Fire 07/12 - 07/18 (Josh)

Originally I thought of doing an awesome sunset picture that made the sky look like it was on FIRE. However we already had done sunset as the first idea of MicroTography, so to not repeat myself, I decided to do something a little more conventional.


A conventional oven that is! hehe Ok, ok, so growing up we always had electric ovens, and the one we current have at our house has these cool even flames breathing out. I captured two shots that I liked.

The yellowish-orangish flash on the right was that the flames floating on the top of the oven while set on broil would hit something flamable and flash as it burn out the energy. I stared for awhile to grab one.

Here I did more of an angle, which made it very reminiscent of a bird or plane with the glow of the oven light illuminating it as the sun rises.

On the Ground 06/28 - 07/04 (Josh)

As you may have heard, I just moved to Reston with fellow MicroTographer, Sara Lee.

When we first came and looked at this place the Realtor told us that it seems like one of the other Realtors had opened the glass patio door and then left it open for a few days, potentially even weeks. Well, this meant that of course some bugs made their way in, and as a bug's life goes, died shortly thereafter.

Hence the theme of my photo. So I gathered up three different types of bugs and quickly arranged them. I like this one because the center bug is in a perfect angle to show the little extremities frozen into the sky. As dead as it gets.

Summer 06/14 - 06/20 (Josh)

Sorry, but with vacation and moving, I keep forgetting to get my pics together! But now that I'm back on track, I should be good to go!

So, backtracking a little bit, when I think of summer, the first thing that comes to mind is the 4th of July. It represents when people turn into the most summer-ish as possible with flippy-floppies, grilling, the beach, and last but not least, fireworks.

For the 5 years, my friends and I from college have rented a house in Bethany Beach, DE for the week of 4th of July. It's filled with the things above, and therefore I'd like to give a few shots that I was able to gather up this year:

My old roommate Anthony and his wife Naomi during the fireworks on the beach:



The iconical clock on the boardwalk at Bethany Beach:



This year I noticed that it seems like the seagulls have made the top of the clock also the designated toilet.

Black and White 05/17 - 05/23 (Josh)

I went to Puerto Rico for an extended Memorial Day weekend for a quick vacation. One thing I forgot to check beforehand and that we then found out was that it's currently the rainy season. Luckily our activities didn't exist around nice weather.

However, the two times that we walked around Old Town San Juan it wouldn't stop raining and thunder-storming. This ended up giving me some cool skies to work with, as in this one taken in one of the numerous park squares scattered throughout the fortified old city.

Office 05/03 - 05/09 (Josh)

A case of insomnia got me to drive around DC tonight looking for some good pics. I was looking for an old government office building with cool lighting.

However, instead what I found was a new office building with a really modern lobby with great lighting in a little sketchy part of DC around the Greyhound bus terminal that they're trying to revitalize with office buildings and condos, by the New York Ave Metro stop.

1100 First Street NE

Trees 04/26 - 05/02 (Josh)

Not all trees make it through a harsh winter if they cannot continue to nourish themselves at a slow rate. After this crazy winter in DC, there are quite a few trees around the office that didn't survive that struggle. This picture is in memory of those who didn't make it, and their brothers and sisters who honor them by going on.

Spoons 04/19 - 04/25 (Josh)

Spoons? Ok, cool.

I wasn't in the mood to make a spoon sculpture, or filling a spoon up with something (since I don't really cook). Instead I thought I'd go with the sub-theme of "SPOONS IN ACTION!"

So I grabbed my bike, my camera and headed down to the National Mall. After getting into a collision with a novice biker and de-skinning my left hip/cheek (if only the theme this week was skin), then I went down and forgot that they were having concerts on the mall with Earth Day Week. As you know there are a lot of food and DC souvenir stalls next to the museums. So it was time to stalk the tourists and welcome them to DC. Since it was a nice and warm day, ice cream was on the menu. Unfortunately most of them were on sticks or in a cone, but I found some people using spoons!

After stalking about 5 different people with their spoon usage, I decided to merge two pics of the same lady. She was by far enjoying her ice cream the most! And also, she definitely noticed me by the third shot as I tried to pretend that I was taking pictures of the National American History Museum. I was pretty sure she was about to walk over to me and say "wtf?", so I bolted. But I think I got too good ones here, as I was trying not to make her the focal point of the photo, but rather an "action of spoon usage" that accompanied the picture.

Macro 04/12 - 04/18 (Josh)

As with what Mel stated, my first urge was to take of something of nature. However, I also wanted to try something different. After the crazy B-day party for Raul at our house on Saturday night, all day Sunday I was pretty much just cleaning up. When I was doing so, I found on my little "stuff from India" section in my house, three little Indian God's that girlfriend from high school, Sabrina, bought me at this little Indian store in Paris. The tallest one (from left: Ganesh, Vishnu, and Shiva) are only about 1 inch tall. So what I did was in the background when I was in India at Neha's wedding, I bought two stone statues each about 8 inches high of Lakshmi (left) and Ganesh (right) holding up a marble slab painted and mounted inside of a frame. So the focus was on Vishnu in the middle and I tried to use the depth to make the statues in the back look really big, even though they were only a few inches taller. I hope I made Sara proud.




On a side note, I'm annoyed by how Shiva is angled too much, but I was still hungover when taking this, so it was the best I could do.

Spring 03/29 - 04/04 (Josh)

Seems like this year it's going to be all about extremes.

The largest amount of snow (per inch) recorded in DC.

And now it seems like we're going to have a really warm summer ahead of us as it's supposed to be in the 50s right now during the day as a high, and instead for the past week, we've been pushing 80. Therefore, it was only fitting that with the warm weather comes blooming, emerging, sprouting.

Most people think of tulips, cherry blossoms, lillies, etc. However once thing that I always like to examine, because at a world of it's own it has it's own type of forest is moss. As I went home to good ol' Johnstown, PA for Easter then I noticed that although it was really warm and almost 80, it hadn't hit up there as soon and therefore everything was still pretty dreary. But the moss was starting to grow like crazy because of the amount of moisture still on the ground left over from all of the snow.

So go explore the forests (thanks to macro) of moss:

As a bonus since I didn't have time to go see the Cherry Blossoms, this one is of a close-up of a Hyacinth (commonly known as baby's-breath) and it was one of the few plants that was growing around my mom's house. I like it because if you look at the pollen anthers (look at the full size), they remind of the small Aliens that would burst out of the chests of people in the Alien movie series. :-D

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 (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

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/

Sin 02/19 -02/28 (Josh)

We all know what a sin is. We all commit them as hard, or lack there of, as we may try not to.

As my good discussion/argument-starting friend Jeff Taylor would tell you, for us Catholics, as history has shown us, we've always been big on guilt to help people realize their sins. Guilt to pay your tithe, guilt not to sin, guilt to not be guilty. Whatever it is, if you ever go into a Medieval church in Europe and stare at the awesome stained glass, statues or whatever, you always get a sense that they're looking at you in pain or shame.

Therefore, I wanted with this picture to make myself as the photographer be the sinner and get that same sense of feeling.

Nothing scares me more than a scary Virgin Mary, Jesus, and some creepy angels which I was able to find at the national Gallery of Art, West Building. Using some posturizing, I was able to add some fire and brimstone inspiring colors and keep the really dark shadows on the eyes, making my skin crawl. Below you will find the original.

I'm off to confession.

Reflection 02/12 -02/18 (Josh)

Last night I returned from a snowboarding trip out west in Colorado. The mountains are gargantuan compared to the east coast. The longest lifts would take up to 10 mins to get you to the top. During this time you could chat with the people on the lift with you or as I did a lot, I found myself staring in awe and reflecting on a lot of things. A feeling that the mountains of the east can just not inspire.

Therefore, I thought, why not combine a perspective of staring into the distance plus my trademark pose that I've been capturing for the past 5 years? 2 hours of my novice Photoshop skills later, here is what I managed to produce.



Here are the two originals that I made it from.

Blackout 02/05 - 02/11 (Josh)

Ok, first off I'd like to say that Jaime read my mine and knew exactly what I meant by Blackout and what I'd do with the snow. And it came out great, good job Jaime, you made me proud.

Therefore, I didn't want to do anything like his and mimic so therefore, I went to the other definition of Blackout in my head which is when you drink too much, and then the next day you don't remember what you did when you were conscious, so you say that you "blacked out". Ok you guys probably already knew that. But anyway, I wanted to go with a fun picture that I took at MicroStrategy World Las Vegas two weeks ago that I took of Jorge Bujazan (who used to work in Support and is Jaime's cousin).

He doesn't remember me taking this picture of him when, so it's the perfect definition of blacking out. :-D

Caffeine 01/22 - 02/04 (Josh)

I was struggling with this idea. I saw Pere's post of something that contains caffeine, and Scott's emanation as well. So I decided to kind of mix both together for my first idea.

"Caffeine filled people trying to keep moving because it's so bloody cold." at the sculpture garden's ice skating rink. I was trying to get some good movement shots, but of course when I arrived there, they say "can everyone please leave the rink". FML. Therefore, I did Histogram equalization to give it a grainy/snowy feel to mix in with the few silhouettes I had.



And just because I couldn't decide on any idea concretely, I'm throwing in another pic below which is a play on the word and titled "caffeine burst"

Sunsets - 01/14 - 01/21 (Josh)

Ok, first I'd like to say, these two pics were not taken in the past week. I was in Lake Tahoe for the long weekend, and I left my camera in Sacramento at someone's house, so although it will be shipped to me soon, there is no way that I'll get my pictures in time. Therefore, I'll have to settle with the most recent sunset picture which was from my trip to Morocco.

This one was taken during a sunset camel ride at the sand dunes of Merzouga. The sky had just started to get dark and was a great spectrum of blue and purple.


Instead of a sunrise which I have, I thought I'd spice it up and show one of the pictures I took at midnight. It was a full moon and as it rose to it's peak I wanted to try and make it seem like a sunrise. After trying a million different things, I finally settled for a 15sec exposure and ISO 1600. I was really happy except for the stupid Spaniards (no offense Pere) who were sitting in this one dip ahead of me and kept turning on this green light.



Next post, I promise will be new pics!