten in the habit of shooting both JPG and RAW for every shot. My reasoning was so that if I got a really good shot, I'd have a high quality RAW image as a back up to tweak and process to make the shot nicer, or fix something if necessary. I rarely ever found a need to process a RAW image, even for shots that I consider to be really good shots.

For a short time, I turned off the RAW format and shot only JPG. More shots per SD card.

I turned RAW back on when we went on our recent family vacation to Toronto and I'm really glad I did. I had a few "accidents" and shot images with totally messed up white balance, and even a few with the wrong aperture/shutter speed, resulting in an underexposed image.

This afternoon I decided to finally start digging through all of the photos I shot on our trip. I'm amazed and how much I was able to fix the underexposed images using the Canon Digital Photo Professional software that came with the camera. They're far from perfect, but they're better than a wasted shot and they turned out better than any underexposed JPG version of the same photo using a few tools that I often use for such things.

Not only that, but I started changing the white balance for a few seemingly good shots and found that they looked even better. Most of the time, I had my camera's white balance set to Auto. It does a pretty good job, but I noticed differences between an "auto" photo shot outdoors, compared to a "daylight" photo shot outdoors. You'd think they were the same, but that's not the case. The same applies to indoor shots with different lighting. Coincidentally, I'm currently reading "Light Science & Magic" and it talks about the fact that sometimes lighting is a mix of different light sources, which can result in incorrect colour. It's cool that I got to see the practical side of that first hand.

Anyhow, rather than hunt and peck through my images, I decided to do them all. All 633 images. It took me most of the day, but I'm really happy with the results. As I write this, DPP is exporting all of my processed images back out to JPG versions that I store on my PC. The original RAW files will remain on the 1TB external drive.

After this experience, I'm almost tempted to turn off JPG altogether and shoot just RAW. Almost. There are times that I do have a need to shoot a quick JPG and really don't have a need for a RAW file, so I think I may end up keeping it on for now.

I may turned off JPG for future trips though.

iStockphoto, take two?

About a year ago, I thought about trying to sell some of my photos on iStockphoto. I didn't expect to get rich from it, but I thought it might be cool if I could make a few bucks to save and put toward more camera stuff. Part of the enrollment process was submitting three photos for consideration. The powers that be take a look at them and decide if they're good enough.

I was rejected. Twice. I gave up.

I am by no means a professional, but I like to think that I can snap a sale-worthy photo once in a while. Anyone has the ability to get lucky once in a while, no?

A couple of weeks ago a friend suggested in a comment on one of my photos that I should sell some of my photos on iStockphoto. That got me thinking about it again. Have I improved enough to be accepted? Should I give it another try just for the hell of it? Do I feel lucky... err... punk?

I could probably go through them and pick three out the most commented and most favourited photos and submit them, but I’d like to hear from anyone who reads my blog.

So here's the deal. When you have some time to spare, take a look through all of my Project 52 photos. Each of the photos has a number in the title indicating which week it was for. Pick what you think are the three best photos and then post a comment on here with the numbers. I may submit the most popular three to iStockphoto and see how it goes.

Tilt-Shift Photography

Ever since seeing some cool examples of tilt-shift photography, it's something I've wanted to try. Thanks to the Photojojo newsletter article, I have now bookmarked a site with a few different examples on how to make your own tilt-shift lens. All I need now is to pick up a cheap, used lens to try it out.

Week 52 - 52 on 52 for 52

It was just over a year ago that I bought my first DSLR camera -- a Canon T1i/500D. I spent a couple of months familiarizing myself with most of its features, and finishing reading a couple of books that I bought a year earlier: Understanding Exposure, Learning to See Creatively, and Understanding Shutter Speed, all three written by Bryan Peterson. (excellent books, by the way)

After that, I felt that I needed a goal. As you can read in my first project-related post, I've always liked the concept of Project 365 but I didn't think I'd have the time and commitment to shoot and post a new photo every day for a year.

Enter Project 52.

52 weeks, and 4523 photographs later, my first Project 52 comes to an end. Although I still have a lot to learn, I'd like to think that my photography skills have improved since. Overall, that is, there are still some shots that I've posted that don't really do much for me.

On to this week's photo.

I have to thank my wife for the inspiration. I was wandering around my house, searching for something interesting and thought aloud, "I need something 52 to take a picture of..."

My daughter left the room and returned to place a small scrap of paper on the table in front of me. '52' was written on it. "Thanks, but I don't think that's gonna cut it..." :)

My wife said, "What about a deck of cards?"

Bingo.

I fired off about fifteen shots from different angles and narrowed my choices down to two. I tweaked the contrast and color and then cropped it a little. That's it, that's all.

Will I begin another Project 52? I don't know yet. One of my friends thinks I should go for 365.

I think what I'll do is shoot and post when I feel like it. Rather than wait for Sunday to make my weekly post, I'll just post whenever I feel that I've taken a good shot worthy of attention.

Let's see how that goes. :)

If you're reading this on my Posterous site, you can click on the Project 52 tab along the top to see all of the shots I've taken for the project.