I am blogging from Chicago today/tomorrow.
I had a chance to go on a photo walk this morning in Michigan Ave. It has been quite some time now since my last photo walk in St. Charles, MO. Photo walks are fun – I feel like I’m a tourist during photo walks 😉
I took this picture in the park located next to the Art Institute of Chicago. I really liked the atmosphere there – it was calm & relaxing. I ended up going there again this evening with my daughter.
Today is theme Thursday and the theme is Flight.
As my wife and kids are leaving to India this weekend on an early summer vacation, doing a photo post with Flight theme turned out quite easy.
Basically I started collecting materials for the past 3 days – my daughter had a world map she had got from Subway with her meal. I used this as a base. Then used the e-tickets, motion sickness chewables, and my little boy’s toy to put this together.
On a related note, I used flash based Picnik (online photo editor) for editing this – since I am traveling this week, I am traveling lite and didn’t want to load CS4 on my laptop. I was amazed at the features Picnik offers and it’s free 😉
We have this old sewing machine that’s about 7+ years old. We were cleaning up the closet and the sewing machine mechanism caught my eyes. The moment I saw it, I knew I want to do a macro shot of the needle plate, foot and transporter of our sewing machine.
Used natural window lighting to shoot this at f/16 for 1/2s exposure.
Houston we have a problem – that’s what came to my mind when I saw my little kiddo watching his favorite TV program Cailou on You Tube. He was sitting so close to the monitor and watching with his eyes wide open like he was waiting for an event to happen…
Today is tasra365 Twitter Tuesday
Tempeh? – it’s fermented soybean.
Last week I had a chance to meet one of my former colleague on my train ride home back from work. He happens to be a vegan and we were talking about Tofu and ended up him mentioning tempeh. It happens to be high in protein, fiber, and vitamins. So we bought a couple of packs of 3-grain tempeh from Trader Joe’s during our grocery shopping on Saturday.
It has a nutty, chewy texture and we tried it with stir fried vegetables this evening. It was delicious and will definitely be part of our diet moving forward.
So this evening, I tried shooting this (I’m always challenged with food photography). I was able to capture the details but I think I failed in plating this – lots of white space. Will have to keep trying with food photography in the days to come 🙂
Another gloomy day here in St. Louis.
It was drizzling on and off and when the sky had taken a break from raining, I went out to my backyard and took this macro capture of carpet rose.
That’s a picture of my little boy having his hair cut this noon. Somehow we didn’t like his hair cut from last time. His hairstyle started looking more like a “bowl cut” – if you want to picture this, think of Moe’s hairstyle in the 3 Stooges 😉
So I was on a mission to fix his hair this noon. Typically I don’t take my Nikon D70 to stores. But decided to do so this noon and I’m glad that I did. I just talked to the hair stylist if it was OK to take pictures and she was quite OK with that idea. So I started snapping pictures – as I didn’t want to scare other customers in the store, I decided not to use flash. So I had to bump up the ISO to 800+ to take the pictures.
Back on my little boy’s hair style – it doesn’t look like a mushroom cut or bowl cut anymore. We will give it couple of days, and he will be cutest kid on the block 😉
Time for another macro challenge. Identify these and post your comments.
I will post the answer tomorrow evening.
Yet another rainy day in St. Louis and a perfect reason for me to take a picture of Karl Rosenfield Peony indoors where I can have much control over the lighting and setup.
Here is how I shot this.
Every house has at least one spot where there is ambient lighting – in our house one such spot seems to be the dining area by the patio door and bay windows (need to explore more to find other sweet spots). So had the vase seated on a black card board and had this lit by the natural lighting coming in from the bay windows. Used a white foam board as a reflector to lit the shadows on the right side of the bloom – as this happens to be facing the interior of the house.
Then had the camera mounted on the tripod and “spot” metered the bloom using Av metering – since I wanted to bring out the details, had the camera set to f/11. Then switched to manual mode and adjusted the light speed until I found the right amount exposure – the first one, as originally suggested by the Av metering was over exposed, so had to cut down the light.
Later used RAW/PS to pop up the colors – used free actions that I had downloaded from PW blog.
Another busy Wednesday evening. Had to take my daughter to her math class and go visit a friend this evening. By the time I got home it was almost 9:00 PM and didn’t have much inspiration for today’s post.
The friend whom we visited this evening had gifted “Little People” Noah’s Ark to our little boy and coincidently, we had watched Evan Almighty past weekend. In this movie, Evan gets a visit from God,who instructs him if he really wants to change the world, he needs to build an ark and prepare the world for the flood. So thought I should do something with my son’s new toy/animal set.
So had the toys set-up on white board and shot this using bounced lighting from trusty Nikon SB-600 flash. Not a great shot – with shadows and composition but overall I’m satisfied 😉