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I have a Canon G9 that I carry in my purse. I take random shots with this camera and dump the images off the card about once per week. Tonite, I am watching John Adams in Paris when this image came floating by. I stopped and looked and looked. Then, I remembered. It was from inside the carwash!
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As part of my composition class, I had to shoot series dominated by a single hue. I chose yellow.
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As part of my composition class, I had to shoot series dominated by a single hue. I chose yellow.
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As part of my composition class, I had to shoot series dominated by a single hue. I chose yellow.
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As part of my composition class, I had to shoot one object as an abstract series. I chose a razor wire fence.
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As part of my composition class, I had to shoot one object as an abstract series. I chose a razor wire fence.
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As part of my composition class, I had to shoot one object as an abstract series. I chose a razor wire fence.
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As part of my composition class, I had to shoot one object as an abstract series. I chose a razor wire fence.
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As part of my composition class, I had to shoot one object as an abstract series. I chose a razor wire fence.
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As part of my composition class, I had to shoot one object as an abstract. Here is the first of the series. I chose a razor wire fence.
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As part of an assignment for my Composition class, I need 5 images with a surreal or mysterious feeling. Here is one of them.
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As part of an assignment for my Composition class, I need 5 images with a surreal or mysterious feeling. Here is one of them.
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I am taking a Corel Painter class from www.betterphoto.com. Our second assignment was to make an impressionistic painting out of a photograph. Here is my original.
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This one is a rainy drive-by that has been fiddled with a loss of some colors when converting to the web. It reminds me a bit of Tracy Helgeson’s work. I enjoy her blog regularly.
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I have picked up a bug and am under the weather. So, I am going to post a series of Bodie playing with his mouse.
Check out an exiciting new blog by Donna Cushman. She is the founder of Digital Stop. See blog.
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I have picked up a bug and am under the weather. So, I am going to post a series of Bodie playing with his mouse.
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I have picked up a bug and am under the weather. So, I am going to post a series of Bodie playing with his mouse.
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I have picked up a bug and am under the weather. So, I am going to post a series of Bodie playing with his mouse.
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I have picked up a bug and am under the weather. So, I am going to post a series of Bodie playing with his mouse.
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I have picked up a bug and am under the weather. So, I am going to post a series of Bodie playing with his mouse.
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First off, this one turned out a lot more realistic than I expected. If you look close, you should be able to see artifacts that it is a montage. I had 10 different shots of this lone gull with other flying gulls and solo. The sequence starts from calms, to swell, to wave breaking. I upgraded to CS3. So, I let it auto-align my 10 images combined into a layer stack. That took about 45 minutes. I tried the auto exposure for the layer stack but that was too real looking. Instead, I used undo back to the auto-align step. Then, I masked in all the aligned layers with a mask to keep the bird on the beach intact. Then, I copied the layer stack again to work on the breaking surf. While masking in the breaking surf, I found a new Blending Mode in CS3 called Lighten Color. Most layers used the Lighten Color blending mode.
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You know it was just a matter of time before I tried an infrared drive-by.
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One last shot of Bodie from his first walk. He was found hiding in a garage and pilfering cat food. He had been attacked by another dog (?) and had wounds on his neck and face. He is fully recovered but still very nervous about other dogs and reacts by getting aggressive. Hopefully, he will relax after he gets used to us and stop this behavior.
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This lovely sculpture is in the lobby of the Cantor Arts Center. This is Styx by Deborah Butterfield. Styx is a bronze casting of driftwood. Here is a link to better images of Deborah’s work. I only had my trusty 50mm lens on the camera and could not get a wide enough view.
Just for fun, here is another shot of Styx. Down the hallway is a first century statue of Venus.
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Today, I visited the Cantor Arts Center with friends. This is Rodin’s Thinker. The Cantor Arts Center has the second largest collection of Rodin’s sculptures out of France. We went to see the Richard Avedon exhibit "In the American West".
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In a nice surprise, I was contacted about using my ’fiddled’ bamboo orchid shot for a children’s book cover. A N Nanda is self-publishing a book that he spent six years writing! This image is his cover. You can see all the details here. Here is wishing him much success and I look forward to reading my copy.
I am working on launching my artist’s website, dorothygantenbein.com. Please stop by for a sneak peek and sign my guest book.
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This is another archive raiding shot. This is from my office looking down Market Street in San Francisco.
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After this, I promise no more cute shots. This another shot of Maizy at Coyote Hills.
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Here I was inching down the hillside with all the loose rocks. Next thing, Maizy takes off like a rocket after a ground squirrel. She almost jerked me down the hill. Then after creeping along, she goes into the statue pose. I do not think she was after the tufts of grass.
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This is our new family member, Maizy Girl. We adopted her from the wonderful Ohlone Humane Society and her fairy godmother was Judy. Judy saw her as she was brought into the shelter and immediately took her home and nursed her to health. We were lucky enough to find Maizy over Christmas. She is about 18 months old and we strongly suspect a pure-bred Papillon. She is a bundle of energy and just learning to walk on her leash.
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This is from her walk this morning out at Coyote Hills park. On the way down the hill, she poked her nose into every ground squirrel hole. She thought that it was huge fun!
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Given that I barely did any shooting over the holidays, I decided to do a little archive raiding. This image was one of my first images taken back in 2003. I had owned my digital SLR for about 6 weeks and was attending a weekend workshop up in Point Reyes with Chip. We got up insanely early for sunrise on Drakes Beach. This was the first time that I had used a tripod.
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I decided to create a slideshow of all the images that I posted to DorothyPhoto in 2006 on Flickr. Even though I say I am a photo a day blog, I ended up with 458 images. To see the slideshow, click here. Given the length of the slideshow, I suggest you set the time between images to something 1-2 seconds.
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Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!
This is a stitched composite of about 12 images from my Krappy Kamera.
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I read about the keychain mini digital camera sold at Walgreens for $10 on The Online Photographer. So, I just had to get one. Chip and I stopped at Walgreens after I took the Palm Reader image from yesterday’s post. They only had one camera. Today, I filled its 16 MB of memory with 20 shots. This is the only usable one although I do have a lot of accidental self-portraits because I did not realize there is a really long shutter delay. I would press the shutter (or SNAP button based on the manual). I could not hear the beep and would look to see if the image counter on the front had moved down. Therefore getting a shot looking up my nose.
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This is another assignment image for my color class. This assignment was to show repetition with variation and interesting color. In school, I was always prepared for my assignments and was not a person who like the last minute all night cramming. However for the color class, my assignment was not ready. So as I walked from the train to my car, I was scanning the sidewalk for images. This is part of that series. I have several more images from that walk that I intend to post.
Oh, I did not place the leaf. Its placement is what attracted me to the image. I am not good at making these little vignettes.
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The smaller, older building is the Hobart building where I work. It is located in downtown San Francisco. After the devastating 1906 earthquake, the Hobart building was one of the first building rebuilt. Our lobby has a gold gilt ceiling with hanging chandelier. The paneling is marble with a large inset marble clock. We do not have air conditioning but do have 10 foot ceilings and windows that open.
I commute to work on the BART train which arrives underground directly underneath our building. We ride an escalator up to street level and this is the view. Yesterday, I noticed a couple looking slightly bewildered standing at the start of the escalator. I got on the escalator and they were right behind me. As we rode up, I always look up at the view. Behind me, I heard the wife say "Holy Toledo! .... Wow!" and the husband say "Crap!". I assumed they were awed by the sight and sound of Market street coming into view. Or...something totally unrelated.
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Tonite, I stopped and picked up some seed pods before returning to my car. I was drawn to their shape and color. On previous hikes, I found some California Quail feathers. Together, I made this scanned image but did not like the color. Plus, the black background felt too heavy so I inverted the scan and turned it to B&W with a sepia tint.
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Well, my adventures with B&W film continue. To my surprise, the processing of my second roll of Kodak 400CN is totally different than my first roll. The first roll was mailed to a lab and came back with WAY TOO much contrast and a strong sepia/magenta cast. I thought well what am I going to do with my other 8 rolls of film? So, I continued shooting my second roll of Kodak 400CN film. This time, I was going to use the one-hour photo at Costco to process. The technician claimed it needed B&W processing and just would not believe that it was supposed to be processed in color chemicals. I wended my way through the crowds to leave. I headed across the street to Ritz Camera. The prints cost me 3x as much and came back completely different. The prints are neutral and fairly flat. That is great because I can add contrast to my taste after scanning.
On a different note, most of my images from my second roll are fairly boring. I am feeling really exhausted and creatively depleted lately. I visited Santana Row this weekend and took a roll of B&W film. Most of the images are so what and some are what was I thinking! I hope to go out and find my muse again soon.
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This maybe the last of the peacock feathers for a while. If you are wondering, I used a very simple setup for these images. I have a Sigma 50mm macro lens that can go to life-size. I placed the peacock feather wreath on my desk with a desk lamp shining down onto it. The light is from Sharper Image and is daylight balanced. I use this light to evaluate prints.
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I bought a peacock feature wreath a few weeks ago with the idea that it could become a macro subject. Tonite, I took a few images that will be appearing over the next few weeks.
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This is my first film shot. Right now, I am fairly frustrated with the entire process. The worst is the scanning. I can only get the scan to work (with anything visible) when fully automatic. So, I guess I will have to read the manual. This is Kodak BWCN film. It is printed in normal color solution but comes out very warm with a little magenta cast. I converted this to B&W in Photoshop.
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Windshield Abstract |
You know the saying that the camera does not take the picture -- it is the photographer? On a rainy nite, I was a passenger in a car at a red light. I had my 50mm lens on and it was wide-open. I focused on a car's tail light. Right then, the light changed green. The auto-focus jumped to the raindrops and I ended with this abstract. I tried to duplicate the effect but no luck.
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Big Sur Overflowing |
This is the Big Sur river. During the dry months, this is just a shallow stream. I heard some of the restaurants along the shore put chairs in the middle of the river and serve coffee and tea out there. I could see the campground across the river with picnic tables but this water was much too deep for me to wade across and was really rolling along.
This is from the Shark Exhibit of the Monterey Bay Aquarium. For a while, the aquarium had the only great white shark in captivity. There was a large celebration but the shark kept killing other fish in the exhibit had to be released.
Just a fun shot from the boat yard. I liked the bright blue on the metal.
My interpretation of this one is probably going to very hard for someone else to see so here goes. This reminds me of our fat little dog, Cho-Cho. When we watch tv in the family room, Cho-Cho likes to lay in the kitchen with her head hanging over the step. She peers through her tangle of hair with what we call her laser-beams (actually she is older has bad cataract in one eye). Behind her head rises her overly large rump. If you cannot see it, you are probably the vast majority. Hopefully, you can appreciate it as an abstract.
For all my high tech equipment, I always need another outlet.
Today, dropped Mother off at the airport. Had to immediately go out and finish my asignment for my photo class. We were supposed to take a set of 5 images of the same object with different viewpoints. I decided on this sculpture at the entrance of our local shopping center. Obviously, the day was very gray but this one has some nice drama with the sun. I did some dodging on the right-hand upper figure to try and separate it from the palm tree.
PHOTOSJLC is another blog of note that I forgot to mention the first time around.
Took a quick trip to Santana Row very late on Saturday nite. I liked how the vines mimicked the tree branches. This is a night shot and a high-dynamic range image.
These shots represent a day in Baylands park. It has been quite an adventure. These were taken at 5 times of day (dawn, mid-morning, mid-afternoon, sunset and twilight) over a stormy week here in the bay area.
Went to Petaluma for the first time on a photo trip for my photo class. It is a wonderful town. This was a taken in a shop where Mother was buying out their jewelry selection.
Another from the bottle display. I think I must of manually focused and just missed it again. However, I like the blurring effect.
Last nite, went out to get a nite shot of the fountain at the local shopping center. After getting setup, the lights turned off so wandered around to find something else. This is a display of bottles in the window of our local Marshalls store.
Another from the shopping center. This is a vacant space planted with wildflowers. Another image for my color class.
This was taken at the gardening section of our local Target store. These were small potted geraniums lit by the golden hour light. Another image for my color image class.
Today, I was still dragging around but I have a assignment due for the "Designing a Color Image" class. So I wandered around the local shopping center to find something. This is a potato vine growing along the sides of the storefront. I did a lot of dodging and burning to make the composition a little more "readable".
Tonite in my photo class, we reviewed the images from our first photo class. This one was a class favorite which was a little surprising to me. I should have known when Chip said it was "Pretty cool." For Chip, that is glowing. This is another image in my growing 'wet foot' collection. It seems I cannot make an image lately without getting wet feet.
Today, I had to go digging into the archives. This is a macro of a Lily of Peru blossom. It reminds me of a butterfly flapping its wings.
I think that the Olympics are inspiring me. I retrieved this from the unprocessed folder tonite for a composite but instead liked it by itself. I cropped off the bottom and cloned out an intruding petal. I shot this with my 50mm f/1.4 lens wide open. This does give a lensbaby look but it still autofocuses.
Since I did not feel up to going out, sent Chip to the store for a bouquet. The colors came out of the camera extremely vibrant. I did not boost saturation.
Another from the archives because I have not been up to going out shooting. Hopefully this weekend I will have some fresh images.
This image has been cross processed which popped the blue in the background. The real background for this shot was my LCD monitor that was turned off.
Another looking down on the Calla lily bouquet.
Another looking down on the Calla lily bouquet.
Another shot (pun intended) at taking a nice image of my pink Calla lily bouquet. I was holding the blooms together with one hand and holding the camera with another.
Played with a few shots of a calla lilly bouquet.
Another from my Trader Joe bouquet.
Another from my Traders Joe's bouquet. This is a chrysanthemum seen from its side.
