Week 33: Reflections

I was excited about this theme this week. It was my first time in a while really taking a theme and working with it, instead of working my photos into a theme I determined after taking the shots. It was nice, in a way. Having a specific them forces you to look at things differently. You're not just looking for anything that could be a good photo, you're looking for specific things. It's somewhat limiting, but forces you to grow creatively. Unfortunately I found this week kind of a bust. I'm not really happy with any of the photos and I had a hard time finding things that I found interesting. Not sure if it was the theme, or if it was me. I also had a few ideas that I thought were going to be interesting that totally failed. I really wanted to try to take some photos of reflections in a camera lens, but they all just turned out bad. I don't think my problem was finding good sources of reflection, I think it was finding interesting subjects within those reflections. Finding subjects seems to be a continuous struggle for me.

This was a shot that at least forced me to move around a bit to get what I wanted. I took some other shots of a tree reflected in this water and it wasn't working. Then I decided to move around until I got the sun to nicely reflect. I do enjoy when I have an idea that I can actually execute.

Not thrilled with this photo. It's the center of a sign light. There was a lot of reflective chrome, but it didn't really reflect anything. I tried moving around to get something, but it was just kind of muddy.

I can't decide if I like this shot or not. I like the contrast and the texture caused by the wet pavement, but I don't find anything about it particularly interesting.

Not much to say about this one, kind of boring. Just a reflection of my legs in a glass door.

This one I kind of enjoy. It was another one that I knew exactly what I wanted and worked until I got it. This was shot through a window and I managed to get equal focus with what was reflecting in the window and what was inside the building. I really love the composition and how it's really hard to tell exactly what you're looking at. The inside and the outside images blend really nicely together.

There was just something about the texture of this light, with some condensation under it, that I liked. 

This was one of the few water reflection shots that I liked. It sort of looks like the tree has been partially erased.

Not quite sure how I feel about this one. Again, I think it would be better if I could find something more interesting reflected in the mirror. 

Week 32: Time-lapse

I decided to do something a little different this week. I have always loved doing time-lapse photography. It's like long exposure photography to the extreme. You really don't know what you're going to get until you've edited all of the photos together and created a video. It's funny, I'm usually not a patient person. I barely have the patience to take a 30 second exposure and see what I get. And yet, I'm somehow able to have the patience for time-lapse. Don't get me wrong, it's difficult. I often have to sit out with my camera for over an hour to get a shot. And then you get back to editing and find out the shot just didn't work. But the payoff makes it worth it. Being able to see motion that's usually imperceptible to the human eye.

I've done some time-lapse in the past, but it was usually just single shorter events. I never really had the drive or the patience to get enough shots that I could piece together into a full-length clip. This week was my attempt to finally do that. I've mixed some old shots with a fair amount of new shots to get a video that was long enough, and overall I'm quite happy with it. It could certainly be better, but that's for future videos :-)



The Universe Within from David Hilgendorf on Vimeo.