Day 366: One last thing...

Well, here I am. Day 366. One full leap-year after I started my year-long Project 365. It's been quite the ride. To be honest I'm going to miss the pressure to come up with some new creative idea every day. I'll have to find a new project and a new way to keep myself working hard at photography. Make sure to check out the full view, it's the last day and I forgot to resize the picture, so I'm not going to bother correcting it and that means all of you get to see the full size detail shot :)

I decided to use this as my last picture because as I was thinking through everything I have taken a picture of this year, it occurred to me that I have taken a TON of pictures from what I called "the rock" and never bothered to get a picture OF the actual rock! (Proof: Search "rock" in the little search bar up there ^ or click this)This is the rock behind my house, from which so many of my panoramas, and of course days Day 51 and Day 209, were taken. I knew I should wrap up the year with this picture because it pretty much completes the list of important and story-worthy things in my life which I have photographed over this year. I spend a lot of time up on this rock. It's a great place for reflection and of course photography. It's always been my place to hang out when I'm stressed or angry, or just to chill out and enjoy the view. I'm so thankful I've spent my whole growing up time in a house with such cool rock-climbing opportunities nearby. And that's it for my final photo description!

Just to clarify for everyone, I've been doing these sometimes-detailed and sometimes-not descriptions all year not only for my own benefit in going back and remembering each day out of this year, but also because I've always felt that photographs deserve at least a little explanation. Unless it's purposefully a photo that should speak for itself I believe in letting viewers in on a few of the secrets of how it was taken, why it was taken, what challenges capturing it presented, and even the situation surrounding and leading up to the capture. I don't know why I've felt that way, but maybe it's part because of the entries on DPChallenge.com. I've always been bothered when I wonder how a photo was taken or what kind of lighting was used and there's absolutely NO description :P So that's why I did this all year. I now have a great catalog of the events of my year, and all of you get some of the behind the scenes details of my hobby and life.

Ok, third paragraph. I'm really going at it with this last post aren't I? I guess theres just a lot to say to properly wrap up such a long project. As I said in yesterday's post, I never thought I'd make it through the year without giving up, but thanks much to the encouragement of so many of my friends and family and even random people who follow my blog, I managed to hang in there. So thanks to all of my various visitors throughout the year, my extended and immediate family members for the encouragement and to all of my friends who just kept checking my blog even when I wouldn't update it for up to a 2 months *oops* :P I never quite met my goal of making the "Blogs of Note" page here on blogger, but that's ok. It was a crazy goal anyway :P I'm just happy that I made it to Day 366 and that I got an amazing 2228 unique views and 8426 page loads. That means over 2k computers visited my blog and visited 4 pages each on average! haha I guess that's pretty good for a blog that went completely unadvertised except some linking tirades on facebook and myspace :)

Most of all though I'm really thankful for all of you who commented over the course of the year, and even one of you who just started commenting :) I don't think I can name you all, but there are a ton and you know who you are, so thanks to anyone who took the time to leave even one comment this year. It's the encouragement from those comments that kept inspiring me to look for new artistic opportunities each day. I think if this were some awards ceremony, say the Oscars, they'd have dragged me off stage by now, so I'm done :)

I'll post a link on this blog just as soon as I figure out where I'm going to put all my pictures now :)

It's been a great year, I'm looking forward to what the future holds for both me and my love of photography.

Day 365: Almost Done

Yes, that's purposefully the same title as Day 1 :)
Make sure to check out the full view, I uploaded this one a little bit bigger than the others so you can all see it better.

Here we are, Day 365. Some of you didn't think I'd ever make it, and I know I certainly didn't. There were times when I got a little too far behind for my own good, but all in all I made it through, one picture and one description for each day of my life for the last three hundred sixty five days. I't been pretty great, but I'll leave the details and other special remarks for tomorrow's bonus post, because you see, 2008 was a leap year :)

I had always wanted to think I had my last day planned out, that it was going to be the best and most astounding picture anyone had ever seen, but frankly I just can't plan that far ahead nor handle that kind of pressure, so when it came down to it my Day 365 was defined by the fact that I was down near GoG visiting Dad (still healing from surgery on the knee) and decided (with the aid of some parental encouraging, they give me so many of my ideas, thanks guys!) that my Day 365 would be an HDR of Garden of the Gods and Pikes Peak. I wanted to take that characteristic Colorado Springs picture and make it something more with HDR. It turns out that I just happened to get there and be able to get my picture as one of the most beautiful sunsets I have ever seen played out overhead. I love how things just come together sometimes, and this was one of those moments. I have no one to thank for the excellent picture taking conditions than God, I guess he's even watching over my blog :)

Shortly after this was taken I headed over to Maddie's (her new 365 blog: link)place... We hung out and took pictures downtown before our usual friend-filled Saturday night skating extravaganza. I got quite a few good HDRs downtown, so I'll def. post those as time allows this week. Update: They're posted!

Day 364: Just Made It

Here we are, another snowy day. I drove home after seeing dad at the hospice-care thingy for about an hour today, and everywhere north of Gleneagle is ALL ice and a little snow on top for fun I guess. Anyway, it's the type of snowfall and road conditions where a turn at about 10mph is more like drifting in an intense game of Need For Speed. I had quite a few out-of-control moments on my way back, but all in all I got home safe, even if it did take me a few minutes to floor it and scrape my way up our driveway. This is what said driveway looked like seconds after my epic battle with Gravity and Friction. Those forces of nature are certainly masters at what they do, I'll give them that, but they remain no match for my 6 cylinder monster-Dodge! This picture is a sort of cop-out HDR. I knew you can make HDRs from a single raw file, but I was inspired to try it with a JPEG file, so I edited the same file 3 times to make it LOOK bracketed and when I put it all back together again I at least managed to get a little more detail out of the shadows. The picture still pretty well describes the day for me, even if it's not that great and artisic.

Now ask yourself this, today is Day 364 in a Project 365. What does that mean to you the reader? Could it be tomorrow is the last day? Or did you forget some key info...?

Day 363: Grounded in Flight

That day number is the last of my day numbers EVER that will be reversible. :( The end is sooo close now :(

This was taken on the US Air Force Academy base, near the famous chapel (day 50). I was over there because Dad had surgery at the clinic over there for his knee. He suffered a "patellar tendon rupture" which is basically a tear of the tendon right below one's knee cap in his right leg on the way down the stairs to play Battlefield 2 with me last Sunday. Since then he's been immobile and obviously off work too. So today his path to recovery (ETA: 6-12 weeks) begins... I went over to the academy to talk with him real quick before mom took him to the care clinic where he will be recovering for the next week. After they headed off I managed to find my way over to the chapel area and I ended up staying for about an hour and a half as the sun set. I got some fun HDR shots.

Anyway, I've always wanted a good picture of one of these plane statues, but no lighting condition is ever conducive to artistically photographing them. Then came HDR. I'm really working on making my HDRs more realistic looking now. I got pretty well caught up in the "pop" factor with my first few, but now I'm getting kind of serious about exploring the possibilities of the art in a more serious and realism-seeking manner. I think the $80 bucks (20% off coupon :) of my christmas money I spent on Photomatix (That's a link to it's website) may well have been my best spent Benjamin ever! I'm still excited about the possibilities. If nothing else comes of this new fascination, at least posterity will wonder why I have three bracketed pictures of EVERYTHING I photographed in the first half of January ;)

Day 362: After Hours

Tonight I brought Elisabeth to _tag for her first time :) It was quite fun, but since she lives in woodland park I had her mother bring her out to our school which is a pretty decent halfway point for me. I then drove her back north to _tag and we had a fun night all in all. Anyway this was taken because I got to the school a little early, which left me just enough time to play around yet a little more with HDR before Elisabeth arrived. This is one of the results. I had a hard time picking this one, but eventually went with it because of the range it has, being able to see both the parking lot AND the dark mountains in the background. It was made from a set of 5 radically different exposures between 1/100th of a second and 20 seconds. The lens flare in this picture is a little (*cough* ...a lot) obnoxious, but I kinda think it added a unique flavor to the photo.

Day 361: Bullseye!

I've always been fascinated with the lines and patterns formed by the 5-year-old dart board that we have which sits in our pool room. Dad never bothered to put it up after he got it for his birthday waaaay back when. Anyway, my endless pursuit of HDR experimentation let me to this today, and I think it had a really cool effect in bringing out all the details of the dart board, from reflections and colors to even the dust.

Day 360: Childs Play

This is another picture of my train set, this time in HDR (of course) but also on the tracks! you can see the whole train here, even if it is pleasantly out of focus, and the little tracks, all in relation to the background, which is the bottom of our Christmas tree. It's so sad that Christmas is over, but alas, all good things must come to an end eh? Speaking of ends, only 5 days left!

Day 359: Winter House

This is one of my coolest HDRs yet in my humble opinion. I really darkened it a bit and made sure to bring out the vague details in post-processing. I'll admit it may still look a little fakey just because I'm having fun going over the top with my new HDR software and editing, but the more I look at it the more I see it really does look more similar to what the eye sees than a normal picture. The details you can pick out in the shadows and highlights are just amazing. The little dots at the top of the photo make me wonder if I should clean my sensor or if that's just an effect of the HDR noise process + snow. I guess time will tell. I don't think my sensor is that dirty :P

Anyway, this is our house. The good 'ol 310. It's a very odd shaped double-octagonal house, but we all love it even if it is hard to furnish because of the odd room shapes and angles :P I'm sure my parents could tell you lots about that. Anyway, I love how my houses portrait of sorts turned out. It shows all the fine detail, including our newly stained deck and newly painted garage doors :) I've lived in this house as long as I can remember, and to me this says "Home" as much as anything. I think this is a great start to the very LAST week of my project 365. Hang in there boys and girls! Only 7 days left! Next Sunday is Day 365!

Day 358: The Last of The Holidays

That title's mostly because I've really got to be done with all the Christmas shots. I waited till after Christmas to get any and It's way past Christmas now, so this will be my last Christmas-themed shot of the year. It's an HDR of one of my favorite ornaments on our tree, a German snowman. I know, it's random. The reason I picked it was that a year ago around this time, when I had just gotten my D80 and hadn't yet started my Project 365, so the picture never got posted anywhere but Flickr. I really liked it, and this year instead of doing a long-exposure snowman shot, I went for the HDR snowman shot. It turns out that Christmas tree HDR's turn out REALLY well. I had a fun time shooting pretty much every inch of my Christmas trees and I even got 10 or so good HDR composites out of it.

Day 357: Merry Belated Christmas :)

We're getting ever closer to the end boys and girls! Only 8 days of blog left! And only 2 of those are while I'm on break :P

This is my HDR photo for today. I got Photomatix with my christmas money, so I threw this together from 5 exposures. It turned out unbelievably grainy despite the fact they were taken at ISO 100 :\ but I guess that's just the nature of the beast. I promise not all the rest of my pictures will be HDR's, but I'm having fun experimenting with this new editing technique. Anyway, today's is just a picture of the typical Christmas lights setup. This was the last kind-of well decorated house in my neighborhood with it's lights still up, so I pulled of on the side of the road and shot a few pictures with my camera and tripod setup.

And to top things off - for once this break I don't have to adjust the post date, because I'm actually posting the picture on the day it was taken! WHOO!

Day 356: My Very First HDR

HDR Photography, as I've already mentioned is a very cool art form. It opens up whole new fronteirs with photography, enabling cameras to see exactly the dynamic range (and sometimes more) that the human eye sees. Check out this picture, my very first HDR Image, as a great example. Sunset pictures are never able to capture the landscape detail that the eye sees, but rather only either the bright sky or darkening land. This HDR (made from 3 bracketed exposures 2EV steps apart) allows the picture to convey both. It doesnt have the same striking contrast that the real life scene held, but this is absolutely the best any computer limited by typical monitors can show. I love the effect it has. It gives a whole new uniqueness to a picture that would have otherwise been pretty bland. I can't wait to explore more of my world with HDR photography. Please check out the full view so you can see the detail this picture has, from the clouds at the top to the shingles on our neighbor's roof at the bottom.

Did I mention how cool it is that this day is the same as 365 but with the 5 and 6 switched. It's almost enough to fool the eye with a quick glance. Don't get too worried! Still 9 more days to go!

Happy New Year everyone!