Quarters Falling in Water

So Q came up and Quarters falling in a glass dish full of green water came to mind. I know! This is probably what you were thinking also because what else would one do for Q other than Quarters falling in green water!? So that is what I did and the hardest part was getting the camera to fire when I dropped the quarters. I started off trying to use my remote trigger and each time I dropped the quarters I was holding the remote at the wrong angle to even trigger the camera, so my first 3 attempts the camera did not even go off. Finally I decided I was able to reach the camera with one hand and drop the quarters in with the other hand at the same time (I actually slid them off in a row from a piece of paper I was holding so they all did not fall in one group) and that started working for me. In the end I think three of the images had some real interesting looks going on with the water but I chose this one as the water is interesting and I managed to catch one of the quarters still falling.

Pet

I figured the kids could use a break from being my subjects and I would use Strider for P as in Pet. After a few minutes of trying to get him to stay in a sitting position I was starting to second guess using the dog for my subject as he was trying my patience and wining! In the end he does a better job of staying in a laying down position and those photographs came out better anyway. I was going to use a flash however there was just enough light in the room to try this with just natural light so I left the flash off. I also had my assistant Hannah holding a piece of white foam core off to the left to bounce a little bit of light back on him.

Old camera

For O I finally came up with the idea of Old and it had nothing to do with me doing new for my last post, I actually did not think about that relation until I went to post this and saw my last post. I have a small collection of old cameras and accessories and figured one of the cameras would make a good subject. This "box" camera is an Ansco No. 2A Buster Brown. From what I could find the patents for this camera were 1906, 1910 and 1916 and the camera was sold up until around the early 1920's. Not sure just how old this exact one is but probably around 90-100 years old and probably worth around $5-30 so I will not be fully retiring anytime soon.

New Glasses

So I was thinking of doing some more self portraits now that I have New glasses and then I realized New would work for N, score! (or cop-out since this was not specifically started for N but hey it works) So we finally went to get our eyes checked the other day so I could finally get some new glasses. It has been probably over 4 years and my old glasses were falling apart. The new ones are a bit different in style but I think I am used to them and am almost used to the new prescription.

LEGO Man

LEGO man was nice enough to make a second appearance here on my blog. Today he is helping me create my photo based off the letter M by holding a Match as he walks around in the dark and we all know that a match is like a torch too a LEGO man. (For a while he really thought he was Indiana Jones) I used up an entire book of matches taking pictures and working on getting something I liked and found out that it can be a bit hard to light the match, trigger the camera and shine the flashlight I was using for the main source of light on him. Now we will have to see what projects LEGO man might help out with in the future.

Lines

In ways everything has lines so I thought that Line would be a good subject for L. At first I was thinking more of some architecture that had straight long lines to emphasize the subject, however I came up with this idea of taking a couple of the kitchen utensils that have good lines to them instead. I liked using these as the metal finish on these have no distracting color and so without shooting in black and white I get that simplified image that focuses more on the form than anything. I also wanted to work on blowing out the background and give the image more of a look similar to "high-key" photography.

Knees

Took me a while to come up with an idea for K that I somewhat liked. Then I came up with this idea of using scrabble pieces but I did not want to just photograph the letter K for this and be done, so I had this idea of spelling out the word knees with the scrabble letters and then having someone in the background (ended up being me yet again) with mainly their knees showing. I also liked the idea of the person being out of the focus area and blurred out slightly, for me this makes the word the focus with the background helping to reinforce the idea (also my knees being blurred out hopefully does not scare anyone away). I also felt a black and white conversion would bring more to the picture than leaving it in color.