Dogwood Week 7 - Portrait - Faceless

I had taken some pictures for this challenge earlier in the week but dismissed them as I thought that I could do better. So I tried to get a better shot using my wife and daughter as my models sharing an embrace on the couch. The back of one person's head would block the others. It looked great in my head but I couldn't get the camera to capture it.

So I decided to look back at the photos I took days earlier and I found one that I did like after-all. THE FIRST ONE I SHOT. My daughter was sitting down doing her homework and I took a few shots of her writing down math answers. It's just her little hands, but it worked.

Here is a breakdown of the camera settings:
Camera - Nikon D610
Lens - 24-85mm f/4.5
Focal length: 85mm
ISO - 100
Exposure - 1/10 sec.
Flash - Did not fire

Note: Those cinnamon hearts from the Candy challenge came in handy with teaching her addition and subtraction.

Dogwood Week 6 - Artistic - Candy

For the week 6 challenge, I wanted to use the lightbox that I had purchased for my wife to take photographs of the cards she makes. The challenge was to take a photo of candy in an artistic way and I figured some closeups with a white background might look great.

I played around with setting my DSLR to manual and reversing my 50mm lens to take some faux-macro images. Some of them worked out better than others, and you really had to pay attention to what you had in focus. I shot some cinnamon hearts in this way but ultimately felt that there was too much red in the image. Plus I felt like I was getting a headache from a bit of eye strain.

Then I moved onto the second bag of candy that I had purchased. (My kids loved me a little extra that day.) I first tried shooting a few shots of a pile, but then I started sitting the candy hearts up in staggered rows. I finally created the image below which I was happy with after trying a few different angles and focus points.

Here is a breakdown of the camera settings:
Camera - Nikon D610
Lens - 24-85mm f/4.5
Focal length: 85mm
ISO - 5000
Exposure - 1/160 sec.
Flash - Dd not fire

Landscape: Black and White

Five weeks in and I'm really loving this challenge. It could be any photo challenge really, I just love that it has reminded me that I get a huge kick out of taking pictures and sharing them with others.

This week was to take a black and white landscape picture, so I set out one lunch hour at work. There are a lot of brownstone buildings near the downtown core in Kitchener that are getting revitalized into some amazing work spaces. This is a view of the new Google Kitchener office at the Breithaupt Center building from one of the corners. If this picture was taken from the opposite corner you probably wouldn't believe that they were one and the same.

After I took a few pictures there I headed on to the downtown where I thought I would find more inspiration for a picture. The weather had some other ideas as the snow started coming down a little strong at times washing out any contrast that I was on a hunt for. The fire escape on the Lang Tannery building was exactly what I was looking for. The snowflakes add to the image but I wish two didn't land on the lens and cause an unappreciated blur.

I really enjoyed creating these black and white images that I can see me pursuing this artform more often. A book from the library has shown me that I still have a lot to learn. Bring it on!

Artistic Red Photography

For the week three challenge of the Dogwood 52 week challenge I posted a video instead of a photograph. While this was my attention starting out on this journey as I want to explore my videographer skills as much as photographer, but I realized that I need to do both in tandem. So over the weekend I shot anything in sight that was red looking for a perfect photo.

The photo below was taken at the Borealis Grille and Bar which is decorated with items from the same historical era as when it was a school. The red really stood out and I knew that I had found my picute.

Here is a breakdown of the camera settings:
Camera - Nikon D610
Lens - 24-85mm f/4.5
Focal length: 56mm
ISO - 640
Exposure - 1/8 sec.
Flash - Dd not fire