Week 28: Country

This week comes hot on the heels of last week. It's been hard to find inspiration lately, so I finally decided to just get outside and do some exploring. I knew there was an old church out in the country that I found while biking, and figured that was a good place to start. I came to a revelation while taking these photos, turns out lighting is really important. Who knew? I went out right around 7pm, so the sun was nice and low and was showering everything in a nice golden light. I've always knows that this is the best time to take photos, along with sunrise, but I don't think I quite realized how important it was, until I realized that 7 of the 8 of these photos would be crap without the nice lighting. So, without further ado, on with the show.

Grass, wind, and nice sunlight always makes a great photo. It's so simple, but can be so beautiful. There's something ethereal about the way it moves and I'm always surprised by the way it can be captured on film.

This is a statue of Jesus surrounded by three other statues. Not really up to date on my religion to know who they are, sorry. There was nothing inherently creepy with the statues the way they were, but I'm very happy to have pulled off something extremely creepy with this photo. I wonder why creepy is my go-to stance when taking photos of statues?

Just a rusty nail sitting on some concrete. I really didn't expect this one to be that interesting, but there's something about the textures combined with the lighting and the slim sliver of focus.

I like to take pictures of the moon, but it always turns out so small and meaningless. Or you have to use a huge zoom, and then you just have the moon, with no other subject. This is the first time I've been able to photograph the moon with another subject and actually be happy with the outcome.

Cicada husks. I loved how the light was coming in from the back and shining through the husks. I allowed the lens to flare a bit and the focus to wander and I think it all adds to the airy beauty of it all. I have another couple of crisper photos of this, but they just didn't have the same impact.

HDR time. I love love love abandoned buildings and this one was fairly fascinating. It was just a house off the road surrounded by overgrown bushes and trees. How does a house get to this point? How old was the house? Without HDR this photo definitely lacks a certain amount of pop. But I think I managed to get it without it looking too over-processed.

I staged this photo a tiny bit. I found this old rusted oil can laying on the floor and propped it up in the window with the sun coming through the trees behind it. It took me about 8 different shots to finally get what I wanted, but I'm really happy with the final shot.

One last HDR of the outside of the house.

Week 27: Kansas City

For our 9 year anniversary, Amy and I decided to head to Kansas City and go to a free art museum. The museum was pretty amazing and we only saw a fraction of it because of time constraints, but I'm sure we'll go back. It's kind of weird taking photos of art, but I guess it's just like any other subject.

This was a really interesting house outside of the museum. I just really wish the railing wasn't smack in the middle of the shot. Not much I can do about it. I suppose I could try and photoshop it out, but that would be a lot of work.

 This was an exhibit inside of the museum. It was a giant egg made up of random stainless steel cooking items. I purposely had the white balance way off, thinking I would fix it in post, but I really liked the warm tint to the light, so I kept it. Hooray for happy accidents.

 There's definitely a sadness to this one that I don't remember when just looking at these statues in person. Maybe I just didn't look close enough. All of their eyes are closed, but I still feel like they're somehow staring at me.

 I found this statue creepy. It just stared right at me, so I figured I'd embrace it and stare right back.

 I couldn't get a good shot of this sculpture. The only lens I brought with me was 100mm and I couldn't get far enough away to get the whole sculpture. Even so, there was so much going on that it was hard to find a focal point. I have many different shots, but I tried to line this one up with the tree in the background to give some sort of man vs nature symbolism.

 Sunset on the drive home. Not bad considering I took the shot through the window of the car while moving.

Week 26: Solitude

I haven't been posting to this blog much. I've just been too busy with other things. I had some time on my hands with Amy out of town this week, so this is an attempt to get back into things a bit. The blog has been a bit lonely lately, and I've been a little lonely with Amy gone, hence this week's theme.