Sin 02/19 -02/28 (Jeff)

Sin is such a tough subject, there were mediums with which to explore, so I chose the obvious. Churches are ripe with controversy, whether it be on internal issues, or on political topics, so let's see what we can get with some pics.



This first picture is of the stained glass in St. Patrick's Church in DC. Here i have applied an orange tint to illustrate the traditional idea of Christianity, the linear journey out of the grips of hell into the comfort of heaven. Coincidentally, the glow from the hellfire comes from the entrance of the church, where members bring their sinful nature into the walls for absolution. I like the contrast of the white cross against the brick in the picture.



The Second picture is of the church itself and I particularly like the overbearing architectures amidst the background of buildings. It looks as if it wants to swallow you whole.

Originals:

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.

Sin 02/19 -02/28 (Mel)

One of the things that I associate the most with Sin is a Snake because of the biblical story of the original Sin.

Buddhist people do not consider snakes evil and Naga scuptures are very popular in Buddhist temples. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naga_%28mythology%29)

I tried to blend these two concepts and decided to take a pic of a sculpture of Mucalinda, the king Cobra that (according to legend) protected Buddha from the rain. I found this amazing sculpture in a temple in Chiang Mai, Thailand.


I incresed the contrast in post processing to make it look darker.


Here's a pic of me with the Naga to show the size of the sculpure and its placement in the temple.

Sin 02/19 -02/28 (Sara)

One of the seven deadly sins, as per Dante Alighieri in The Divine Comedy, is extravagance. During my vacation, two friends decided to do a vodka tasting, which involved going to a few liquor stores and purchasing every little bottle of vodka we could find. The next step was to drink 15 shots of vodka (a second smirnoff is missing from the image). Needless to say, they learned their lesson after the 8th shot.

Post processing involved brightening the image -- indoor lighting always makes me sad.

Original

Sin 02/19 -02/28 (Jaime)

Mmmmm chocolate!

Blanca and I went to the Chocolates Galore and More event in Loudoun this past weekend.

Talk about sin. The pic above is from one of 3 chocolate fountains we saw. I like how you can clearly see the smooth texture of the chocolate as it comes down the fountain. The best part? It tasted better than it looked.

Here are a few others that will surely make you diabetic. Jeff, please use caution.

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.

Reflection 02/12 - 02/18 (Jeff)

Hello All, This is my first post. So here's hoping the first time is special, even though we all know it will be confusing, painful, and sloppy! Feel free to let me know what I have messed up! Enjoy!

Santana's Prayer:



Santana Moss was a very close friend of the late great Redskins Football player, Sean Taylor. Both attended "the U", the Univeristy of Miami, and became close during Sean Taylor's tenure in Washington. Although Sean Taylor's death rocked the National Football League, in particular it affected fellow Miami alums as well as teammates, including Santana Moss. What this photo is capturing, is the pre game ritual in which Santana prays before the game for his safety and then says a prayer for Sean Taylor, and his surviving family. Fans are yelling at this point to sign autographs and give some high 5's, but he remains focused, and the crowd and surrounding areas melt away. His reflection leaves high single-minded of purpose, focused and inspired.

Here is the Original Pic:

Reflection 02/12 - 02/18 (Jaime)

I really love this topic, unfortunately, I did not have enough time this week to do what I had in mind, but I'm still happy with the result of what I could do.

This is a view of driving on the toll road reflected off of sunglasses, reflected off of the rear view mirror...

Also, here are a few other reflection pictures that I've taken.

This one is my favorite.

Reflection 02/12 - 02/18 (Pere)

I started playing with my Petanca Trophy from 1994 in my old room and I think the results are quite playful and nice. My room is small but has a double mirror in one of the walls so the reflection from the trophy together with the back mirror added tons of content to the pictures...

I quite like these two






P.S. For those not familiar with the great sport of peatanca

Trophy was for second place :-(

Reflection 02/12 - 02/18 (Scott)

I made it a goal this week to not take a dark picture, and couldn't quite decide whether I wanted to explore a reflection of the self, or a mirror style reflection. I also played a little with refraction and ultimately choose the below image - shot on my double pane window, reflecting the TV image, but each pane refracting a different wavelength (color) of the olympic speed skating competition.

I like this image alot as the double lines which should be parallel play with my senses, contrasted by the off-center slightly blurred human image, with the slight shadow drifting right.



Original, un-cropped, here.

Reflection 02/12 - 02/18 (Sara)

For this assignment, I really wanted to go to a lake nearby and take a reflection picture. When I got to the lake, however, everything was frozen, and ice does not give off the reflection I was hoping for. In any case, I was inspired at while fidgeting with my itty bitty toys on a conference call.



Original can be found here. Post processing elements made the background darker (because our cube walls are ugly), increased contrast (to make it pop more) and sharpened the image so that the reflection was more clear.

Blackout 02/5 - 02/11 (Vihao)

A little late, but better than nothing. My little sister in the woods with a Maglite.

Blackout 02/5 - 02/11 (Scott)

First, I had some technical difficulties with my posting image last week. If it doesn't display in the blog, let me know, and click on the links below the image. I struggled with this week's assignment, and followed a theme of the drinking variety - specifically the day after when you wake up with bloodshot eyes and the world blurs together.

My picture is of icicles hanging off our gutter, merging into the treeline in the distance. At night, it was difficult to distinguish them, so I wanted to pull that effect into my picture.



Note: the original picture was washed in red as I took this picture in my office, with the computer on netflix.com, a very red page. I post-processed and grayscaled the image to bring out the blending of icicles and trees.

Original:
http://www.scottrowley.com/images/photoclub/DSC_2896.JPG

Blackout 02/05 - 02/11 (Sara)

I don't know if I took this too literally, but I took a few pictures because I was having fun :)

1. I took this picture last week as an attempt to do "caffeine", but clearly, it does not fit caffeine. In any case, though I took this last week, I thought it was rather fitting, so I am going to use it. I set up my camera on a tripod, turned off all the lights, and used a flashlight and went crazy with some circles. My first light in the dark picture (sorry, I didn't upload the original):

2. I didn't lose power through the first snowstorm, and I hope I don't lose power through this one, but I went outside to grab something and caught this:

I liked how the branches from the tree appear to be reaching out into the light in the middle of the darkness

3. Last picture: As I was re-entering Jeff's house, I saw a flicker in the door, and thought this was pretty cool as well:

I had fun with this week's assignment :) The rest of the pics and the originals (minus the first pic) can be found here

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

Blackout 02/05 - 02/11 (Jaime)

So i didn't exactly know what Josh meant by blackout, so I'm doing the first thing that came to mind when i saw this and saw the snow coming.

I really like the contrast between the white snow and the black background at night. When i did the negative version of this, i found it really cool how it brings out a lot more detail that you can't see easily in the original (like the branches underneath the trees).

Here are a few other pics with their negatives.

Blackout 02/05 - 02/11 (Pere)

Really struggling to follow the blog from China, the government has blocked access to all Google blogs :-( but despite the technical difficulties I still dutifully took my weekly picture...

I took a picture of a guy taking a picture of what is supposed to be a wonderful lake scene, unfortunately the weather "blacked out" the scenery for that afternoon...

Nihao to everyone from China!

Caffeine 01/22 - 02/04 (Sara)

Sorry for the late post! I don't know why but I was feeling a bit uninspired.

So I took a couple pictures. My original idea was to take a picture of coffee in a cup and capture it jumping out by dropping things in the cup. My first thought about caffeine is that when you're on it, you're super jumpy (thus, caffeine jumping out at you). This was an extremely failed attempt, and after an hour of frustration and failure, I will settle on these:







If you see the wispiness, that's actually marbles I was dropping into the cup that were flying out. Eventually, I tried to slowly drip more coffee into the cup.... but that got really messy fairly quickly:







These pictures represent my state of mind when I drink caffeine at a time when I should actually be asleep. In my times of relying on caffeine (college), I realize I never felt all that hyper when under the influence of caffeine. Instead, I was walking through life like I was half dead, messy, incoherent, etc.

Originals are here. The only changes I made were contrast (stronger contrast) and I tried to reduce the saturation on the images and bring out more of the brown to make the coffee stand out stronger (and to have a vintage-y look)

Caffeine 01/22 - 02/04 (Jaime)

I had a very similar idea to Josh, but I wanted to use my kids as models for this. Specifically, little Jaime, who to me, is the human representation of caffeine (as many 5 yeard olds are).

Original here

I caught him doing his daily run this morning trying to tackle me.

Here are a few other shots. [1] [2] [3]

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"