Recently the iPad has been a source of inspiration for my photoshop creativity. Since it functions so well as a photoframe, it seemed only natural to use it as a frame for frame breaking. I also must admit to being astonished that I seem to be the first person to see its pristine reflective glass as a place to put an ice skater. It seems so natural to me. Here are my first two attempts at iPad photoshoppery.
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As soon as I learned that my friend and grocery store manager, Andrés, cultivates mushrooms, I knew immediately that we had to do a timelapse photography project with his next batch. The particular species he cultivates is Pleurotus ostreatus, the oyster mushroom. He buys preprepared bails of hay wrapped in plastic, to which nutrients, mushroom spores, and water have been added. Holes have been cut in the plastic on the top and sides of the bail. Before you can see any mushroom growth, the whole bail gets warm to the touch, as the nutrient consumption begins inside. When the little fungal sprigs started appearing in the holes, Andrés came to me, with a big grin on his face, and said, “Today’s the day!” So I returned that afternoon and set up the tripod, flash, and intervalometer pointing at the bails of hay in his grocery store’s warehouse right down the street from where I live. And then we waited…
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Recently I’ve been having a surprising amount of fun playing with some bubble solution that Nora was given by a local shopkeeper. Besides the obvious, the bubbles are my favorite of Nora’s toys. It took her a while to break out of her awe at looking at them enough to intentionally pop them, and she still hasn’t understood the process of blowing through the hoop to create them. But that’s fine; I’m content blowing them for her.
I have more ideas about photography of bubbles than I have time to implement them, but last night I finally got around to my first attempt. For some reason my off-camera flash wireless connection wasn’t working, so I decided to turn off the room lights, set a long exposure, and manually fire the flash. Of about twenty shots, these are the best three.
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It’s been just over a year since my last experiments with taking off-camera flash shots of my daughter. All yesterday she was reminding me, both in looks and behavior, of the title character of that 1993 Dennis the Menace movie, so I decided to take some photos of her during her playtime before bed. Recently, when my flash is on my camera, I can’t get her to look at anything besides the flash, so in all of my photos of her, she’s looking just above the camera. This problem is what gave me the idea to try my off-camera flash transmitter to see if I could capture her looking more at the camera or at least not looking almost into the camera.
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I’ve been playing around lately in After Effects, which is more or less “Photoshop for Video”. After Apple’s dumbing down of iMovie (Apple dumbed something down? Imagine that!) last year, it’s refreshing to get back to editing videos with an actual timeline and keyframes.
Our little primate specimen decided that everyone should be up and active at 7:30 AM every day this week, so I’ve seen every sunrise so far. Monday’s was beautiful, but I just enjoyed it without recording it. On Tuesday, I actually got out the camera and recorded the area of the horizon where the sun appears. And on Wednesday and today the sky was gray and boring for the sunrise.
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Last week a sprout of grass sticking out of a bricked town square caught my eye, particularly the shadows it made, so I took a picture of it with my iPhone camera. I liked the photo so much that I decided it might make a worthy subject for a real camera outing, so some days later I took a few more photographs. What’s really sad is that the sunlight in these photos is from noon. That’s how low the sun is in the sky, and how long the shadows are, these days.
Feel free to make your own profound metaphor about Nature resiliently fighting back against human Urban Progress. Or don’t.
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What happens when a photographer walks around town on a windy and sunny day with, not a still camera, but a video camera? Photographs…that move.
On my walk yesterday I had quite a few American Beauty moments1 where something as simple as a flower dancing in the wind made me stop and admire Nature. When I filmed the first few clips, I didn’t know how I would put them together, but by about the fifth one, the idea for this video was formed.
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I’ve been wanting to make this particular timelapse video for a long, long time. Oddly enough, it was a Viagra commercial I saw the other day that played a candle burning in reverse (obvious imagery) that made me finally decide to do it. I used some birthday candles that we’ve been using for Nora’s birthday parties, which, by chance, are “sparkler” candles that not only relight themselves when extinguished, but also send off sparks every so often. The camera was set to take a photograph every three seconds, so the majority of the sparks were missed, but several of them where captured. What surprised me about them was the obvious rotation of the burning projectiles, resulting in squiggly lines of fire in the photographs. Behold!
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Last night at eleven o’clock our power went out. I’m unfortunately accustomed to this because our circuit breaker is incredibly weak and about twice a month flips to the off position out of sheer laziness. So I got up to flip it back on, but it was already in the on position. It was at that point that I noticed how dark it was outside the window. After fumbling through the darkness towards the window, I looked out into the blackness. It had been raining with low clouds all day, and there was no light reflecting off the clouds from Colindres, nor from nearby Laredo or Santoña. The entire region was blacked out!
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This is quite possibly the creepiest blog post I’ve ever posted, at least on a personal level. I’ve always known I would do this, and my regular readers might share in my surprise that it’s taken me so long to do it. Yesterday, in a curiosity-fueled effort to speculate on what Nora might look like as an adult, I morphed my face with my wife’s. Morphing is always creepy, and even more so when it is done with faces that you know very well.
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