Perfect Wave

Day 27
As I was walking home after dropping my daughter at school, I noticed a man standing on the curb. He was staring out at the ocean. I was taking photos of the houses, trying to get a streetscape and suddenly I noticed the man sort of gasped. I followed his gaze and saw this perfect wave starting to peel off.

Day 26 Cents

Day 26
I waited all month to do this shot. I found a quarter, that's not even really very old, but it's all blackened,and dented. I paired it with a 1944 wheat penny that I found awhile ago, and took a macro photo of them on my piano, with the sun coming through the window. I really wanted to use this sooc, but when I saw it sharpened and saturated a little bit, I just had to keep it!

Cure For What Ales You

Day 25/365
This was fun, I wanted to shoot this bottle as soon as I saw it. My husband drank one glass, and decided it wasn't really for him, so I made sure the bottle got stopped and put in the fridge until I was ready to shoot it. I chose the bar at the top of the stairs because of the retro faucets, but I had a hard time balancing, because I had to stand on the penultimate step to get far enough away with my 50mm lens. I couldn't put a tripod up either. At first I was trying to get the top of the bottle in the shot too, but decided it didn't add anything to the photos, so I cropped it in a bit cosier. Running the old west action on it gave it a nice blurry look, and then I added the vintage texture that I got from kim klassen cafe, and I was really happy with how this looked.

West Basin

Took a field trip to the West Basin Municipal Water District with the Grades of Green docents today. It was really interesting learning about where our recycled water goes. During the tour, I took a bunch of photos, it was such a sunny day, and all the machinery looked pretty amazing. I played around with an HDR treatment in Photomatix and fell in love with the way the metal in this pipe looked.

Day 24/365

Potato Medley

I was actually quite proud of this photo, for a change. I bought these colored potatoes at Trader Joe's the other day because I loved the colors. I had a photo in mind, but hadn't formulated it yet. I had some time to devote to it today, so I put up the (grossly underutilized) tripod, and set the potatoes up in the light of the window. I tried some bracketed shots, and was really taken with the way the potatoes looked in the highest exposures against a nearly white background. So I performed a light HDR on it, then took it into Photoshop and brought up the contrast, saturated it a bit, then I made a lasso'ed the table only and duplicated the layer and did gaussian blur to it until I couldn't see any of the grit and noise anymore. The bowl was already white and pristine, so as a contrast to all this clean white background, I turned up the sharpness on the potatoes again to give the skin and eyes and scars a realistic, gritty look. Maybe not the way a stock photographer would do it, but I really liked it this way.

Day 23/365

LA's Garment District

I drove around downtown looking for great streetscapes. I love how many wonderful photo opportunities are there. I came across two different music videos being filmed, and the crew were very kind to me, letting me take photos, and one of them even gave me a CD of the band's music. I gave it to Chanel, I think she'll enjoy it. I finally went with this one because the street was so colorful, and every singly shop was closed. At 5pm! I'm sure they were closed all day, as there were virtually no cars, and I was able to walk down the middle of the street safely. A security guard one street over looked lazily over at me and then went back about his business. I hit the grunge button in Photomatix and really liked the effect. The shot I wanted was ruined from my handshake due to my stubborn neglect to use a tripod. It was of a parking meter, with the street in the background, it was fabulous. Except for the blurry ghosting, that is. This one is a close second, although I felt like the perfect symmetry was a bit boring. My mother loves it though, and wants it blown up.

Day 22/365

Embrace

This one is bittersweet because I worked on it forever, I think I spent a total of six hours trying to get the texture and fonts right. It was really a nice photo to begin with, I probably should have left it alone, but when I saw it with the golden texture, I fell in love, and devoted my whole day to getting it 'just right'. I didn't ever manage to get it to the point where I was really proud of it, the white font bothered me a bit, and my original fadey part into the frame got lost in the layer shuffle, and I couldn't bring it back. But I do like it, and I'm glad I did it.
Day 21/365