Day 355: Last Day

That title applies in that this is the last day of 2008 (It's been a good year!) AND the last day for this poor pine-beetle infested tree in our back yard/neighbors front yard. They scheduled some tree cutters to come out and down the dead infested trees, so mom came running into my room this morning to wake me up at the un-break-like time of 9 am asking me to get pictures. I did, and here it is. One of the big trees in our much-photo-graphed-back-yard, falling to it's death. Because this isn't that special a picture, I included all those really cool links to most of the pictures of my back yard from my whole project. Can you guess which one is my favorite?

Day 354: Fire City Redux

I have been playing around with HDR photography of late, as you may have noticed with Day 351. Anyway, my goal for tonight was to go out on the big ol' rock behind my house and get a nice post-sunset picture (or set of pictures) of the city to try to stitch together into and HDR. It didn't work out because it was far too windy, but what I did get were some awesome firey pictures of the fast-moving clouds. This was taken up near ISO 800, and about a 30 second exposure. It really contrasts with Day 338 because tonight was an almost-no-moon type of night. The only lighting here is city lights and the stars. Oh, and I forgot to mention, this image is straight from the camera, literally. No editing, cropping, or anything whatsoever was done to it except resizing it before posting :)

Update: Just to clarify I guess, THIS is not the HDR picture. It was an attempt at it, but it didn't work out because images wouldnt align and I couldn't get the correct exposures needed on such a dark night. All is ok though, I eventually did succeed, with this picture.

Day 353: Lost in the Woods

...with only 3 strobes, a camera, and a tripod. What did Survivor Steve do? He took pictures.

So this was taken in my back yard yesterday. I'm not particularly sure where I got it, other than that it takes advantage of the grand total of all 3 of my new strobes. I was going for a little more mysterious feel, but it turned out you can pretty well tell the setting of the picture. Alas, some ideas just don't quite turn out. It was still fun to take the picture, other than the cold. I placed one flash directly behind me, and two just out of frame and also behind-ish me on camera left and right. The editing basically just included desaturating it and a little levels editing.

Day 352: Presents and Gifts

Ok, so this a little late, but it's basically a display of everything I got for Christmas (not counting my awesome new iPod-compatible-pillow!) Let me explain, the train you see on the left is my new train, as compared to my old young-childhood toy wooden train that had the same build and paint job. I thought it was great that since it was this little set that inspired my love of big train sets it was fitting to have the bigger train set have the same train engine. Impeccable(and from what they tell me, unintentional) planning on my parents part! And best of all it's all been lit with my other Christmas present, two more strobist flash kits from MPEX! (that's short for Mid West Photo Exchange) which in nerd speak basically means I have 3 big lights now, with the umbrellas and all. It's a very nifty set-up.

Day 351: The Great Christmas Tree

This folks, is my household Christmas tree. I really like it. We've had the same one for about 14 or 15 years now... but it still works great! (It's fake... in case you hadn't caught on yet.) Anyway pictures of it tend to turn out very trippy, so I tried to take this one and edit it to be a little more normal, but it ended up looking very HDR-esque I think. Which get's me thinking, I should really try my hand at some HDR photography before the year is over... don't you think? There was of course a little extra intentional photoshopping done to kind of make it look more glowy and stand out better.

Day 350: T''was The Day After Xmas

...and all through the house, every creature was stirring, yes, even the mouse.

So here's the "skinny": I forgot that I did nine portraits, so instead of my week, I have 9 days, which puts me two days over. This should have been the day before Christmas, but I had those other pictures which I really did feel I wanted to post. Anyway, I'm not going to bother going and fixing it all, so if you would all kindly pretend these next three days were posted two days earlier, it'll all start to make sense. Haha.

So this is an ornament on our tree. It's my favorite of them all because it moves! the little train goes around and around, and once in a while (a lot less often now that it's so old) it makes a little train whistle sound. It's been a part of our tree for every year I can remember, so this ornament has that "Christmas" feeling to me more than any other.

Day 349: From the Star

Merry Christmas Everyone!

This panorama was taken from our Christmas local star. Sure, it's not your typical Christmas picture, but I have those for tomorrow :)There's a big star shaped light ring that takes up a good portion of the mountain range near monument that is lit every year through all of December. Trevor and I, while exploring Palmer Lake today, decided it would be a fun and unique experience to try to climb all the way up to the star. Long story short, it was an 80 percent grade and Trevor got pretty far, but it took all my effort and crazy rock climbing skill (not) to get to the very bottom corner of the gargantuanly beastlike ornament. From there I quickly took a few panorama shots of the view, and this is what I got once it's all stitched together. I had to do a little creative editing because the sky way well exposed and the ground was not, but that's all fixed now. I'm really impressed with how this panorama turned out. I't just a great example of a beautiful view and a quaint little Christmasy town. You can even see the frozen lake Trevor and I ventured across!

Day 348: Christmas Tradition

Every year my mom and I go to a local pastry shop where they give $30 gingerbread house "lessons" The whole experience is really more like having the house built for you and then having an unlimited-candy-and-icing party. It's great fun, and tasty to eat afterwards!

Day 347: The Ninth and Last

Whew, that's good. I was wondering how much longer I could hold out coming up with unique numerical name. :P I'm kind of in a hurry now to get to a new years party, so excuse my rudeness if this one is a little shorter than the others, but it probably won't be.

This is rachel. It's not actually one of the photos we did at the photoshoot on Sunday, mostly because it was 9 degrees outside and none of our ideas panned out. I took this from the pictures taken on Friday after the English final. We had about an hour of extra time, so we all just hung out and I took a lot of surprisingly good candids of people. This i think is my favorite of Rachel from the day. I hope she doesn't mind I switched to this from the set of pictures I took on Sunday. It's just that they all turned out blurry and orange... :( Anyway, Rachel and I have been friends I think pretty much ever since 7th grade. I do know however that she was in my 6th grade second semester homeroom with Mrs. O'Brian. Since then I believe we have been in almost every English and History class ever together.

Day 336: Acht!

This is Steve, my very own namesake. I think our friendship in 7th grade started simply because we thought it was awesome that we shared the same name. I took his portrait at his house waaaay downtown, and let me tell you some of those old houses have really awesome back yards. Anyway, I had to get up before my average (noon) wake up time on the first full day of break to do this portrait, but I'm not complaining at all. Steve's been a great friend to me through the last 5 years, and he's a really a fun person to talk to, and incidentally so's the rest of his family. We actually had a very invigorating conversation about film and digital photography once I got to his house today. It was fun :)

Day 335: Seventh of Nine

Kelsey is my seventh picture of nine. By the time I got her portrait finals week was over, and I had all the time in the world, so I actually got more than 15 minutes to get her portrait. She probably wins the award for cutest picture of the week too. I had a lot of fun doing this shoot mostly because she's all smiles when she's around her horses. You can definitely tell it's what she loves more than anything. Anyway, Kelsey and I knew each other more as acquaintances or friends of friends for most of middle school, and at some point along the way an inside joke took hold saying that we were "Married." (it happens to me a lot. You'd be surprised.) Anyway, I believe our friendship kind of came into being during the year we were...ahem..."married" (Nothing like marriage to lead to friendship right?) and since then we've just been great friends. She's a lot of fun to hang out with and we've had some interesting times around the downtown Manitou and Garden of the Gods areas, just hanging out and goofing off. I think a more recent memory I share with Kelsey is getting our licenses on the 16th of June. That was a fun day, and it was no later than the 17th that we exercised our newfound freedom by driving around town following each other for the day :)

Day 344: VI

Here's the sixth of nine! It's Tali, which is short for Talisha. It's a pretty unique name to fit a pretty unique friend. We've been friends since 7th grade band landed us in the spots of the only 2 saxophonists. Since then we've been through a ton as friends, (mostly Mrs. Baker and her playing tests mind you...)but in the end everything works out for good, and though we don't get to talk as much now that neither of us is in band, I think we're still great friends. I have so many fond memories of Tali. A ton of them are of course from being band nerds, so I suppose I could share our average day in band. It basically consisted of getting there just in time to inter the band room, grab our folders and instruments from our respective lockers, play a few badly tuned notes, and then sit and talk until we got yelled at. After that of course, we'd play for awhile, and then go back to talking between songs :D And of course if we ever needed a pencil to mark our music, it was either the trumpet or trombone section... they always pulled through for us. I'm sure that the number of times our band teacher and her various aids must have told us to basically "shut up" could not even be numbered. But we had fun, and I suppose we might have even gotten a little better at playing saxophone over the years. Not much though :P

Day 343: Fifth and Tom

Yes, that's right. It's my fifth of the portraits, and it's subject is none other than Tom. I think this picture pretty well captures Tom. He's a very intellectually inclined person, and a good friend to have in case you ever need your arm br- I mean, a shoulder to lean on. Haha. He's also fun to talk to. Just that kind of person. Oh, witty too... can't forget that. Anyway, We've been friends for about the same amount of time Trevor and I have. We all met around the same time. I think one of my funniest memories of Tom is that every day after school in 8th grade I used to pull out my cell phone and do videos of our various antics around the little paved area outside the band room. We did everything from annoying Reese and Carol to stealing Trevor's tuba. We definitely had fun doing that. Ah, here. I've found one of those very videos: Check it out!

Day 342: Trefour

That's somewhere between French, his name, and the number. It's a hard-to-figure-out title but basically what I'm trying to say is that this is my fourth friend of portrait week!

Ok, so here's Trevor. His face, I mean. His image, his soul. It's all captured right here, in this picture which was taken in a parking garage downtown. I think the parking garage worker lady was a little suspicious of our mysterious camera-toting intentions, but we were good and orderly, and thus avoided arrest. :D

Trevor and I have been the most unlikely of best friends (Football player vs. Nerd) for a very long time now. I didn't really know him through most of 6th grade, but somewhere along in 7th grade I managed to sit down with Steve, Tom, Reese, Trevor... that group and I ...er...fitted?...right in. Haha. I don't know if I have a specific earliest memory of Trev, and I really don't know why. I do remember the get a room joke from the Unite retreat we had a while back though. A few of my friends had made a point of making out quite obviously in the seats next to me in a theater, and when I told Trevor about it the phrase "get a room" came up in conversation, and from then on it really took on a meaning of it's own. We definitely made a poster and hung it on our cabin door at church camp. "The Get a Room room" I'm not sure that had a particularly good meaning now that I think back on it, but we certainly got some entertainment out of it. :)

Day 341: Portrait Three

This is Lor, ...at least that's what she'd like you to think. Her real name is Laurion, and I've always been partial to that name rather than her nickname, although my spell checker never seems to like it at all. We first met way back in Sixth grade when we were in the same homeroom, Mrs. Stanley's. We were pretty much enemies back in the day, and for some reason we had a vendetta but that all settled out and we've been friends for about 5 years now... I probably had the most fun so far shooting (I mean that in a nice, photographic way, I swear) Laurion lor because although she'd never give herself credit, she's a very photogenic person and we have a lot of fun hanging out. I think I'm going to try to recant my earliest definitive memory of some of these friends just for the heck of it, so here goes. For lor my first and foremost old memory of her was in 6th grade English. Mrs. Striker had us line up from tallest to shortest, and although I was pretty much across the room back then, I can still see Mrs. Striker coming to the last few girls in the row (It was 6th grade, back then all the girls were the tall ones. You remember that don't you?) and she just couldn't pronounce lor's name for the life of her. She must have said Lauren like 3 times before Laurion finally got her to get it right. Good times!

Day 340: Portrait Numero Two

This is my second for the week. I'm posting all these portraits in the order they were taken, so I hope nobody get's offended (*cough* lor *cough*) haha. Just remember, where you are featured in the week is all based on when you said you were free! haha.

This is Elisabeth. It's spelled with an S which would annoy me to no end if it was me, but I think she likes it. She's the newest in my list of friends because she only came to my school this year. She just happens to be from my cousin's hometown, and as fate would have it she's a photographer. We kind of hit off once we found out we were both so into photography, and we've been friends since! Shes a very nice person, has a unique sense of humor, and is a real joy to be around. The words peppy and maybe chipper come to mind. Haha.

Day 339: Portrait Week, Number 1

To officially commemorate the last month of my blog, I'd like to present you all, dear readers, with portraits of my 9 best friends. These next nine days should prove a very interesting journal of who's been most influential in my life. They've helped me become who I am today, (along with parents of course, wouldn't want to forget to credit them) ;) and have just been fun to hang out with over the last few months or more. So to all of you subjects I'd like to say in advance, thank you all for being such fantastic friends and great people in general. Also, I'd like to thank a few of you specifically for conquering the camera shyness and cooperating with my odd and sometimes probably annoying photographer habits :D It's been a fun week!

Well, now I suppose I should get to this guy that you see in the picture here. His name is Jordan, and he's one of the most personable guys you'll ever meet. He's nice to whoever he happens to be around always very humorous, actually that's probably an understatement, he's hilarious. We first met as locker buddies in 6th grade. I use the term locker buddies lightly I guess, because we didn't share a locker, but rather our last names have put us right next to each other on the locker spectrum since way back in the day. He also happens to be a really talented artist to say the least, and his drawings can all be seen at his DeviantArt page. My theme for the week as I had planned it was to capture these nine people doing what they love best, so even though you can't see it I'd like you all to know that Jordan is drawing in his sketch book. Note that extremely concentrated face as he creates his masterpiece. He usually does that in class, so I'm sure he's good at keeping his concentrated drawing face pretty similar to his "Why yes, I'm listening" face... haha.

A little creative editing went into these mostly because it was finals week and I could use a little creative expression, so excuse the odd tints. I just thought they gave a one-off feel to the whole photo.

Day 338: Day or Night?

This is that picture I was referring to when I mentioned it looks like noon if you have a long enough exposure on just the right night :D

I love the way this picture turned out. Let's look at some of the specifics:
Date taken: December 13th 2008, at precisely 12:53:38 AM
ISO: 100
Aperture: f/5.6
Flash used: No (duh)
Focal Length: 135.0mm
And most importantly:
Exposure: 256.900 Seconds!!!

Yup. Go try those settings out some time on a regular night and you might not get much other than over exposed city lights, but this night was unique. You can read up on it from NASA here and from the typical news resources here

Day 337: Last of the Moon

I fear this will probably be the last moon shot for my whole project 365. I hope you enjoy it. It features the biggest full moon in 15 years, which was closer to earth than it has been for over a decade or will be for another 8 years. What's more it was taken with a normal 27-200mm lens, which with the crop factor of my camera factored in is like a 300mm lens. This is the nearly full size crop of it, and I'd very much encourage you to click through for full view. I edited especially for the contrast in the moon's craters and I think it created a rather unique picture. Enjoy!

Day 336: Ethereal Specral Visage

Wow. Trippy name I know, but the picture really does live up to the title I think. It's pretty cool what happens when the moon gets closer than it's been in 15 years to earth AND it's a full moon. Anyway, I spent about 40% of the evening hours on this particular night outside, which is really saying something because it was very very cold, like below freezing all night. Either way, I had a grand time and got some amazing pictures. You'll see more tomorrow and the day after. Turns out the average 30 second exposure looks like dawn or dusk when the moon is 30% brighter than usual. The amazing thing is, if the moon is high in the sky, I minute long exposure pretty much conveys complete daytime. It's fairly impressive.

Day 335: Pure and Key

There's something almost musical about the patterns seen here. I really like the way this turned out for some reason. I'm going to go ahead and tell you all the truth. There was a lot of editing here, especially because I used a 15ish year old keyboard and didn't clean it before hand. Let's just say it wasn't this white. It's great for typing though, I'm even using it right now! Anyway, it all came together to make a wonderfully white picture. I really think this may be a favorite! But wait, since I've been so slack-y on the artistic pictures lately I have made sure there's even better pictures yet to come!

Day 334: Memories

Well, this is ye olde travel memorabilia key chain. I've kept pretty much ever key-chain format souvenir I've ever gotten on this thing. It's fairly full with cool medals, plaques, pictures, and name tags as you can see. It's usually found up in my room on my big dresser who's horizontal surface I have dedicated to souvenir displaying. I used to travel a lot more in my elementary school (of the Montessori variety) and homeschooling days. Now that I have to deal with all this real school nonsense, we don't get to travel as much, but I have some great pictures and things to remember my trips by.

Day 333: Since 19something-or-other

It's my last day of triple numbers! :(
I can't really read the date on the sticker, hence the title. IT's 1966 or 1968. Any votes?

This was another one of my one-picture-in-one-day pictures... I only took this one all day so here it is, with a little editing, as my picture of the day!

Day 332: Internet Enabled Camera

That's code for webcam.

Here you see the new web cam my dad recently randomly purchased for both of us for 15 bucks. I really don't know why this is my picture of the day, but maybe it's just because I didn't take even 2 pictures today. Just this one, oddly enough. So in the spirit of fairness, here's my picture of the day. It's not very artistic I know. The lighting sucks, I know. Rub it in. Haha. Anyway, can you name the websites I was on when I took this? it should be pretty obvious.

Day 331: Bendy Snow

Now there's a unique title. Oddly enough however it's true. I've never seen snow do this in my life, not to this extent anyway. This was taken a few days back just when we had gotten back from Kansas City, and we had that 11 inches of snow... well as it melted the next morning it did this... It bent almost completely over on itself. I think it made for a very trippy picture. Have you guys ever seen this happen before?

Day 330: Bird Caller

I'm always kind of afraid I'll reuse titles in some of these pictures. Maybe that's a sign I'm not varying my pictures enough. Oh well, I've probably done it before, and I'm sure I'm doomed to do it again. I'll try not to though.

Anyway this picture features a fun little toy I picked up at our local Renaissance Fair in Colorado. It happens once a year and they have very cool little things to sell, or rather, steal your money with. This is one of the things I picked up one of these years at the fair, and it's like a normal whistle, except that when you put the right amount of water in it, it sounds just like a bird chirping. It's a very unique thing I guess.

Day 329: Creepy Crawly Critter

That's a title for ya right there. That's called alliteration... or come to think of it maybe it's assonance, or consonance... or like hyperbole or something. Maybe I shouldn't be too confident about my grade on my Honors Lit final...

Anyway I got this picture when I found this little spider crawling over my HP books from yesterday. It was a rather random occurrence, but I had my camera and my flash handy so instead of squishing the little guy I blinded him. This is what carpet looks like up super close I suppose. The spider's a little out of the field of focus, but I liked this one over the other clearer ones because of his pose... That is if you can call that a pose.

Day 328: Mr. Potter

The name's Potter, Harry Potter. Wait, wrong story.

I've been an avid HP reader ever since my dad got me the very first book a few weeks after it came out. He and Mom took turns reading the first few to me when I was really little, but I really started reading them on my own after the 4th book on. I kinda centered the focus of this picture toward that book for more of an artistic purpose, but I suppose it fits the story. Anyway, when the 7th book finally came out I had a great 36 hour no-sleep-just-read-leisurely marathon to get through the book in as much time as one sitting can possibly take. I didn't try to speed read, I just enjoyed it. It still was over far too fast, but I'm still excited for the movies. I got the idea for the picture because I've always had a little tradition of guessing exactly which colors the new book would be under the cover art. I was never right, but it always intrigued me that the books all had the same duo-tone kind of theme.

Day 327: Terabyte

These are my new external hard drives that just got in a few days ago. I'm exited to finally have some extra room because I've actually pretty well filled up my 300Gb drive that I got just over a year ago for my photography. It's amazing that I've taken a full 80Gb of photos in just under a year, and that number just keeps growing. Anyway, the two drives are 500Gb each, and one is used for a backup of the other, so I really have a nice 500Gb redundant storage facility for my pictures! I tried to light the photo kind of creatively, but it really didn't turn out as I had imagined.

Day 326: Layers of Set

I took this from a traffic light near a newly constructed shopping center near my house. The town we live in north of Colorado Springs is really getting build up lately. I guess that's just what happens when so many Californians move in...

Anyway, this sunset picture really stood out to me because of the stark contrasts visible, and the fact that it has both a bright orange section and kind of a more mellow blue hue around the top. It just makes for another unique sunset photo.

Day 325: Watercolors with Ice

This is a picture straight from the camera, with next-to-no editing other than a little levels and resizing type things. The subject of the picture, if you couldn't tell is slush on a road, but this stood out to me as a picture of the day because it looks undeniably like a watercolor painting. Check out the full view to see what I mean. It looked just as convincing as I walked on it in real life, it was very cool. Anyway, we came home last night to a very traumatic 17 inches of snow in our county. Just outside our house we have about 11 inches everywhere, and the car we took our week-long trip in is in the driveway. Talk about a pain, and of course we had to carry all that luggage up like a 50% grade driveway :P but it's good to be home!