Fruit Smoothie

F is for Fruit Smoothie and it was tasty! We make these frequently around our house and the kids love to have them so I thought I would practice on a glass of smoothie. We use a juicer for stuff like carrots, apples, oranges, celery (well I usually skip the celery), etc. then blend it with a few frozen strawberries and bananas. If you want an extra special treat you can throw in some sherbet to sweeten it up a bit.

East

E is for go East! Took some thinking to come up with some ideas for E that I could do something with and Beth suggested I think more abstract than the usual literal object starting with the correct letter. Once I had this idea it was a very simple thing to compose, simply have 1 kid stand on a sheet of white paper with a direction arrow pointing east and yes both arrow and kid were facing in the direction of east. When I was doing this one I thought that the overall image would look best in black & white so I did the conversion in post processing.

Dominoes take 2

So as I was posting my dominoes photos earlier it hit me how I could get more of that "ghost" image to show by increasing the amount of ambient light (natural light in the room) hitting the dominoes. So I opened up the blinds to let more light into the room and took another go at it. I really like the one where the dominoes are more facing the camera but also included another side shot as it shows the effect real well.

Dominoes

Well D is for Dominoes. I did these with a slower shutter speed and the flash set to rear sync so it would go off just before the shutter closes, making the last fraction of a second frozen in the frame. The slower shutter speed combined with the rear sync flash left a slight ghost image of the domino as it fell.

Chess

Well it has been a little longer than I wanted to get this next one up but I have been pretty busy over the last week but I did some playing around today to get something for C. I had an idea of using a chess board and trying to come up with a more dramatic lighting look. Originally I kind of wanted to back light a few of the pieces so the pices would be more of a silhouette, however, I could not totally figure out how to achieve what I was seeing in my head (this I blame on the head cold I have). I then moved the light off to the side to get more of an extreme side light look with a dark background and this is what we have here. I may need to revisit doing some shots with the chess board some day as I have seen some interesting shots using one as a prop, including putting fog in the scene with some dry ice.

Bible

For B I thought I would use the Bible, seemed like the best option to me as it is something I try to read on a regular basis. Not much to this setup but one interesting thing I did was to put my flash in the light. So the lamp was not on at all and all the light was from my flash that was set up wireless and held up in the top of the light with some really small bungee straps. In case you are wondering it was open on Proverbs chapters 25-27 and there was no real reason behind it, just where I opened it to.

Aces

So I don't always have ideas of subjects to photograph but feel I should push myself to take more pictures and one idea I have seen people use is to go through the alphabet. You start at A and find a subject that starts with A and photograph it, working on composition ideas with that subject till you get a picture you like. After one letter is done you move on to the next letter and so on. So I am going to start today at the beginning and my idea for the letter A was, obviously, Aces. I actually had a hard time coming up with things that started with A and as we have no aardvarks around here I settled on the idea of photographing a poker hand with 4 Aces. I have never had this hand in poker but it would be a nice one to have!! Now to think up ideas for B.