#dedpxl01

Zack Arias recently started up an Assignments section on his new sub-blog, DEDPXL. I haven't shot a ton in the past 6 months (even for personal work), so I thought it would be awesome to jump in and see how well I can follow directions.... :-)

This assignments was "lines" which I found to be quite difficult. You see, When I think "lines" I think straight lines. Always. This little phenomenon of "only straight lines" pissed off my art teacher in college to no end. In this assignment, all of the shots are from my Android using the Vignette app.

So without further stalling:

Based on these results, my filter for black and white conversions is well beyond "a little muddy" and it would be useful for me to take a look at my phone photos on my color-balanced monitor more often. The top 2 photos are basically how I saw them in my head, while the last one I could have turned down the dark corners a little. Beyond that... I'm hoping for a C since I have a really hard time with following directions. :-)

Selfie Challenge!!!! #3

Imagine that Voice-Over-Guy that does work for the Movies...

The Self Portrait Challenge.... One Man.... One Woman... taking photos of themselves....

Okay... that's enough of that.



Last Week, Carolina posted a lovely mirror shot, per my request. You can see the results of that photo here: Self Portrait Challenge, Round 2

Her Challenge in response to mine? "A photo booth type series with a different emotion in each photo."

Brutal. Showing emotions is really hard for me... Being happy is great and all, but showing other emotions honestly, and in public, can be really hard. It reminded me of the Japanese and how they have one "mask" that they put on at work and something else when they're being truthful... It's called Honne and Tatemae. You can read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honne_and_tatemae


Anyway, with that in mind, and the fake emotions we put on, here is this week's submission:

Emote

Nerd Alert: Shot with my Android using Vignette with the "Holga" filter. Arranged in GIMP 2.6

Carolina, This week your challenge is to use off camera flash... but not just FOR your photo.... I want the Off Camera Flash to be IN the photo. ;-) (I'm sure you have a flash laying around somewhere....)

Self Portrait Challenge #2

Hello All 4 of you!

If there's one thing that I love (I mean, one thing of many) it's receiving a challenge from someone... If there's something that I love more, it's challenging someone else!

Continuing from last week, +Carolina Yocom and I have been challenging each other once a week to a themed self portrait. I asked her to make her shot with light bouncing at least once. She did exceedingly well and made the shot much more subtle than I anticipated.

Read her post HERE.

This week, her challenge to me was a self portrait "with very shallow depth of field, focus being somewhere other than them thar eyeballs."

I'm hoping I took things in a direction she didn't expect:

"Monocle" 

Nerd Alert: Pentax K10, Kiron 35-135/3.5 Macro, AlienBee 400 @1/8th. 1/125, f/3.5, ISO100 (I think)

My dear Carolina, this next week's challenge to you is this: Self Portrait using a mirror. Have fun!

Photo Challenge: For Carolina

Hello Everyone,

A while back, I challenged my good friend (and photographer) Carolina Yocom to a photo challenge during a Google+ Hangout. The challenge was something like this: Make a photo of yourself staring dead-on into the camera. The reason? She's very good at making self portraits of herself in beautifully lit poses, but never dead-on from the front. She fought with her photo, but her final portrait was excellent. You can see her photo on her blog.

In exchange, her challenge to me was this: Make a dramatic portrait of myself, but.... don't use off-camera flash. She knew what my weakness was! I light almost everything I shoot. I've spent the past year strengthening my "off-camera flash mixed with ambient light" skills, so being limited to what I could use without using off-camera was a challenge.

I fought with it for weeks...designing and redesigning the concept in my head. Tonight, I managed to capture this:

It's amazing how much you can get sick of seeing your own face while editing (for all 30 seconds that I touched this photo)... How do you feel about self-portraits?

Anyway, Caro, I hope you think I did okay. XOXO.


PS- For the photo nerds that always love to know settings for photos.... I don't know how I shot this... but I'm guessing: 1/2" @ f/8 @ ISO200. Light source is a single shop-light from the shed... probably a 100watt bulb. I dunno... I was busy.