It’s been raining all day and making those small pattering sounds on the window. So here’s my window looking out. Focus is on the reflections of the background tree in the drops. A wide aperture was used to make the tree branches totally out of focus and abstract in look.
As it’s Valentine’s Day I have taken a still life of a cookie for my daily Photo365 Project. I used a torch to illuminate the cookie and give it a warm glow. It was placed on a wooden bread board.
It’s that time of year when the snowdrops poke through the still hardened soil.
I like these first signs of spring. I have a few in the garden. When I say few it’s just that..three clumps of two or three flowers on each.
So choosing the right one didn’t take much time, but also didn’t give me much scope to pick one with a good shape or decent background.
Having said that I’m happy with the result, taken using a Pentax K10D and 10mm macro lens.
It’s my first natural flower shot of my photo365 project…no doubt others will follow.
Well I wasn’t actually chasing a rainbow, I was after a sunset, but once again it failed to materialise on one of the edges in Derbyshire. This evening I went on Stanage Edge, and saw some spectacular light, stormy weather, sunbursts, dramatic clouds and this rainbow.
I just had the Olympus EP2 with me with its 17mm attached so had to take what I could. The light started to get really good towards sunset and then the cloud came and put a stop to it. Enjoyed jumping and climbing about on rocks.
One of my best friends invited me out for a meal with them this evening…it was hard to refuse. A night at the jimja tree in Bawtry. This is an oriental restaurant mainly Japanese, with several areas to sit around and be cooked to!
The chef prepares the food and cooks it in front of you..and performs a set of tricks with the cooking utensils and eggs.
Eggs are juggled, slung and split, caught in the hat, bits of fried egg is tossed to you with open mouth in a game of catch, and many jokes thrown around as you watch the food appear and cook.
The food was incredible. I had Chicken Breast with Teriyaki Sauce and Fillett Mignon Steak with Yaki-Niku sauce, followed by Black Sesame Ice Cream. I’m now suitably stuffed.
My photo today is a snap shot taken using the Fujifilm F70 EXR of the chef starting to cook the various meats and fish for our table. It’s with flash as the ambient light was too low to avoid subject blur…and sadly the flash has delivered a hard shadow, but you get the idea.
A bubble blown through the rear end of a bottle cleaner using Fairy Liquid.
It was the photographed with a macro lens and cropped further in Lightroom. The lighting was a single studio light with softbox attached.
I couldn’t believe it when I saw the word Chilli on a packet of extra strong mints, but closer inspection proved my eyes weren’t deceiving me. Yes, as if extra strong mints weren’t hot enough, they’ve added red chilli to the mix. I had to try some. You get the usual enjoyable hot mint with a underlying kick. They leave your mouth tingling.
So today’s picture a simple photo of a mint and its packet.
A glorious day today, low winter sun streaming through the windows and through some internal patterned door glass. This lead to shadows and light shaped on the wall.
I took a few photos and then started playing around with the shapes, by adjusting the angle of the door so the light rays lengthened. I also noticed that a shadow of the camera was appearing just below the pattern, so I moved it to a lower position and held my hand spanned out in front to make a more interesting shadow. Light was also catching the lens of my reading glasses and threw even more light and shade to the wall.
This is the result of a carefully positioned head, door and hand. My Photo365 project is making me go off in experimental directions that I left behind many years ago and I’m thoroughly enjoying the revitalised abstract creativity. I hope you do too.
Some days my head does feel like it’s spinning, but not today, so I made it spin!
I’d always intended doing some spinography – where you set the camera on self timer and throw it into the air spinning as it falls down the shutter fires and you get a revolving shot. My first attempts today were average so I started to rotate the camera in my hand and the results were smoother but still too erratic and not too interesting. That gave me the idea of using a Lazy Susan (rotating platter)
I laid the camera on it back down, lens facing upwards in the centre and set the timer to 2 seconds. I then triggered the camera and set the platter spinning, the shutter fired and I got a 360degree turn and half before the shutter closed.
It’s a self portrait (I was looking down into the camera) and you can see the ghost-like person blending in with the circles.
A ceiling with more going on would give a different pattern.
What a day…miserable most of the day at home weather wise but I saw a break and thought it would be worth going out to Derbyshire with the Lee Filters Big Stopper to get some cloud movement shots against rocks.
How wrong I was.
It was cold and extremely windy. On the edges so windy I nearly got swept off my feet. Not good for one minute Big Stopper shots. So I stuck to normal exposures, even then the drizzle played havoc on the filters so getting a decent shot was virtually impossible.
Here’s one with the tripod low down and the Lee 0.6 Grad filter. I added the blue sky shade using Lightroom.
