Health 03/22 - 03/28 (Sara)

Sorry for the late post! I fell asleep early last night :P

Lately I have been exercising 5x a week and calorie counting. Partially it's to lose weight, also to be healthy. As my post, I thought it would be fitting to put a few things I've been eating, mostly because I've been scared to take my camera to exercise for fear I might fall and crack the lens. Here I have featured homemade miso soup, green onions (chopped and consumed by Jeff) and kimbab.


Originals

Health 03/22 - 03/28 (Jaime)

I think health is very well represented in sports/physical activities. I attended one of Vanessa's ballet classes this past week and got this cool picture of her doing a jump.

No post processing.

Health 03/22 - 03/28 (Josh)

I know this was a tough week. I picked a subject that even when I chose it, I didn't know what I was going to do.

As luck would have it, while helping my roommate Chuy on Saturday switch the pedals from his road bike onto a new mountain bike that he had just purchased, I had to pull really hard and as it gave way, my pinky finger went smashing into the large crank for the chain. As I initially stared down at my finger, I saw that two of the teeth had punctured the skin right above my second knuckle and wrapped 2/3 around my finger. As I bent my pinky and saw how deep the cut was, I could see the white glint of my bone before the blood began to pour (and boy did it pour for awhile).

Enough with the graphic words though. Needless to say, my pinky is swollen, bruised, and unbendable. I'm thankful that the cut was on the top and did not damage the muscle. So other than telling an overly graphic story, where's the picture you may ask? Well since that wonderful Saturday afternoon as I have been redressing my wound (I didn't feel like getting stitches at the hospital), then I tried to capture materials that I've been using to protect my wound to bring my pinky back to health. So here goes.

I wanted to focus on the center of the wrap and the medical scissors, but also have an unfocused vision of the hydrogen peroxide (my arch-nemesis) in the background. I tried to use the warm light of my bathroom to give anti-fluorescent-hospital color.

Sorry for the tough subject for this week. :-8

Water 03/15/ - 03/21 (Scott)

I was very excited to have Water as a theme since the weather is getting nicer here. I used it as an excuse to get out and explore Turkey Run park, on the VA side of the Potomac, just south of the American Legion bridge. The trail there follows the river, but also crosses over a number of smaller creeks with plenty of boulders, making for interesting water-photo opportunities. In the summer, you will also see plenty of wildlife, but i didn't spot any yesterday.

For my photo, I played with shutter speed - the slower speeds smooths out the water while a faster shutter captured the chaos and side-splashes of the water. The shot I ultimately choose focused the splash in a ray of sunlight, with a shutter speed not quite fast enough to freeze the pillar of water, so it smoothed out the background slightly, but fast enough to freeze the slower moving splash in the foreground.

The only post-processing I did on this was to try and lighten the shadows so that it will display on other monitors how it looks on mine.

I also wanted to post one of my favorite pictures which I also took at Turkey Run last April. This was just following the intense rains, so the potomac was gushing water at an incredible rate. For this photo, I adjusted the temperature and clarity as the river was brown with silt.

Water 03/15 - 03/21 (Mel)

It is finally spring and the flowers are bloming in Hangzhou!

The weather is much better but we still have some rain. Which was lucky for me this week because I was able to get a pic of a flower dripping water

Water 03/15 - 03/21 (Josh)

Ok, so I failed last week posting for Self-Portrait. I'm not a big fan of portraits (yawn), I was hungover, and uninspired.

Therefore, this week, I figured, why not try to mix myself into the Water theme. And here's what I got:

My point and shoot camera is waterproof, so I filled up my bathroom sink with water, and then decided to play around with putting my face right above the waterline, and with my hands, I was making different ripples each time to make my face get distorted in different ways. Going from left to right above, the first one was using a vertical splash that went perpendicular with my face. As you can see it always make a nice flash line in the water each time. This was one of the few where that light was not centered right over my face. I like how it makes my eyes go crazy. The middle picture was from making waves towards the center of my face from both sides. You can see here that this didn't make too many flash marks which was good, but really distorted my face. Lastly, the right-most picture is when making swirls in the water. It seems to not really distort but stretch all of my features.

I'm sure I could have gotten better quality pics if my nice camera was waterproof, but it was fun to play around with different tides and see how it came out. Also something to take note of is how the flash was affected with different color tones depending on the ripples and how they scattered the light. Next time I'll get Siva to analyze this for me and tell me why. :-D

Water 03/15 - 03/21 (Sara)

Another photo trick I've wanted to try for a while! I'm glad Pere chose water, because I finally got to try this :) It took a lot of patience and frustration --- I took close to 300 shots, but I'm glad that I tried. This one was my favorite (post-processing included changing temperature of the colors and increasing contrast -- the original is pretty drab looking):

Some other ones that came out (kind of) clear (I didn't have a tripod ready, so steadiness was an issue):

More here and original for the first one here

Thanks to Jeff (L) for helping me with holding test objects near the drops for focus and for giving the idea to fill the sink with water instead of using a mug :)

Water 03/15 - 03/21 (Pere)

I had a lot of pictures of water this week from my recent trip to the keys so it was hard to pick, still I think that if I have time I would like to do something else with water but for now I wanted to submit the following two pictures:

This one is not so much for how pretty the picture looks but I wanted to upload a picture of this amazing animals. It was my first time close to a dolphin and it was love at first sight. They are so cool, cute, funny, friendly, amazing, that I just felt like I had to upload a picture of them





















My second picture is more about timing, bird just taking off from the water



Originals

Self-Portrait 03/08 - 03/14 (Sara)

I had a lot harder time with this topic than I thought I would. I wanted to incorporate silhouettes into my image, but had a hard time trying to create the silhouette indoors. I don't like to take pictures of myself, so it's good that this picture is pretty dark.

Self-Portrait 03/08 - 03/14 (Jaime)

Self portrait is a very interesting topic, not only do you need to capture yourself in a photograph, but you also need to capture your personality, which is the tough part.
Most of you that have known me for a while now, know that I don't take too many things seriously and pretty much like to be happy all the time, so that's what I tried to capture here.

I used my camera's remote, and surprisingly, it only took me 4 tries to get it the way I wanted. This was fun. I also uploaded the other attempts, which ended up showing a cool sequence, even though it was a new attempt every time.



No post processing.

Self-Portrait 03/08 - 03/14 (Mel)

I wanted to artify a pic I took of myself some time ago. I chose to make it in the Pop Art Style of Roy Lichtenstein


Here it is




I didn't quite like it and thought that this looked more like a Warhol than a Lichtenstein so I decided to Warholize by Lichtenstein

I call this technique "Warholchtenstein"



I am not very happy with the results but it did take me over one hour to do this and I can't get my time back so I decided to go with it


Click here to see the original

Light 03/01 - 03/07 (Pere)

So there was this picture that I wanted to take for a while, the corridor leading to my desk in HDR and today for a number of reasons, partly for not liking what I took over the weekend, partly because I felt rush to submit something, I decided to go ahead and take it.

I like how the corridor shows the artificial light coming from the ceiling mixed with the natural light coming through the offices windows and hitting the opposite wall...



Original

Light 03/01 - 03/07 (Scott)

I told Pere that I would try and not challenge his brain with my picture this week - however I think I have failed miserably with that task.

I wanted to capture shades in my light picture - so I setup on a bowl of cream + cocoa powder and snapped away as it was whisked. The texture of the smooth cream mixing with the grainy cocoa intrigued my eye, as did the blurryness of the picture I choose. The solid black at the bottom provides a jumping board into the rest of the shot, with the brightest patch just off vertical center, offset by the rightmost shadows. I thought that the slightly blurry aspect helped keep my eye moving and take in the entire shot, vs being stuck an specific element. No post-processing this week - the orange glow came from a slight under-exposure.

Light 03/01 - 03/07 (Mel)

I went to Shanghai this weekend and only took my point and shoot because I thought I was not planning to take any pictures but then I went to the top of the Oriental Pearl tower at night and regretted it.

Let there be light...



and fireworks..



Here is another photo that did not make it to the blog but I think is also good

Light 03/01 - 03/07 (Jeff)

Light is a very exciting subject. For this week's choice, I decided to capture this streetlight at dusk. I like the shine of the yellow-orange light that stands out against the blue sky. I also like the trees moving into the focus against the chaos of lines in the background.

I have a second submission from earlier, just one that I wanted to share. This was taken outside of a restaurant in Solomon Island, MD. This was easily the best picture I have taken with an iPhone:

No post processing this week kids! Went raw this time!

Light 03/01 - 03/07 (Jaime)

So i decided to use a model this time and little Jaime graciously accepted. I thought he was not going to be able to sit still during this (see caffeine topic), but he actually was great while we were doing this.

[Original]

I just had him sit down on the couch, then I grabbed a floor light and put it between him and the book to give the impression that the book was illuminating him. All the post processing i did was to bring down the yellows.

Here are a few others from our photo session.

Light 03/01 - 03/07 (Josh)

I am a huge Muse fan. Crazy enough that I went to both the DC show at the Patriot Center on 03/01 and the Baltimore show at the 1st Mariner Arena on 03/03. A big bonus was that Silversun Pickups, whom I had been introduced to through Rockband and now I was also a big fan of were opening for Muse. Seemed like space and time collided perfectly!

Ok, enough of that. As you now, concerts are a pain in the butt to take pictures at. Flickering lights, lights in your face, no lights, it's all there. Therefore, I picked out two pictures from the Baltimore show at the 1st Mariner Arena that I really liked. Because I was able to get into the show with my nice camera (just tell the security guard it's a simple point a shoot), I made it a challenge at the concert to take a bunch of pics and be able to pick two to post without editing. I loved these two pictures that I captured, one with very minimal lighting, and one with an over abundance of light. Enjoy.

Nikki Monninger, bass and vocals for the Silversun Pickups



Christopher Wolstenholme, bass and backing vocals for MUSE


To check out all of the pics that I took there, go to:

http://holybucket.smugmug.com/Concerts/2010-03-03-Silversun-Pickups/

Light 03/01 - 03/07 (Sara)

Kicking off the week early! I've been wanting to do a bokeh mask for some time now, but was too lazy to attempt it. I finally set the 24-70 aside, pulled my 50mm out of storage, and meticulously cut out little shapes and made some bokeh masks.


A couple of my favorites:
Hearts, because they're cute:

Post processing involved changing the temperature to make the color of the lights pink instead of yellow.


And a baby bat signal! This one I used the light outside Jeff's house.


The rest are here.


How I did it:
I needed a source of light that had a lot of little lights that aren't toooo bright -- the street lights outside Jeff's house are too far apart, and too bright (I used light across the street for the batsignal one because in front of jeff's house was too bright). After brainstorming, I realized christmas lights would work perfectly!


Then, I had to cut little itsy bitsy shapes out of black cardstock (I tried a yellow post it note, and it made my pics have a yellowish tint.. very displeasing). This was probably the hardest part, because it's very hard to cut little tiny shapes. A paper cutting stamp might have worked better:

Sin 02/19 - 02/28 (Pere)

I thought the deadline was Monday so we had time to process pictures taken over the weekend...

Anyhow, for me the word Sin brings the word Church to mind, those two words go hand by hand like no other.

So I wanted to take a picture of a Church Sin City style. I did not do a good job of researching a cool and scary church this time but the results are ok I guess...





Originals

Sin 02/19 - 02/28 (Scott)

I apologize - I sincerely didn't mean to miss the sunday deadline. (I'm actually still on a conf. call while writing this, so my description will be brief.)

Following most, I went with the church's definition of sin. I think recently the pope added a revised list of sins, including one relating to environmental mis-management. I found humor and sin in a fallen tree after the snow storm. The owner called a company called Tree Care, whom also removed live branches from other trees in the area, which clearly weren't causing any danger. I snapped the following picture of the horror - the previously living branches being mulched and flung through the air like yesterday's garbage.



I cropped and adjusted the color intensities for the above image.

Original:
http://www.scottrowley.com/images/photoclub/DSC_2986.JPG