Day Thirty-One: Best Snow Day EVER!!!

I know yesterday's post was also sledding...but yesterday was cold and sleeting when Molly and I (and very few others) took to the hill.  Today is 35 degrees and sunny and we've had a whole bunch of neighbors out sledding the hill at the top of our street.  In this photo are Sunny and Nick.  They are across the street neighbors and were out with us for most of the early afternoon.  My self imposed rule is that I pick one photo to be the photo of the day, and this one is it.  But we had lots of folks and lots of fun today, so I'll post a bunch more on the main blog (link below),

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Day Thirty: All down hill from here.

We got a good six inches of snow and Molly's been sledding since shortly after she woke me up (too early) to go out for the first time.  It's very cold (23 degrees) so we do four or five runs then come back inside to get warm for a bit. Dryer has been running pretty much non stop all day.  

Molly is having a BLAST!!  Have to admit, I am too.  We'll be going back out soon, and taking more pictures, but I like this one because you can see snow getting sprayed up at the front of the toboggan.  And...with my post out of the way for the day...it's all down hill from here.
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Day Twenty Nine: Let it Snow, Let it Snow, PLEASE Let it Snow

Molly and I are ready for some SNOW!!!  Looks like we're getting 6-8 inches starting soon.  We are both very excited...though Molly chose this picture instead of one where she's holding her sled and looking excited.  When she models, she gets to choose.  She also gets to shoot.  Here are a few she took of me:

That's it til tomorrow.  When, with any luck, we'll be taking pics out in the snow.

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Day Twenty-Eight: Bright Sunshiney Day

Today was an absolutely gorgeous day in Durham.  It was 60 degrees and sunny with great clouds in the sky all over.  I went for a ride in the country (which is about 10 minutes from my suburban home) and took pictures of farms and fields.  The weather report calls for a "wintry mix" the next two days, so I really wanted to capture how beautiful a day it was today. 

Hoping we get snow...fun to play (and shoot) in the snow.  Til tomorrow...

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Day Twenty-Seven: The Decisive Moment

This afternoon I drove out to Chapel Hill to shoot on Franklin Street and on the quad there.  The light was filtering through the enormous old trees and making interesting shadows on the paths and lawns.  So I found myself a spot into which life would move, and I waited.  I liked the balance of the lamposts on the left and windows on the right.  And I wanted the figure in my photo to be moving perpendicular to the point of view, which creates tension in the composition.  Then I waited for life to stroll by.

I had groups, singles, people walking dogs and pushing bikes.  I shot some of them, but none of that was what I was looking for.  I was waiting for the "decisive moment."  That term (coined by Henri Cartier Bresson) has always seemed somewhat limited to me.  While I understand the objective, to me, it's not necessarily that the moment be decisive, but rather that the elements in the composition be caught at the apogee of their action within the frame.

Here, the gentlemen striding down the path interplays with the girl in the background,  His stride is long and purposeful, moving along his path.  Her stride is more casaul.  He is moving across the frame, she deeper into it.  While there are two figures in the frame, they are isolated from each other.  The eye is drawn to the path into the photo by the placement of the subjects-- the static lamposts and windows, and the dynamic figures.  Neither has crossed into the plane of the vertical path...in an instant, both will.  And an instant ago, they were not yet in the frame.

This is the apogee, or, if you prefer, the decisive moment.
 

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Day Twenty-Six: Today is January 26, 2010

I'm not exactly sure why this photograph captures my day.  It could be the sense of marching in place that these towers give me from this perspective.  It could be the connectivity they represent.  It could be the bleakness of their industrial architechture.  Or the disconnected mazes the lines create.

I guess all those things spoke to me today.  I took a bunch of pretty pictures.  The sun was out and the sky was bright with puffy white clouds.  I looked for vivid colors as I usually do on a day like that.  But what spoke to me today was something darker...more menacing. 

I struggled with this post.  Picked a nice picture with lots of rich colors.  But found I didn't have anything to say about it.  Then I thought about this image.  I hadn't priocessed it yet, but I remembered taking it.  I remember visualizing it in my head to look like it does in this post.  I remember I made an illegal U-turn and parked in some mud on the side of the road to take it.  One of the things about the 365 is that it's a chance to chronicle a year in my life.  I've talked to people who've done one before and many of them have remarked about going back and looking at the images and remembering the day they took it.  And that made me realize that this image and this day are linked.  And I want to record that, so when I look back at the end of the road, and see this image, I'll remember why it's there.  It's January 26, 2010.  And this is how my day was.

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Day Twenty-Five: KISS

As in Keep It Simple Stupid.  I am three weeks into this project and each day I have a plan to go somewhere, set something up, find someone to sit in front of my camera...But part of being a good photographer is being able to use the simplest of subjects in compelling ways.  Here, some dry brown foliage, sitting against the bright sky and some distant branches makes a simple sketch.  I used split toning (an old process for adding color to monochrome prints) in Lightroom to get the green tones which are soothing and seem well suited to the subject and composition.

So much of being a better photographer is embedded in seeing the possibilities and then composing to realize them.  And my goal for today was to shoot something simple in a compelling way.  I am quite pleased with the result.  Hope you like it too.

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