My fiancee, our two dogs and I took a ride two hours north to my sister’s place today to see my mother.  It was quite entertaining to watch Buddy, my sister’s lab, run around and play with Mela and Leila.  Buddy and Mela have met several times over the past few years.  However, today was the first time the 40+ pound Buddy met the 7 pound Leila.  I just missed a PERFECT shot here since Leila’s entire head is not fully visible in frame, but I love the clarity I got on Buddy’s face.

I really liked the shadow that was being cast by the ladder and pool light from across the side walk.  I found this combination while taking a short photo walk outside of the hotel.  From an artsy-fartsy point of view, this photograph does not invoke much emotion in me.  However, I can see how this type of photograph (i.e. black and white focused shadow as the subject with a hint of out-of-focus shadow-creating object) could be quite effective in telling a story with a better subject.

If this post seems a bit different than the rest, it is. I am writing this photoblog post on my iPhone while sitting in a movie theater waiting for my friends to arrive. While the interface is no where near as polished as the normal we. Page web page which I use to create the entries, the iPhone application is very handy to help pass time and keep the project up to date.

Today’s photograph is of one the three clocks we have hanging in our dining room. This clock, showing the New York City skyline is my favorite of the three. I lived just across the river from New York City in Hoboken, New Jersey for three years. This view of the skyline, albeit a more modern skyline, was part of my everyday sights.

I chose to process this picture with a New York inspired preset. Not only was the name of the preset perfect for the subject, the style of the preset gave the photo an old fashioned feel to match the historic skyline depicted on the clock.

Yesterday I had some new gear delivered.  The new gear consisted of a gray background, thirty inch reflector disc and a reflector disc light stand holder.  I wanted to play around with the light disc tonight and thought that using it in the basement to control the light from the recessed lighting would be a good exercise.  I set the mug up on the dry bar and played around with the reflector disc until I liked the lighting.

In post production, I used Nik Silver Efex Pro to apply an antiqued look to the photograph.  I felt it was appropriate due to the age of the mug.

You may notice that the project blog layout looks a bit different starting today.  I have recently switched over from using Squarespace.com as my hosting provider to running my own, fully customizable, WordPress installation on a shared server.  The major reason for the change was to unlock the door for all kinds of plugins and limitless templates.  The plugin I am most excited about is the Flickr comment importer.  This plugin grabs any comments left on Flickr, where all my images are hosted, and posts them to the article here on the blog.  Comments imported from Flickr are prefixed with “Flickr” to differentiate them from comments left here on the blog.

Now onto the photography.  Today’s picture was a quick snap of our two dogs, Leila and Mela, laying together on the couch.  I had to carefully get off the couch and grab the nearest camera, the Leica point and shoot, in order to capture this scene before they moved.  In the picture, you can see that Leila is actually laying on Mela’s back and neck.  My fiancee and I have never seen them do this before.  In fact, Mela will usually move immediately when Leila starts to climb on her.

Because the picture came out noisy and out of focus around Leila’s face, I decided to process it heavily.  I feel the black and white coloring, coupled with the heavy vignette around the edges, really draws the eye into the important part of the scene.

I found these “guys” hanging around under our deck today.  Just like yesterday’s photograph, I had to crop the image pretty heavily in order to remove some distractions.  I left the camera on Auto ISO mode when I was shooting and  the 7D chose an ISO of 1600.  This is much higher than I normally choose for myself when outside in the middle of the day.  I would have rather been at ISO 800 with a shutter speed of 1/125 sec to limit the amount of digital noise.  Next time I will have to pay more attention to what ISO the camera is choosing for me.  Or better yet, lock in my own ISO setting.

It was one of those nights were I did not have any ideas coming to me for the project.  So I did what I always do in this situation, grab the camera and start pacing the house.  I found our new coffee machine which I had loaded with fresh coffee beans earlier in the night.

I tried a few different compositions and waited until I was at my computer to figure out which I liked best.  I picked this image of just the coffee machine hopper because it gave me the biggest urge to brew a fresh pot of coffee even though it was already pretty late at night.

I tried a few different Photoshop plugin presets before I finally settled on a Nik Silver Efex Pro one.  The way that this photograph was processed makes my eyes travel right to the details of the beans which are in focus.  There is no doubt about what the subject is in this photgraph.