I have never been a fan of the movies, and as proof I guess one could say that my having been to the movie theater 4 times in the last 35 years would serve as proof. Even as a kid I really didn't have a big fascination for the silver screen. The only exception to this was my Jr Hi years when I was part of the Noon Movie crew who showed 10 minutes of a movie each day during the lunch period. The entry cost to see the day's showing was $0.02, and by the time you had spent $0.30 you got to see a full featured movie. Now most of these were B rated thrillers like Godzilla does Los Angeles, or something of equal intellectual value, where there was a peak moment of excitement every 10 minutes or so and at which point, or more truthfully just moments prior, we could shut off the show requiring a return on the next day to see what happened. This was back in the days of the old carbon arc movie projectors whose light was provided by the burning of two carbon rods which not only produced the light but a lot of heat, so much so, that it the movie was stopped without the light gate being closed, the acetate would immediatly melt. Occasionally though we got to show a movie of reasonable value, and one I did see in the theater, and I believe we also showed at school, was "On The Beach", a 1959 adaptation of Nevil Shute's book about a nuclear holocaust set in Australia. A very well done movie which addressed the reality of an all out nuclear war. As I was working with some of the images taken at the moonrise shoot, this story came to mind and with a bit of meddling and some small amount of thought, I came up with my version of the nuclear holocaust. Obviously an image of the creative type, I share it as the first one of this type for the new year. ISO 200; 1/60 sec @ f / 5.6.
Let's leave the moonrise for a bit and take a look at an image I sent out a couple weeks back but at that time it was in an altered form. Here is the basis for the creative "memorial day poppy" that you may recall was vivid red with a yellow center. If you still have it you may want to compare. If not it has no impact on what I'm sharing today. Depending on your perspective, this is either a close up or a macro shot, and I would consider it a close up, but the terminology is not important. One frequently employed technique for displaying flower photography is to place the image behind something creative such as frosted glass or rippled glass or anything else that gives it some form of a textured look. One could also place the flower in front of translucent textured material in order to keep the flower sharp while blurring out the background. Of course one could always do the same by applying a Gaussian blur to the entire image and then masking out the portion that you wanted to keep sharp. Here is yet another approach which I've employed in this image. To get the background to drop out, I've added noise (think grain) to the image and then masked out the portion of the flower I want to keep sharp. Not necessarily a better way than the others, just another tool in the chest for when you might like to try something a bit different. Like moving to a high ASA film in the good old days, but with far greater control. ISO 200; 1/1600 @ / 8.
After having been in discussion for almost 8 months, it has been determined that I will be teaching a class in Beginning Digital Photography at the local school where I am still doing a long term SPED sub job. The class begins tomorrow afternoon and I just now got the class roster: 19 students, and, oh by the way, some are low income and likely won't have a camera. And I thought the sub job was a challenge . . . . . Of course there is already a syllabus ready to go based on the concept that those taking the class would be looking for something serious. For the past hour I've been pondering about the best way to proceed and decided I'll just plunge them into the deep end of the pool and see who surfaces. Taking a Daily Image approach, image and discussion, it may just work out O.K. Last week I shared a couple of images from the Mt Baker area in which I discussed some HDR approaches. Just to prove that such an approach isn't always necessary, here is another image from that same series only this time the only alteration I've made was to take out a very offensive traffic sign that doesn't need to be there anyway. And I even left in a couple humans to be very different. On this trip I never could find a wind free moment and was unable to get the lake surface totally still so I went with a slight ripple approach hoping that what the image lacked in mirror like quality could be replaced by a bit of texture. The one advantage of this approach, if there is one, is that one tends to not feel the need to show the entire mountain and an equal amount of its reflection which generally results in a mirror image split equally in half which in truth is somewhat boring but done all too frequently. With the ripple effect folks tend to not feel the need to show equality and such is the case with what you have today. ISO 200; 1/250 sec @ f / 10.
