Caffeine 01/22 - 02/04 (Pere)

The picture this week is the evolution of an idea.

I started thinking that I wanted to portrait caffeine as a drug / addiction and came up with the idea of the mirror and the lines of caffeine. Then at home I worked on the positioning of the items, shooting angle and lighting.

Special thanks go to Maraea for her feedback and valuable ideas :D




Originals in my Flickr account

Caffeine 01/22 - 02/04 (Scott)

EDIT: I can't get my picture to show this week (help anyone?). But it's here:
http://www.scottrowley.com/images/photoclub/steam.jpg
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Scott here. I'll get things rolling this week with some caffeine for you. A little known fact is that my senior thesis in college was studying the effects of caffeine had on bone density in rats. The study theorized that in exceess, caffeine would prohibit bone growth (resulting in a loss of bone density), but when combined with other hormones in small doses, it could stimulate growth and be used for elderly / cronic bone loss individuals.

Back to photography - Being from Seattle, when I heard the theme of caffeine, I immediately thought of Starbucks Coffee. And then thought about one of the first pictures I ever took when I got my Nikon - it was a later summer day, and the weather was a little cooler. This was back when we lived in DC and had a balcony, and Chrystelle was on the balcony reading a book and drinking a hot cup of tea. The tea was steaming out of the cup and i was able to capture the ebb and flow of the swirling air currents in a picture (which i can't seem to find now).

So from caffeine to coffee to tea to the common byproduct - steam, I setout to capture it once more. Unfortunately I wasn't very successful this time. I took this original into photoshop, and converted it into black and white, adjusting the strength of the color channels until I could sort-of see the steam I actually saw (swirling mainly inside the cup, then rising on the right half of the cup). Behind the cup is a tea box - placed for added caffeine appeal, but I think this only hindered the display of the steam.

Perhaps I should have gone with my backup idea - a picture of a group taking Jaeger Bombs in vegas.





Good luck to the rest of you.

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!

Sunrise - 01/14 - 01/21 (Jaime)

I decided to do a sunrise, i call these "Suburban Sunrise".

It was also my first attempt at HDR, for which I think i failed.

The first picture, is a merge of -2 to +2 exposure and I did not change anything else.

The second, is a merge of about 5 images and then playing around with the saturation and contrast to get it closer to what I was actually seeing, which was a purple/orange/pink sunrise (which Vanessa loved).

At least I'm getting bonus points for a sunrise, right?

Jaime.

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

These pictures were taken on Monday at work because the sunsets this past weekend were pretty lame. I was using manual focus because my auto-focus was being frustrating. I'm a big fan of auto-focus because I can never seem to get the image as crisp as I want it to be in manual focus, but being dependent on the auto-focus makes for blurry pictures when you're not using it. Anyway, while using manual focus, I found a creative way of displaying a somewhat ordinary sunset:

*I keep changing the order in which the pictures go (from clear to blurry, blurry to clear) -- I think I like this one better.

The original, pre-processed images came out pretty dull, but I was amused with the post-processed results. Originals and larger images can be found here. You'll notice that the image that's supposed to be clear is actually a little blurry because I'm not used to manual focus. :(

I'm not too thrilled with my pictures either, but I like this one because it's a little different from the one above. I gave the sun some time to go down (more pink! although I think this may be due to post processing):

On both sets of images, I changed the temperature because the originals had a weird hue (greenish?), and brightened them because I am a fan of brighter pictures (as long as there is still color).

Sunsets 01/14 -01/21 (Scott)

Scott here,

After struggling to find a sunset this weekend, I too brought my camera into work and shot from my desk. This turned out to be fortunate as the sunset tonight was brilliant. Following Pere's example, I will post two pictures. I apologize in advance because I enjoy dark photographs / stark contrast, so I posted one dark and one lighter photo today.



And a second:


I like the translucent aspect of the glass in the first, and how the sun almost appears like an eye. But the second has to be my favorite of the two (not extremely happy with either for some reason), but I think it is going to be my desktop background for a while. Full size pictures available by clicking.

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

Pere:

Here we go I'll jump in first...

A couple of ideas I had for a while now, sunset from the MSTR kitchen...

First I tried a bit of HDR:
































Original

Then after it got dark went for a regular shot:

Original

Not extremely happy in any of the above two shots, in the HDR one you can see the lights from the kitchen, the second one has the Pepsi vending machine on it :-( oh well