Week 22: Music

Decided after a week where the theme was anger, something a little more calming would be appropriate. I learned a couple of things this week. If I run in the morning instead of at night, I'm much more motivated to take photos, and I have much more motivation with it staying light out longer. Motivation is a good thing.

I don't think I'm going to say much about the photos this week, just let them stand on their own.

Week 21: Anger

So after a week off I wanted this week to be a good one. I couldn't have come up with a better theme myself for this week, anger. This is perfect timing. I'm at the height of anger and frustration with my photography and I figured I could capture that in my photos. This is supposed to be a photo-a-day project, but I ended up banging all of these out in two days. It felt great. I finally felt creative and thought I got some really interesting shots.

This is easily my favorite shot. I feel like I was able to capture exactly the amount of frustration and anger that I feel when I can't think creatively. I also really loved how the lighting turned out on this one. I shot my flash through an umbrella behind me, then I also put another white diffusing panel between the umbrella and me. So any light you see is either wrapping around me, or is bouncing off the rest of the room. I think not lighting my face directly added to the thematic darkness of the photo. 

I call this one 'angry neck'.

Sometimes when you're angry you just want to punch something. I wish I could have gotten an action shot of punching something, but it's already hard enough taking self portraits without adding movement into it. 

This is me holding the camera by the lens, mad at it because it won't reveal its creative secrets. 

When you get frustrated with photography you throw and break stuff. Luckily no actual equipment was hard in the making of this shot. 

After the intense anger and frustration comes the crushing self doubt. I like how there's a little bit of light illuminating my eye.

And sometimes you just have to crush a hat with your hands. 

All in all I'm very happy with how this week went. It showed me that I can get some decent shots when I start feeling creative. Hopefully I'm over the hump and things will get a little easier from here on out.

Week 20: Night

I've been finding this project more and more frustrating. I've been really busy with work and coaching frisbee, which leaves very little time to take photos and feel creative. I feel like the last bunch of posts have all started like this. I took these photos as an attempt to jump-start things a bit. I figure I only have time to take photos at night, so I should make that my theme. Then I can embrace it. I ended up taking a bunch of photos one night, and then not really anything the rest of the week. I think there's also a bit of cabin fever sitting in, and it's hard to come up with new things to take photos of in the house.

After taking these photos I took the week off to try and rejuvenate. We'll see if that helps any with next week's theme. I'm encouraged by the fact that I know what I'm putting out sucks. I'm at the point where I know it's bad, but I don't really know what to do to make it better. I don't think it's execution, I think it's pure creativity at this point. I know I have the skill to execute my ideas, but it's those ideas that are failing me now.

I think it's important to keep churning away, because I'm not going to get better with my camera sitting at my desk. Hopefully I look back at this post as a turning point.

This is a photo I took of a little baby Adipose plush with a Curious George birthday hat. I stuck this little candle light in front of him and there was just something mesmerizing about his eyes. They're just black pieces of plastic, but somehow there's a curiosity in them. I can't explain it.

There's something I really like about this photo. It's not an interesting subject, or an interesting idea, but something about the background and the contrasting light and dark of the cat draws me in.

The main reason I like this photo is because of the reflection in the wood floor. 

This isn't great, but I kind of liked it at the time. I enjoyed the idea of taking a photo of something that's usually beautiful during the day and still trying to capture some of that beauty when it's lit by a yard light.

Lately I've been taking a lot of pictures with flashes, so I really wanted to work with the light I had and something that means motion. The first photo I took, I was just trying to take a picture of the light coming through our front door, but the shutter was way too long to make it crisp, so I decided to go with it and really move the camera around.

The only reason I find this interesting is because of the way the camera somehow only captured half of the numbers. This is the clock on our microwave. I'm not sure if it has anything to do with the refresh rate of the display. 

I was slightly inspired by the Pixar lamp with this one.