Tempus Fugit!
Hell's teeth! It's March already and I am already sixteen percent of my way through the three hundred and sixty five day challenge. Where does the time go to? Onwards into March!
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Day 91. March Photograph Review. I am off to see my folks today so I cheated a bit and knocked up this video yesterday because I just knew that I was going to be hard pressed for time. There will be no time for responses or comments today much as I really want to say "Hi!" and "Thank you!" to all you wonderful folks so I am going to wish you all a "Happy Easter" and warn you "not to eat too much chocolate!". I will see you all tomorrow
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Day 90. Easter. This is as close as I get to religion; a plaster facsimile of Nossa Senhora do Fatima. We bought her in Madeira and she lives in a shrine in our garden during the summer months and indoors for the rest of the year. We joke that she takes care of the cats and wildlife in the garden but she is always there smiling soulfully when you walk past her. It has got to the point where I bid her good morning as I walk by. Anyway, regardless of the religious sentiment, I would like to wish you all a very Happy Easter for tomorrow. I will either be very early posting or very late as I am driving up country to see my parents.
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Day 89. Roses are... ...fake. I really wanted to have a go at using the Photoshop Mixer brush and this shot seemed to be the one to have a go with. The shot was taken in daylight in our front bedroom (aka The Carmen Suite because I played Leontyne Price singing the role of "Carmen" over and over whilst decorating the room years back). The Photoshop Mixer brush lets you pretend to be painting and drags colour from the picture as if it was wet paint. So I did the rose buds, vase, candle plus holder as if they were painted and left the background just as it was. If you view large you might be able to see the result.
Check out http://snapchap.weebly.com/roses.html to see the effect on the roses. |
Day 87. Camera Raw. Eww! I was at a bit of a loss for ideas today when this macabre thought occurred to me. So it was out with the trusty Canon as a model I tripod mounting my old Sigma (spent a long time finding the two second timer function!), I took three shots (bracketed by one stop) and then HDR'd them in Photoshop.Then it was just a bit of fun doing the slice, finding a picture of some meat, fat, gristle and blood and putting them all together! I must admit I was tempted to also do Camera Rare, Camera Medium and Camera Well-done but it would have been far too much to eat all at once...
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Day 86. Not Frank. Meet "Not Frank". He is one of the creations of Maria Devlieghere who has a shop called "The Bear Necessities" in Bruges, Belgium. He is called "Not Frank" because he has a pointy, ferrety face and I insisted that he not be likened to Frank Burns from the TV series M*A*S*H (who was known as ferret face), hence "Not Frank". Spookily, he is a "Knarf" bear which is Frank spelled backwards. The reason for him being here today is that I must have eaten something that disagreed with me last night and Not Frank has been keeping me company all day while I try to sleep it off.
Almost forgot... http://www.thebearnecessities.be/main.htm |
Day 85. WAKEY,WAKEEEEEEEEEEEEYYYYYY! So it's Monday morning again and you want to have a lie in do you? Let me sing you the song of my people! Why do people curse when the alarm goes off but they will curse just as loudly if it doesn't? OK, my alarm clock goes off at four fifteen in the morning but I didn't have the heart to spring this shot on you that early in the day. Enjoy your Monday and your week!
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Day 84. The Portrait. I took a lot of shots last night and this was far and away the best shot that I achieved even if there is a seat back chopping through her head and a distinct flash shadow despite using a diffuser (the original light was very subdued). I have given this the Photoshop retouching treatment but I haven't totally removed all of the "facial character" (i.e. wrinkles) and I have added a dark vignette for good measure. OK. it's a cheat as I didn't take this shot today but tempus fugit and all that.
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Day 83. On the job. Nothing creative today. Weekends are hard enough for me to comment and post pictures but sometimes they go from bad to worse. We have been invited out to dinner this evening and all was fine until the words " pretty please re bringing your camera and taking a shot or two of me" were found in the email we were sent. Oh gods! That means I have to work for my meal! So here is the whole kit and kaboodle photographed with my trusty Sigma. I am not going to get caught without the right lens for the situation!
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Day 81. Two faced. After yesterday's bulb frenzy, I struggled with today's photograph. Several ideas came, were experimented with and ended up being turned back into random electrons. That is, until this one popped up. I was photographing her exquisite celadon hands with my "Mwwah_I_love_you!" 100mm macro lens when I looked up to check the time. Bingo! Zingo! Bazinga! Two faces of time; Guanyin and an antique clock.
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Day 80. "Light" bulbs. The burglar alarm went off on the Doctor's surgery across the road... at two a.m. this morning... I have had plenty of time to think about this shot...
I hadn't put away the bulbs from my picture of February the ninth so I thought that I would use them again in a different sense of the word "Light". This is a merge of three shots, One to get most of the scales and strings exposed correctly, one to simulate the light glow (I added some blur to a heavily over exposed shot) and one to get the tray of the scales and bulbs to show against the black background. Then it was a job for layer masks - oooh I love my layer masks! The whole thing was shot upside down and then inverted. Oh come on now! You didn't think that I could hold five soggy strings vertical, did you? :o) I will tell my child bride that I had to drill a hole in the scales later when I can think of a plausible excuse! |
Day 79. I'm feelin' Fruity with a capital 'F'. I didn't feel like a visual pun today. I wanted some colour and texture and this veritable "traffic light" of fruits grabbed my attention straight away. Shot in manual with ambient (i.e.very flat and grey light) as a series of different exposures and then combined as HDR in Photoshop, sharpened a bit (all Raw files need a bit of sharpening) and then a tweak on the vibrance et voilà. I used my 50mm f/1.4 lens so that I could blur out the grotty, old kitchen tiles in the background... and it looks like the chopping board has seen better days too!
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Day 78. My curse! I'm at that age when I have entered the andropause (the so-called "male menopause") and I wake up in the night absolutely baking hot. That happened again in the early hours of this morning but at least it gave me the idea for this shot. Ladies and Gentlemen I give you (drumroll followed by high hat...) "The hot flush"!
Sorry... I should have said this was two photographs. One was the hand of cards photographed on a black background, the second was of a burning piece of newspaper overlaid and then layer masked in Photoshop. |
Day 76. Can't see the wood for the trees. t's a quickie today because we have a guest arriving in about five minutes time. I was eating my trees and yellow peas (sorry - Royal Naval jargon for broccoli and sweetcorn) last night when I thought of this pic. So this morning it was out with a bit of pine and the broccoli. Ideally I wanted a nice big knot for the moon but for once I had been careful with my choice of wood when I bought it so this small wooden kitty will have to do.
I'm sorry but I won't be able to respond to (or make) any comments today or tomorrow but I promise I will catch up on Monday. Have a great weekend. |
Day 75. It's magic! (aka pulling a habit out of a rat). Not for me, ordinary sleight of hand, legerdemain or prestidigitation... just a dreadful spoonerism! (What did you expect?). The rat is a "Year of the Rat" hat from a few years back, the syringe is what we used to feed our old cat with when he was on his last legs, the needle is one of those brightly coloured matchsticks I make use of! I want to thank @trailertrash for her photograph http://365project.org/trailertrash/stuff/2013-02-21 for the inspiration for this one.
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Day 74. ...is all my brain and body need. What was that? I'm sorry... my hearing aid is playing up again... oh... SEX... and drugs. What do you mean that paracetamol isn't quite what Ian Dury had in mind when he sang the song? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfp8xrNAS6I
Oh well at my age, the most exciting thing that can happen is if I spill hot cocoa in my lap before beddy byes! |
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Day 73. Manna from heaven. I sometimes get asked where I get my ideas from so I thought that I would do this short video to let you know. It is only one minute twenty seconds long so shouldn't take too much of your time. Enjoy.
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Day 72. Time to reflect. The creative muse left me during the night and I had a hot flush instead (the perils of getting older and being struck by the andropause!). The figurine above is a piece of Cmielow porcelain (Polish in origin http://www.en.cmielow.com.pl/?lang=en&action=katalog2_produkty&ids=4&idks=3) which I collect. I love the rather sensuous curves of this figurine and the glossiness of her accoutrements. I laid her against a mirror to reflect herself and shot a series of photographs. I then did an HDR job on them and tried a variety of B&W techniques before blending a B&W calculations conversion with the original colour shot which has given it what I shall refer to as "the beachradish look" (sorry to take your name in vain @still_beachradish )
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Day 71. 3D printing? I have taken quite an interest in 3D printing recently (is it going to change the world? http://video.pbs.org/video/2339671486) but at the moment with my old Canon printer this is the best I can manage - a 1 'T' printer. This was quite a little challenge which is why I am posting it even though I am not 100% happy with the end result. It's a mix of about four shots with a bit of warping in Photoshop to make the 3D teapot flatten out and look like it has been printed by the printer.
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Day 69. Spitting feathers! It's an old expression and it sums up how I feel at weekends! There is never enough time for me to do anything photographic because my delectable child bride wants me to do other things (go shopping, fix things, you know...) So here I am spitting feathers. It's an expensive studio set up once more - an old white sheet propped up with some spare wooden rods, a tripod, the camera (obviously, doh!), flash set to auto and a remote release. Now all I have to do is get the feathers off my tongue...
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Day 68. String instrument. My but I have had fun with this one! First of all, parcel string is... awkward... to manipulate to say the least but there you go. Secondly, I used a hardback book as a background because the cover added some texture that helped keep the string in place but when lit, each little bit of raised texture became a specular highlight! I spent a good forty minutes making a selection so I could plonk it on a gradient background that I created in Photoshop. Best listened to with Hazel O'Connor's "Will you?" (sax solo begins at 2mins 20secs) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCwWn6yYH9A (alternatively you could pull up Gerry Rafferty's "Baker Street" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fo6aKnRnBxM and sax solo at 1min 48 secs.)
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Day 67. Paraesthesia. Early this morning I suffered a major bout of paraesthesia. That's pins and needles for those of you who are interested but in this case it was darned painful - my right leg and arm had gone to sleep and took some time coming back to life. I had a couple of old rolling pins and some knitting needles so it was out with the drill and voilà, today's picture. Now that my leg has woken up again it is just the rest of me that wants to go to sleep!
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Day 62. Rock and Roll Damnation! OK, this is a cheap shot, partly because I am always in a rush at weekends and partly because some of my other ideas just haven't been developed far enough. There I was, listening to some AC/DC the other day and I thought "Rock and Roll"... why not? So here we have a bread roll with some rock in it. Do you think I could find proper, good old-fashioned Brighton rock in Horsham? Like 'ell, I could. So these rock candy canes will just have to do. I hope that you are enjoying your weekend. Now I better get cracking on tomorrow's shot because I am going to have even less time!
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Day 61. Project365.org February Compilation. Have yourself a video compilation of last month's photographs. I'm afraid that I am cheating again because I got home very late last night. I went to the Prince Consort's Library in Aldershot for an author's talk on the role of the Chindits in Burma during World War Two. Not only was the author there talking about and signing his book, I met a wonderful 90 year old gentleman, Private John "Jack" Hutchin who fought with the Chindits in Burma from 1942 until the end of the war. What an amazing character! Anyway, blame John Hutchin for my lack of a shot because I couldn't tear myself away from his amazing stories until very late and there has been no time to do anything else. Enjoy
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