Symmetry.
8.18.2010
8.17.2010
143:365 Negative Space 8.12.10
gesture.
I'm pretty sure this wasn't an intentional photo. Sometimes you just get lucky. I had some cute shots of my dogs sitting at a street corner and some esoteric ones of some street lamps, but I kept coming back to this one. Maybe it's the simplicity or the abstractness of it that I struggled to capture 2 weeks ago... whatever it is, here it is.
142:365 Negative Space 8.11.10
stumped.
The tree in front of my in-laws house was removed the other day. It just feels empty now. It was a huge tree that lost a significant limb during a big storm a few weeks back. Now it's a stump.
8.11.2010
141:365 Negative Space 8.10.10
Positive space.
I spent part of the day photographing for Summer in the City. They are truly a creator of positive space in a place that has gotten such negative press - Detroit. Their volunteer projects range from muraling and community gardening to running free summer camps for children in underprivileged areas. Today I was photographing at the Latino Mission Society in southwest Detroit. SITC runs a camp there where they have an average of 80 kids show up every Tuesday through Friday. The kids are paired with a "buddy" and they play games and organized activities and just have an all around good time.
I took lots of photos of the kids and their volunteer buddies. I haven't had time to go through all of them, but here are a few more that fit with the "Negative Space" theme I'm going with this week. I hate to say anything is "negative" about SITC or these kids, so I'll call these "positive space."
Life is like a box of chocolates...
If you have some free time on Friday, you should stop by for the last day of SITC this summer. It's going to be a blast - I'll be there. Check out their website for more info.
139:365 Shadows 8.8.10
upstairs...
What is up there? a haunting ghost? a bunch of cobwebs inhabited by a basketball sized spider? A portrait of Dorian Gray? No, it's even scarier - an almost 2 year old!!! Don't worry, she's sleeping. For now...
8.09.2010
138:365 Shadows 8.7.10
an alpaca in the shade and some detail in the sky.
Here's the thing about digital cameras, they can't really capture everything we see. Even the best ones pale in comparison to the human eye. Digital cameras have a notoriously narrow range of exposure (or "dynamic range" for those who speak tech talk). Basically, this means that if you are looking at a scene with a large contrast between the bright areas (highlights) and the dark areas (shadows), you can't properly expose (see) both at the same time.
This is the problem that arises when you are trying to shoot outside on a sunny day. There are bright areas in the photo, usually the sky, and then there are dark areas, or the harsh shadows cast in bright sun. Your eyes can see both at the same time, but the camera can't. You have to make a choice. Do I expose the photo for the highlights or for the shadows? If you choose one, you usually lose detail in the other. This photo is a great example of that bright sunny day... but wait, what's that you say? You see details in the shadows and the highlights? Well, that's the magic of post-processing. What comes out of the camera looks like blah, the sky is all white and the shade is too dark, but what you can do with the information hidden in the zeros and ones is quite remarkable. When you play around with the little sliders in Adobe Lightroom and find those details in the highlights and shadows that you thought had disappeared, you can massage the pixels into showing us something close to what our eyes can see. Unfortunately it takes a good amount of time on the computer to coax out these details, whereas our eyes do it instantaneously.
The funny thing is that most people will look at a photo like this and say "that's not real, they did something to it in photoshop." And while that is true, the intention for doing this was to be able to bring it back to reality - to show the full dynamic range of the scene, or simply, show what our eyes see. So the next time you are squinting on a sunny day, be thankful that you can see the bright blue in the sky as well as the girl under the umbrella laying on the beach. If your eyes were like a digital camera, you might have to choose which one to see (I'd go with the latter...).
137:365 Shadows 8.6.10
Stress.
Don't worry, she's just acting for the sake of the photo. The dramatic shadows didn't feel like a smiley happy photo. Sorry, they can't all be smiley and happy. Maybe next week. Thanks for modeling (and putting up with me), sweetie.
136:365 Shadows 8.5.10
Spork.
Yes, this is a metal spork. Albeit a little more fork than spoon, but it's the closest thing to a spork I've found of the non-desposable sort. I believe it was borrowed from a Lufthansa flight back when you didn't have to pay for crackers.
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