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!

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 :)