Night Vision

I've been fascinated for a long time about how we can see in the dark, and how cameras can see in the dark. For instance, in the dark, if we close our eyes and open them for just a split second we can still manage to make out objects in the dark. If you are standing in the street you'll see a street light and a silhouette of a house, a car parked on the road, etc...

However if you take a picture in the dark for just a split second, you'll see virtually nothing. On the same hand, with a long exposure or a extremely high ISO (in the 20,000's or so, which yep you better believe cameras are at and above that these days...) you can actually see better than a human eye. That being said, I think there is a lot of complexity in that relationship to be discovered and explored. Here's a picture of my car, with a couple of lights reflecting off of it. By carefully finding the right exposure, I was able to capture exactly what it looked like through my eye.

Planted

Water Clouds & Oil

Love

...is all you need.

Bird's Eye View

Some things look different from above.

Bachelor Party!

A no-flash shot with a not-so-long-wishing-it-was-longer arm. I actually saw an extender pole for taking pictures of yourself the other day and it made me laugh, pretty hard actually, however it would have worked well in this situation! It was a fun night Kevin! There's nothing like a good beer after a couple intense games of Lazer Tag...

clouds and trees

A little long exposure tinkering.

details and contrast

I loved the variety of colors in this picture!

a different perspective

I thought a change in point of view would be nice. I'm going to do a few more from the roof, I saw several different things that I've never seen from the ground. It's truly amazing how different the world looks from 20 feet higher. It's also amazing all the things that are completely invisible from ground level too!

Happy Father's Day!

Colorado State Flower, the Columbine. I had never seen a Yellow one until today. Happy Father's Day to all you Dad's out there.

Expanding my Imagination

I'm almost halfway through the year and I realized I've been running a little low on creative ideas. Part of this is because I've shot at least 100 different ideas out of the 175 posts so far this year, the other part is because other than photography, I've been lacking in the creativity department. I'm working on the latter of the two.

Today however, I set out with the intention to take a picture of something with either conflicting patterns or repeating patterns. I don't think either of these two really exemplify that but I think I can justify them: The flower shot represented repeating patterns to me when I saw it, however I shot it a little differently then I had originally intended. I was looking at the lines of the fence in the background and the straight lines of the flowers also vertical in the foreground. However while I was framing it, I took a lower perspective and decided I would do it in black and white and make more of a 'fully framed' image out of it. The pattern is there, but a lot less prominent, I do think however that it became a better 'picture.'

The second is just plain silly. I was walking around and saw this in the rocks. I guess a conflicting pattern explanation could be the rounded masses of neutral colored rocks in contrast to the colorful stick person. However, they are both rounded and have nice curves.

More Black & White

So I shot these two pictures on the same settings (ISO, Shutter, Aperture) on both the film camera and on my DSLR. These are obviously the digital images.... However, it gave me an idea of what the actual film images may be like. Oh and then, I saw this depressing message on facebook. Apparently Jacob has no friends. It wasn't very nice for facebook to tell everybody though; people have feelings, even people with no friends, people like Jacob.

b&w

I've been shooting Black and White in my film camera this week which has got me thinking of things in black and white when I shoot digitally. I saw these Black and White balloons and thought it was a perfect example of that.

light

just messing around.

An Unusual Find

This monkey escaped the zoo but failed to find freedom when he fell captive to some recyclers.

light and light

Natural, Man-Made

Alright, so for those of you out there on Facebook, you may have heard that I recently got an old Film SLR. A Canon Ftb (approximately 1973) from my friend Kim. I took both of these shots today with both cameras. I'm getting them developed this week so we'll have to see them in comparison. And I've been loving the daily rainbows.

Woof

A 'lovely' shot from Bark at the Briargate. Not sure what the motive was for this event, however I do know that I think I saw 1 of every dog breed ever created. By the time I got off for lunch to go walk around, most of the dogs had already left.

And here's a cool shadow with 3 different shapes.

Hmmmm

Alright so definetly not my favorite shot. I liked this train track and the missing ground, however I'm not totally satisfied with this shot. Being however almost 10:30, I think it'll have to do for the day.

Pretty Random Today

Grass with Sprinklers

Grass with Sprinklers 2

Picture of light and movement

I saw these flowers and took a quick shot of them for myself but I ended up liking the composition a lot, so I'm sharing it too.

An attempt at a hands-on b&w conversion. This brings to light the fact that I do need to learn about Photoshop and how to do it. I've done very very little in Photoshop with the exception of a few facial touch-ups and some auto-setting conversions.

Trying to see everything beautiful.

I dedicate this picture to Annie & Kevin, who are seeing a real beach, not a parking lot with rocks that kinda looks like a beach.

Ahhh the joys of living in a commercialized world, next to a commercial shopping center that used to be a beautiful field, I feel sorry for those folks. Needless to say they are running a 'construction special' for their leases...

The Peak o' Pike

A orange fence.

Cheyenne Mountain

Rolls of Fence

a retaining wall for the construction site seen above^^

looooooong exposure

Well not that long really. 30 seconds to be exact, on f 22 for those of you who care. It was a test shot but I thought the exposure came out alright so I just kept it. I wish I had my other lens at the time though because downtown is hard to see. Also a lot of the smaller office buildings downtown aren't lit up at night, so I think I'll try this again sometime closer to sunset when the skyline is still visible but accented by building lights. This is my first attempt at a long traffic exposure. I've got a few ideas that I'll be trying soon so you'll get to see some of those.

Shot from the bridge at I-25 & Fillmore, Colorado Springs.

Okay here's part 2. After posting ^^the above stuff, I went back outside with my lovely volunteer, the Fabulous Audrey, to do some light painting in the park. Here ya go:

Sunny Day :)

(Post Dated 1 day)

Reflections of a church.

Cripple Creek (we drove by this when we were in Divide and thought it was interesting. Apparently you used to have to drive through this, but there wasn't any information about it)

Colorado Moon Rise

(This is post Dated 1 day, we were camping!)
Abbey and I went to Mueller State Park for a little camping trip. We were married at Mueller, which is in Divide, CO. We also met in Divide, however not at Mueller, but about 5 miles away. We have decided to make an annual camping trip in June to celebrate our marriage and the place we met. We decided to do that this weekend and had a wonderful time! Mueller State Park has Walk-In camping where you park in a parking lot and then carry-in all of your gear. The result: Secluded, incredible views, peace and quiet, and lots of little critters. We also went on a Full Moon hike with a Ranger/Naturalist which was awesome. We started the hike around 8:30 just in time for the sun to go down. We hiked about a mile and once we got to the overlook it was completely dark. We turned to the East just in time to watch the full moon rise over Pike's Peak. I totally suggest doing that sometime to all of you on the East Side who've never seen that. For sure the coolest 'Moon Rise' I've ever seen. It really got wicked cold that night, 28 to be exact. And we are in need of investing in a 'Colorado' tent (aka one that at least has windows that zip up, unlike our tent which has mesh all around which is wonderful for 28 degree wind blowing in all night long....) But it was fun even in the cold! Here are a few picks from that day. (Okay, so the pictures for some reason won't load right now, blogger says they are having service updates, blah blah blah, so I'll try to post the pictures again tomorrow, as well as posting todays post, ok? great, i'm glad you understand.)

The moon rising over Pikes Peak

One of the ponds at Mueller State Park

Baby Pines. The park is going through extensive Fire Mitigation now, so I assume most of these will be chopped down. Think of this as the 'Final Portrait'.

On one of the trails.

Sunset from our camp site.