i received a parcel that took my breath away today.

a snoozy day all round.

was absolutely the best place to be today. rubbish picture, but i had some serious relaxing to be getting on with.

another one shot day today.

it takes a ridiculously short shutter speed to freeze water like this.

coming out blinking into the light today, but still rocking the monochrome thing. i love the way the shadow melts away at the edges. it struck me how similar the lines in this composition are to yesterday’s, i must be working on autopilot at the moment. i wonder how zen these are likely to get before i have to start stepping back and allowing a bit more in. i’m sure it’s some kind of reflection of my current state of mind; blank, waiting…

our house would be pretty much empty without it. my heart really wasn’t in it tonight, but this gave me a chance to play with lens correction in photoshop, which i hadn’t tried before. i get noticeable barrel distortion with this lens (sigma 30mm 1.4 - love/hate), is nice to find out how easily that’s corrected.

this little fella has lived on the moonscape tiles under our stairs for years.

another one for my “after dark” challenge. flying completely manual for this one, i tried to take it as dark as i could while keeping it clear and reasonably balanced. it prolly would have helped to have a few brighter highlights somewhere, but i wasn’t in any position to adjust the available light. i totally forgot to increase the film speed, but i think if i had i may have lost some of the crispness of the hair highlights, although i guess it may have gained me additional sharpness due to a faster shutter speed or i could have stopped down and gained some dof. ah well live and learn, i still like this but that’s prolly cos she’s my baby.

edit: i had a play at making a b&w version and i prefer it. i still like the subtlety of the original but i think the b&w makes a better image.

some day soon i’ll be able to see my feet again.

this is the first of my daily pics i’ve made any significant changes to. the camera balked at the bright pattern on my dress and i had to tinker significantly with the levels to get the texture of the fabric back. thanks to all the radiant vista tutorials my selection skills are improving, but this one still leaves a little to be desired.

i got to pick the project 365 challenge of the week this week. i was going to choose “lucky” because i’ve been struck by a few serendipidous images lately, but then i realised the main point of the challenge is to give some ideas/structure for taking new pics for that week, rather than just digging them out of the archives, and lucky is a hard thing to shoot deliberately. so i went for “after dark” instead.

i might try to take all my pics after dark this week, if only because then it frees my daylight hours from the pressure to get the day’s shot. not that i’m finding it a huge pressure, but i am spending more time on it than i’d like and when the weather’s as foul as it’s been here lately it can be a bit grim to get to 5pm without a picture and realise the light is already pretty much gone for the day. this way i don’t have to start even thinking about it until 9pm.

i wish this was my bed.

i got my xpro pics back today (hats off to spectrum imaging’s lightning-fast turnaround) and i have to say i’m really enjoying that all-analogue weirdiness, especially after all the muted colours of the polas/ttv. the overexposures where my lightmeter died show a really extreme colour shift (to red/magenta, a surprise when i was expecting blue from the tungsten balanced film). i prefer the in-betweeny ones that are correctly exposed but brightly lit/high colour subjects. i really like the building site ones but they’re from the sunday and i already have a pic for day 10.

i spent far too long for a very pregnant person lying in an awkward position setting up this shot, waiting for them to drift into the frame. when they finally did i had to take what i could get so they were way off centre and i’ve cropped this. i don’t want to make any other adjustments to these pics as i reckon it defeats the object. in an ideal world i’d darken the foreground, but i’m pleased that this has come out otherwise fairly like i’d hoped.

except of course that - unless you’re using safari - i can’t show it to you as i see it (you have to take my word they’re even better than they look here :D) thanks to something to do with colour profiles that i kind of get and kind of don’t. i’d really like to show these fully saturated/contrasty as that’s pretty much the point. i understand what i’ve read about it, but i can’t get the supposed fixes to work for me, so far. in my quest to get a handle on it i have calibrated my monitor though, and adjusted my gamma from mac-standard 1.8 to pc-standard 2.2. my whole online world looks rather different, much more contrasty. i can’t say i care for it much at the moment, but i guess my images (especially the polas that i match on screen to what i have in my hand) will prolly lighten up a whole load as a result.

links for later ref: here, here, here,

is it cheating posting a diptych? the second pic was very much taken with the contrast in mind, although the amount of movement is, let’s say, an added bonus. the first was taken against yesterday’s still life setup (tissue paper over the window) with a tripod and is probably the sharpest pola i’ve made yet. the second was taken in late light /rain/wind, hence the movement. i love the colour of the original, although i’m having various colour issues at the moment, more of which anon.

i was really disappointed that this came out so blurred. it was pouring with rain, the light was very low, i was trying to balance an umbrella between shoulder and chin, and at the same time i was trying to explain to M that while i didn’t want her in shot i didn’t want her on the other side of the road either.

i was planning to go back out and reshoot another day. and then i realised that if i wanted to post something that pretty much sums up the way my life is (as opposed to how i aim for it to be) this would be that shot

i think these chimneys are likely to become a bit of a leitmotif in my 365 pictures. been playing today. i stumbled across the through the viewfinder flickr pool and thought i’d have a go. this was shot through the viewfinder of the sx-70. obviously it’s a bit trickier with than with a medium format camera, but i got interesting enough results that i’d give it a go again. ideally not indoors, in the late afternoon on a rainy day, though.

for the first time i found i had a difficult choice of images today. two very different ones that i liked almost equally. this one’s pretty bland, but it’s delicate and as far as i’m concerned it’s the best picture of a magnolia i can take (heh, that sounds like a challenge…). the other one i felt was a stronger image but would benefit from some more work. so i can revisit it another day, when i’m feeling technically inclined, or when the light’s more interesting and hopefully get more out of it.