Jag

We did a small wedding show today up at the Huntsman Center at the U. Totally unproductive as far as getting work but I met Mitch Burt of Zuma Photo. What an awesome guy! This image is the hood ornament on the Jaguar Limo outside.
One interesting thing about this image is that it illustrates the dangers of high jpeg compression. When you choose a lower quality image (not size, quality is usually listed as fine, medium, super fine, etc.) on your camera the processor lumps together similar colors in order to save space. So where there would normally be a slow transition across 100 slightly different colors of blue, all of which must have separate data information, the processor decides to convert it to 10 different colors of blue. You lose the data for 90 colors of blue which saves space but instead of getting a nice gradient you get banded lines that have abrupt changes from one color to the next. Look at the bottom middle of the image and you'll see it quite plainly. I'll tolerate it on a cell phone camera but if you ever see these lines (usually in a nice, blue sky) you know your camera is compressing the jpegs too much.Change the quality to super fine or live with the banding.

Juiced

I've become more and more fascinated with the supermarket as a subject. There are fun shapes and sizes and the lighting is usually pretty good. I think there will be more from my local grocery store as the year goes on.
Shot on the Toy Camera setting in Vignette.

A Little S.A.D.

The only way Seasonal Affective Disorder could be more appropriately named would be if the acronym came out to ANNOYED. I'm sure it's not masculine to admit it but every year about this time I start to feel SAD. It actually isn't sadness, it's more like annoyance at myself and the world. I love having time to work on personal projects (I'm going through all my fine art images from Europe) but somewhere in the back of my mind I have this nagging feeling that every last bit of my work sucks. It's horrible for the self-esteem. I wonder why anyone ever books me and I'm 100% sure that no one will ever hire me again. But eventually work comes in and things get going and I forget that I ever thought all my work sucked. It's good because it pushes me each year to do better and better work, but wow, it's tough on the ego. That's what I was trying to capture in today's image.
Did it work?

Plant in a Tent

We have this cool plant in our kitchen. I put it in my light tent and made a couple of pictures. Normally in a light tent the goal is to expose the subject so the white background blows out to pure white. Since I have no exposure control with this camera it exposes for the tent instead of the plant so I took away one light and just rolled with it. I think it's still interesting.

Portrait of Baby and Mommy Duck

I'm very proud. I had Hannah all day today and instead of working, we did a portrait session of Mommy and Baby Duck. (Hannah did all the posing and hair for the shoot.) It was a lot of fun. (Didn't kill NEARLY enough time though. I still had to work for way too long.)
Image shot with the standard Motorola Cliq camera and edited in PicSayPro.