State of the Project Address

I hope you're all enjoying the project as much as I am. From your comments, personally, on facebook and the blog, I'm hearing so many wonderful things! I love hearing that people wait with baited breath (where did THAT phrase come from?) what I come up with every day.

I've been surprised by a couple of things...

First, I am surprised at how much I'm enjoying this whole thing! Granted, there have been plenty of nights where I've jumped out of bed at 11:30 and wandered my house looking for something to shoot but most of the time I'm so excited by the world around me I have something I love before lunch.
Secondly, As I'm sure you've noticed, I'm surprised by how much I have liked shooting in a square format. I started shooting everything with the standard camera then editing. After a couple of weeks I found myself shooting most often in a square right in Vignette. I suspect it's because I shoot everything professionally in the standard 2:3 DSLR standard so the square lets me see things differently...or it's because I'm a square.

I thought I'd celebrate the first month of The Project by showing you some of my favorite images that for one reason or another weren't a photo of the day. I feel like many of them are better than some of the images that made it but it's all about the day. If I make 5 great shots one day and 1 the next, that's how the cookie crumbles...mmmm...cookies...

Leaving Chuch in a Hurry

So I was standing in the hall at church pontificating on the virtues of Vignette, one of the coolest Android apps out there, and was basically just snapping pictures to demonstrate. This one turned out cool. I hope Beth and Anna don't mind being featured on...THE ONE-A-DAY PHOTO PROJECT BLOG! (That sounds better if you say it in a deep announcer-type voice.)

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?