March Calendar

Here's my March Calendar.

March 31st - My Strat

I made a DIY Grid Spot tonight. I used twice-sticky tape instead of glue and it worked very well. It gives a kind of "spotlight" look to things so I thought I'd put the spotlight on my guitar. Like Alan's trumpet, this guitar has been photographed more than it's been played this year. But I have played a bit this week so that's good :)
1/250th sec. F/4 iso 400

March 30th - "Warm" Light

What is it that is so pleasing about warm light in our homes? Why do we not have fluorescents? I can see why not bright fluorescents, but what if they were turned down and not quite so bright as at the office? I still don't think they would be as comfortable as a warm light by the bedside like this. But what is it about the color of light that makes it warm and pleasing or the color of other lights that makes them cold and harsh?
1/25th sec. F/3.8 iso 400

March 29th - Hiyu

Our theme this week is "Life is Good" and for me it could have just as easily been "Life is BUSY!" as I've been pretty slammed with different things going on... Right now I'm wiped and I just realized I need to post a photo today for this week's theme - Luckily I snapped the Hiyu leaving the ferry dock this afternoon. This is the smallest (I think) ferry in the Washington State Ferry fleet and it's here in the islands while they fix the broken down Elwha. But anyway - since any sunny day in our quaint little seaside village says "Life is Good", I think I got my photo for the week.
1/600th sec. F/7.1 iso 400

March 28th - Wasp Passage Sunset

On the ferry home tonight, we got to go through Wasp Passage, a rare treat these days. It used to be the ferries would almost always take that route, but now they don't so much any more. Coming out of Wasp Passage and into San Juan Channel, we saw this beautiful sunset over our island. That's Yellow Island at right; San Juan Island in the background.
1/200th sec. f/4.5 iso 400

March 27th - Twinkie, Episode Eight - The Great Escape

Yup OK, here's my photo a day late. (But I did shoot this photo yesterday). We've seen that a lot of other people have been to La Conner recently, so we thought, "Why not?" and we went too, and good thing, because we caught Twinkie there trying to make a getaway. Luckily, Twinkie doesn't have a whole lot going on in the brains department - the "Tug Boat" he chartered was just a sculpture.

March 26th - Cell phone setup

Lance saved me today - In comments from yesterday's photo, he said he wanted to see the setup for it, and I was out of ideas and out of time tonight. (look at the time stamp for today's photo!) So here it is, down and dirty. 3 strobes, one at top thru modified softbox, two at back with blue gel and red gel throwing color on the wall. Camera was mounted just out of frame at left, and that's a one-way bronze mirror the cell phone is resting on. (but you've seen that before)
1/3rd sec. F/8 iso 200

March 25th - Cell Phone

If you've been following my photo blog here, you can probably tell by now that I like reflections. Well tonight is no exception. I didn't really know what to shoot but I really liked the results people came up with on the Strobist assignment Cooking Light, especially the colorful ones. So I thought I'd try something with gels again, and here it is. I just wish I could have got the backlit numbers to show up better, but the strobes totally overpower them. So I have some learning to do yet.
1/125th sec. F/14 iso 200

March 24th - Fifty Legos

I've got the number 50 stuck in my head today for some reason... ;-)
Anyway, I've had a photo like this in mind for several days now after seeing Lance's battery photo. There are 50 Legos in the photo casting 50 blue shadows and 50 yellow shadows and some shadows that are a 50/50 mix of blue and yellow. Happy 50th Birthday Eric! May you have Fifty more!
1/125th sec. F/13 iso 200

And a great big thank you to all the other 365ers who did a 50 theme today: Susan, Alan, Martha, RBS, Lance and Laura.
And one more the following day, Hotter than... joined in the fun!

March 23rd - Chopsticks

Yesterday's photo was called "Spooning".
Today's is called:

"Spooning, Asian Style"

Shannon and I were giggling about this one a few nights ago so I thought I'd put it up and see if you got a chuckle out of it too.
1/125th sec. F/5 iso 200


>>>Edit: By the way - I hope this hasn't offended anyone. It was in no way meant to be demeaning or derogatory or offensive at all, but I guess it's possible that it is offensive. Please let me know what you thnk - did I cross a line with this one?

March 22nd - Spooning

Our theme this week is "Symmetry" and it wasn't until after shooting this, that I went and looked it up in the dictionary. Yes, I picked the theme this week - and whoops, I guess I was thinking something else, LOL. My first thought was "Aw man, the spoons are 'Parallel' not 'Symmetrical'". So I shot a bunch of other things, but I kept coming back to this, and then I finally realized - the spoons and their reflections are symmetrical. Well kinda. So this one won out after all.
1/400th sec. F/8 iso 400

March 21st - Mona the Camel

The first day of Spring and it was a gorgeous day! We went for a bike ride to Roche Harbor and saw this camel on the way. This is Mona, and she is a bit of a local celebrity in her own right. She certainly is a sweetheart. If you Google "mona the camel" you're sure to find more about her.
1/400th sec. F/9 iso 400

March 20th - The Sound of Truth

Courtney playing "The Sound of Truth". This time she's lit with a shoot-thru umbrella (camera-right) and my modified softbox to the left. Played with "boost color" in iPhoto and it gave a nice warmth to the light, so we tried to do the same thing with gels on the strobes. We came kind of close but the iPhoto one looked better so that's what you see here. PS - Sorry for doing another guitar photo, but get used to it. Or get over it! LOL
1/400th sec. F/13 iso 400

>>>Edit: Oops. forgot - It's Twinkie day isn't it? OK, here's Twink after six weeks!

March 19th - Soul Mates

This is Shannon, my sweetheart and soul mate, and me. I think I need another shoot-thru umbrella. She looks great in the light from the umbrella. The light falling on me is coming from the small softbox I modified for strobes. Might as well be a bare strobe if it's going to look like this.
Strobe through shoot-thru umbrella, camera-left; strobe through my softbox, camera-right - both at 1/4th power.
1/400th sec. F/8 iso 400

March 18th - Many Me

Today's post is a photoshop experiment I've had in mind for a long time although I'd thought of it as a family photo instead of all me. Only problem with doing a family portrait like this is, the 5th family member's image (or 6th if you count Chester our dog) will be very small compared to everyone else. This is not my original idea - again, I saw something similar on Photosig.com. And Lance's photo yesterday reminded me I wanted to do something like this.
One strobe 1/8th power through shoot-thru umbrella camera left.
1/250th sec. F/5.6 iso 400

March 17th - Splash

A bowl of water, an eyedropper, a couple of strobes with gels (the red gel fell off the one strobe on this shot) and this is what I came up with. I want to do this again when I have more time because this didn't turn out exactly as I'd hoped, but I know what I need to do, so you might see an improvement of this shot sometime this year.
1/800th sec. F/11 iso 400

March 16th - This Ain't the NFL

OK so the thing I still don't understand is, what does the Canadian Football League have to do with saving energy? Get it? CFL? Canadian Foot.... nevermind, yeah that was a bad one, sorry. No but seriously, we got our shipment today from our electric utility. A package with CFL's, low flow shower heads, and the like. Pretty cool!
1/250th sec. F/14 iso 400

March 15th - Rock n Roll

Some men at my age go off and buy a little red sports car. Me - I go out in the back yard after dark with my strobes doing crazy guitar stunts. I've always loved Rock 'n Roll so it's fun to shoot photos like this. Our theme assignment this week is "Motion" and this is my entry. Think Roger Daltrey on "Won't Get Fooled Again" with that epic rock n roll scream. (It's at 7:50 on that video if you're too young or too old to know what I'm talking about.)
5 secs. F/8 iso 400

March 14th - Kitchen Stories

I'm working on shooting better interiors. Here's one of our kitchen thru a wide angle lens earlier today. I wanted to be able to see the backyard through the window without it or the kitchen being over or under exposed, but rather with both nicely balanced. I think this works. Now I just need some correction for the lens distortion and hide the strobe locations better. But I'm working on it...
1/80th sec. f/11 iso 800

March 13th - Experimental Photography

Experimental photography - Sometimes it works. Sometimes it backfires. Sometimes people get hurt. Sometimes it hurts the eyes. I haven't yet decided what this one does. Or doesn't. I was just playing around with my new radio slaves (wireless things to trigger remote strobes) and a wide angle lens and came up with this. I held the camera at arm's length, pointing right at me, and rotated it about 180 degrees and hit the shutter release - slow shutter speed makes trails out of the lights in the living room behind me (Yes, those are still our Christmas lights. Yes, we leave them up all year - they make a really nice low light for watching movies on the telly) and then the strobe freezes anything in its path, like me in this case. And the strobes are the bright lights that left no trails. I tweaked the contrast a bit in Photoshop, but the rest is pure science.
1/5th sec. f/8 iso 800

Oh and I almost forgot...
The Great Twinkie Experiment - Episode VI: Snoresville is here.

March 12th - Time's Almost Up

I think this is the latest I've posted all year. Gotta hurry or it will be tomorrow before this gets uploaded. Busy day... almost forgot about this! Just in time - like Eric was once in January! And I just realized, this looks a lot like a post by Hotter than... from yesterday.
1/5th sec. f/10 iso 800

March 11th - Pompous Grass

This is grass that stands about 8 - 10 feet tall. We see it in several of our neighbors' yards where they've done some landscaping and brought in some various shrubs, bushes and grasses. Walking home from the store tonight I noticed the last of the day's sunlight hitting these against the blue sky and thought it looked kinda cool so here it is for you to enjoy.
1/160th sec. f/20 iso 800

March 10th - Hole in the Clouds

I got a tip tonight from my good friend Ian that the full moon rising over Griffin Bay might make a good photo for the day, so I rushed out there and took several shots, but my lens couldn't pull the moon close enough so it just looks like a white dot in the photo (well not quite, but almost). Anyway, while I was out there I looked toward the southwest and noticed this hole in the clouds, so I shot a few frames of it too, and this one, after some photoshop work took the winning spot tonight.
8 sec. f/22 iso 800

March 9th - R/G/B

These are really the only colors you see on most any computer monitor and in most of the color photos you see on the web. R/G/B = Red/Green/Blue and they're seen here in a refraction experiment that I saw in flickr last week, but I wanted to do it with a little color. Look at the different ways the 3 glasses interpret the window blind.
Lit with the New Lamp lighting the ceiling on full power.
0.6 sec. f/8 iso 200

March 8th - Stood Up

This week's theme assignment is "Alone" and I struggled all week with what to do. Finally I got some ideas but they either required a lot of extras or the great outdoors, and the weather kind of tanked on me, so then this popped into my head out of nowhere... Click on the photo to see it larger.
1/125th sec. f/10 iso 200

March 7th - What's wrong with this picture?

This is the first in my new series called "What's Wrong With This Picture", a series of photos that points out things that I believe we all need to be thinking about these days. Study this enlarged version carefully and see if anything strikes you as out of place or not quite right. Then, click here to see what I was thinking. Be sure to come back here and leave a comment and let me know how you did!
1/250th sec. f/5.6 iso 800 - Three strobes on Full Power nuking the dark paneled ceiling trying to match the light of the sun on the carpet.

March 6th - Shattered

Wow. OK, this is art now. We're talkin' HIGH ART. So high it's downright disturbing. (Yes... Disturbing! That's me in there!!!) I think I'll go have a nightmare. Naw I'm just kidding. I did quite a few shots for this project, and this one came out the best as far as how my eyes looked. In some of the others my eyes were split over several pieces of glass; in some I made a scary face; in some I made a terrified face... I guess when I mentioned nightmares, I was thinking about those others rather than this one.
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And..........it's Friday, and Friday is Twinkie Day! Here's the latest from Good Ol' Twink.

March 5th - Boiled Eggs

Alright I know, I know... this is one of the more silly ones I've uploaded yet. But when I looked at my breakfast this morning, I saw something else. Do you see it? What is it?
1/50th sec. f/5.6 iso 800

March 4th - Something Just Clicked

>>>Edit - I'm re-writing this post; It was originally called "Epiphany", and yes I had one of those today and this photo reminded me of it. Suffice it to say, something just clicked in my head today, and I feel better about some things because of it.
1/500th sec. f/16 iso 400 - Strobe with dispersion grid and gobo, camera left behind subject, and bare strobe directly behind subject) (me)

March 3rd - Slice and Dice

I'm doing the Lighting 102 thing over at Strobist.com, and this is from my exercise tonight. I'm gonna re-do the exercise because I got carried away with trying to make an artistic photo and didn't really end up with the results the exercise was all about. But this was fun so it's my photo for today.
1/500th sec. f/5.6 iso 400 - Softbox camera right.

March 2nd - Night Landing

Two ferries came in tonight, one right after the other. The one on the right in this photo is the Evergreen State. It was the "big" ferry when I first moved here back in '71. Now it's the little ferry doing the inter-island run. The one on the left is a much newer boat called the Sealth. Neither of them is the boat I was on last night for yesterday's photo.
4 sec. f/22 iso 800

March 1st - Different Perspective

Our assignment today was "Different Perspective". Man that's hard to do when you're pressed for time! I ended up shooting different angles in an empty section on the ferry coming back home tonight and this one won. The color was kinda boring, so I played around with it in Photoshop.
1/50 sec. f/3.5 iso 800