Things I did today

I took two hot sauces photos. One in the beginning of my photography practice in early April, and another in late May. It's quite the difference between not only my thought process, but also to fully use what things I have at my disposal. This one is pretty terrible. I took it with my phone camera, said to myself "You should remove ALL of the items that aren't hot sauce, and you should probably not take the photo on a white surface like your counter." At least I was smart enough to MAKE good photographic decisions, but not smart enough to actually DO them. I overexposed the window because I was too lazy to make a proper background. If I were to retake this photo, I would use a dark table and not overexpose the window, won't add the duplicates, and perhaps not even include all the different hot sauces I have. More like this one, that I took in late May: I focused on the collection of Hell Fire Detroit hot sauces I was given for my birthday. I used my r

For my birthday, I was given a large box of tea! (Yes, my friends and family know me well enough that I happily get tea, cooking paraphernalia, camera lenses, nightlights that reference They Might Be Giants songs and books on the history of math and computer science.) I thought about how I wanted to stage the photo. I knew that the big difference between these teas is the color of the tea bag envelope. I decided to make the composition look more like an explosion of colors rather than perfectly lining up the teas in either a gradient or colorful chaos. It would also take less time to set up. I decided I didn't want to capture every tea envelope but focus on most of them, and have no table or background showing. I also loosely made sure that the composition didn't have similar colors next to each other, the writing on the envelopes were positioned to make the composition looked as if the envelopes were expanding outward from the bottom center, and that the most interestingly n

I took a picture of the book gifted me at Christmas called The Food Lab by J Kenji Alt-Lopez. I expected to start cooking and learning all sorts of things when the winter subsided, but when it did, the pandemic made shopping much more dangerous and food shortages meant I couldn't get a lot of foods or supplies. Heck, it's nearly June, and I can't buy a bread machine, and flour is finally back on some of the shelves. Yeast, however, still is elusive. Since I shouldn't be meandering around grocery stores for a while, and some ingredients are still hard to find, I've pushed this project to the summer... which seems to be optimistic, now! I'm unsure when I'll start, but I don't want to forget about it. After all, I'm getting better as a cook just going through what the Instant Pot offers. I haven't made a cheesecake, because I'm afraid that once I find out how easy that is, I'll eat entirely too many cheesecakes. Onto the photo, though. I

I took a picture of a nightlight in my home, and imagined the final result would be a glowing bird, as it's a blue canary in the outlet by the light switch. However, I forget about the light reflecting off the wall, which ended up making for a much more interesting photo. I took many photos, as the light reflection perspective would be different every slight positional change I did with the camera. However, I liked the photo which seemed to show the light from the bird exploding upward onto the wall. However, I couldn't quite edit out how light the top of the bird's head was - I wanted it to be a bit darker, like the shade in the middle of his back. Perhaps I'll go back to edit and practice that skill. This still is one of my favorites from April.

I took a while to get this book photographed in this way. I knew I wanted to make a half-joke about how this spring has felt like "The Long Loneliness" but wanted the title of the book to be the focus, not the book itself. I started by photographing just the spine of the book, but that didn't get the effect I wanted, as I have beige/white walls, and I wanted the background to be dark to make the book stand out. I couldn't stand the book on edge as it would result in a weird crop in the editor. I needed something other than the book in the picture as well. I tried photographing the book cover, but it was too busy and I didn't want to have the author name and picture of the author in my photo. I realized I needed to really consider just  the title - it doesn't even need to look like a book. For reference, here's a picture of the book: The binding has the reddish and blue colors on d and a in the author's surname. I just liked the black and white

It's nice to see that I've gotten better with composition for just random photos when I didn't have an idea in mind. Earlier, when I couldn't think of an idea, I just took a close up of the book I was reading. I didn't do any editing of it and just posted it to a folder in Google Drive. It's blurry, and the writing isn't centered, and the colors, while realistic, aren't eye catching. You don't even know it's a book. It could be a sign or a poster. There's no context. I did some editing of the photo just now, but it didn't help the blurriness. The colors are better, and cropping the right side made the writing centered. I sharpened the photo, but it didn't help a ton. It's still better than the original. Here's another 'off the cuff' photo of a side salad I made. It's still a bit blurry, but that's due to picking the wrong aperture and being hungry and wanting to eat. At least the compositio

I was doing a string of "collection" photos, and decided to photograph my three guitars. Technically, I have one guitar, one baritone ukulele, and I borrowed my cousin's guitar and have yet to bring it back. Oops. Trying to take a picture of guitars is a little difficult if you're setting up in a dining room. I didn't feel like moving all my equipment to the living room. Of course, I didn't have enough space to capture all of the guitars in their entirety, but remembered that I don't need to photograph the instruments fully. I could just have enough guitar. After all, most people know what a guitar looks like and I am trying to challenge myself to do art over documentation with my photography. I also did the crossword but I wasn't fast like I would have preferred. I kept getting tripped up by their using "Judge's study" as a verb (the answer was LAW) while I expected it to be a noun (because of the apostrophe!) and CHAMBERS doesn&