Wishing you love EVERY day Day 55

Tomorrow is Valentine's. Commercialized celebration of social norms. I'll fully understand if you get sick from all the sugar overload ;-D

Maybe that's why I got flowers already today. Nice potted orchid. Oh, yeah, he added a single red rose but then again, I like them :-P

LOL

I'm wishing you love EVERY day. A kiss, a hug, few warm words, a call from a friend... anything that makes you smile. Or just togetherness. And to this I'm adding my love. I do appreciate you!

Shadows of simple objects Day 54

I've recently bought a book on 20th century photography and promptly immersed myself in it. I ended up wondering about the simple Kertesz's work entitled The fork. Guess what I was doing 5 min later? Oh, yes,  I was in the kitchen fork and bowl on the table, camera (I'm nicknaming it The Annoying Thing if this persists!) in hand. This was a good lesson. Simple photo really. It took me slightly longer than 1 click to get it exactly right... learning is called a process, non? ;-)

Kertesz's famous shot can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kertesz_The_Fork.jpg

So while I've accomplished my task I still had to take a photo of the day. Nah, uploading the "copy" would be too easy so I set to find a decent shot with one fork, one light, one white bowl and white table top. It's not precisly rocket science and the result is hardly worth a blink but I'm satisfied with double shadows.

Processed adding a filter that makes it resemble an analogue shot.

The source of life Day 53

I know that my delight in catching certain things won't necessarily be shared. This will probably be considered extremely boring by most viewers...

Got an idea what it is?

No?

Yap, wind ripples in a pool

I've pushed contrast and cooled WB

I have a suspicion that these are chattering in fluent Dutch Day 52

Me, my camera and flashlight in my kitchen last night. Long exposure, underexposed in camera to make sure the background stays black and painting with the flash light. Fun! But very unpredictable as it's difficult to see what one is doing.

I desperately rerun recovery (formating memory card, cleaning contacts, replacing battery) about 20 times last nigh and the error message finally stopped reappearing. I have my suspicions about the memory card so I'll keep formating it every single upload (i.e. every night). Sad part is that I don't trust my baby anymore and will have to drag around the old spare when I go shooting. Ups, that's every day. I guess bigger handbag is in order ;-P

The title comes of these reminding me of old masters oil paintings...

runner up

Errors Day 51

Digital cameras are sensitive, I guess. I knew they don't last forever but after a year of my 5D I was not expecting crucial problems, definitely not yet. But it started to play up. Won't take a shot all of a sudden. Then it does and again it doesn't. It really deteriorated today. Seems to be a problem with shutter or mirror and I guess I'll have to send it in to have this fixed. Unfortunately my warranty does not cover my country of residence so I'm stuck with a faulty camera till end of this month when I reenter EU. How fun. I'm angry, upset, worried, sad... and yes, you can keep adding to that list.

To make matters worse even lens was not cooperating. Wouldn't focus. Even manual was not as it should have been. So I'm stuck with no photos. I was about to upload a black (blank) image when I noticed I kind of like the composition and colours of this one

version with cold colours:

Awwwww, mom I'm bored Day 50

Grey drizzly day. He didn't last 5 min in this bored pose, he had a roll on the couch and he was off to new adventures. Mundane image but so more "real" for that.

I love my 5D but seriously miss a pop up flash. He was gone too quickly (and this was unplanned) so I couldn't pull the big flash out of my bag... actually luckily I was sitting next to it when he showed up ;-D)

Good news is that I finally found a way to get rid of the under eye circle is colour images (in PS). Please do not confuse this with the mask like shadow over his face - that is due to the (only) light source being a window.

Well it's pretty simple. Use a brush and click on airbrush effect (in CS4 you find it in the bar on top), choose flow between 5-15% and alt-click on the face, next to the under eye circle in order to sample the corrective colour. Paint away. Yap it's that simple. I then (always) turn the corrected image into a layer, place it over uncorrected original, change the opacity of my layer to get the desired but natural looking effect, flatten image and save. That simple. I'm in love ;-P

uncorrected and before I toned down the sepia

I did several conversions for 365 Community February techie challenge on post processing:

(sepia, BW

XPro, SOOC)

and you can see that this type of correction works on any colour tone

here is the uncorrected original

for example Xpro before correction

Xpro after flip and correction

Fashion is a fight ;-D Day 49

I had fun and I'll try to recount it visually.

My friend took me to the Istanbul Fashion Week 2010 in Santral Istanbul. We were there to support a young designer. The smiles started by checking out other -> mostly waaaaaaaay overdressed <- women.
Seriously, I wished I could take a few pix but I didn't want to be rude..

Technically, shooting a catwalk is not easy. I did google for advice before I went and I'm so grateful for the info I found. Yap, they were right. Keep speed over 200 even better 250 [even faster if possible would be better I realized]. Smallest f you can go (took my prime and opened it as wide as it goes i.e. 2.0) and high ISO: recommendations were for 800, I needed 1000. As for WB, ah, I trusted auto since lights kept changing all the time. I'm uploading SOOC (straight out of camera) images. I did crop though. Since I was sitting among the audience and not where the older sisters of my 5D hovered at the end of the runaway, I had to crop out the heads. Plus I could not shoot full length. Still the experience was fun!

Fashion is a fight, right?? Günesli Türkay's collection followed the concept of Gladiators (I'll spare you the promoting blabla why ;-)) and provided some fun moments, including the shot of the day. I love how the shadows make it look as if her eyes are bruised and how the camera somebody was holding looks almost like a weapon she's ready to throw ;-P

The twelve o'clock run was dedicated to 3 new designers and full of editors etc that looked like judges. I liked expressions on their faces, I had such a laugh (this is the moment when the 1st model of the gladiator collection stepped out):

The head fashion number one:

And number two (saves you on a bad hair day):

The models did walk like horses:

and some had horrendous postures

but some were darling dolls (she's posing for the pros at the end of the catwalk)

and some situations came out very arty 

(this is my runner up i.e. outtake

I'd have titled it Lamelight jealousy)

[but since the 2nd person is barely visible

I decided I preferred the colours and allegory of the gladiator]