The Many Faces of Jen

Well I had fun tonight...by myself! I was bored so you know when I get bored I turn to self portraits. Well this time I decided to have lots of fun with them and not be all serious.

I laughed, I made funny faces, I jumed up in the air, I jumped into the photo, swung my hair around all crazy, took some serious ones, and tried some new angles with the tripod. I had fun just being silly...

After I while I realized I had developed a "series" of faces...so I went with it and made as many as I could think of. I ended up with 30. So, I came back into my office and made a composite of all 30 faces and called it "The Many Faces of Jen."

It has no purpose at all except for FUN...and fun I had...if you can't tell:

(click to view very large)


I did take some serious ones. I made the tripod as TALL as I could get it and had the camera pointing down at me. I turned my head all different angles and this is the first one I edited. This is exactly how it was taken (landscape) with my head tilted to the side looking upwards into the camera lens on the tallest tripod setting:



Converted to a Dark B&W:



And a little LOMO...



And a session would not be complete without a kiss (well it was really a "sniff") from Lucas aka "Silks" (I don't know why my face was blown out here but who cares....)

He Had His Own Photoshoot And Boy Do I Love Him!

You'll have to bare with me on this post...mainly because there are a lot of photos! There are a lot because they contain my 2 favorite living beings on this planet....My Tom (hubby) & My Lucas (my Lab).

After I was done with my self portraits the other night I invited my buddy Lucas to join in a few shots with me...check us out!:











And by this point it's like he's saying "enough, enough already!"



Then Tom joined in the fun with Lucas:



Converted to B&W:



And then we dangled his favorite rubbery purple toy over his head to get him to take these! And I love them!

Experimenting Photographing Snow at Night

It started snowing late in the day while I was at work today and by the time I got got close to my town it had actually started to stick to the road.

Normally my commute is about 40 mins the MOST in traffic but today it took well over and hour. It gave me a lot of time to think and one thing that popped in my head was the idea to photograph the snow coming down tonight on the bulb setting to see if I could capture the snow with a streaky look as it streamed down.

I put the light on by my back door and set my camera on the tripod under the awning (to keep it dry) and I captured this:

ISO 100, f5.6, Shutter 15.2 on BULB setting



After the exeriment was completed I couldn't resist getting a photo of Lucas enjoying "sniffing" the snowflakes:



I tried multiple shots...this one I liked the best. If anything it was a neat experiment. :)



Tonight I worked on these 3 images of a "side of the road" barn & silo that my sister and I loved so much we had to pull over to photograph on our trip to the Mulica River & the Pine Barrens on October 28th (I'm still trying to catch up on 2007!!):



The same photo (above) converted:





And just to show you how funny the two of us are on these photo trips.... Here is my sister taking her version of the shot and my shadow as I take the shot from behind her to the right. We must look hysterical on the side of the road and that's why I like to document us while we're out...my sister tries to do the same for me and those are many of the photos you'll see running along the right side of my blog.





The other thing I tried tonight was a "gritty" Photoshop technique I found while googling. I tried it on a "Lee" photograph and this is what I got as a result. Kinda neat if you're going for this kind of effect:





Found this photo from November.

My Dad moved away and we went to clean out the attic and I found a box of my old stuffed animals...my sister was there with her dog and we had some fun. Can you tell which is a stuffed animal and which is not? LOL. The Jack Russell is hers. LOL!




In other news....

I'm flattered with a phone call I just received while I was writing this blog post. A local Photography club found my website through a web search and asked me if I would be interesting in judging their bi-monthly photography contest. The did a search on local photographers in the area and came across my site.

I declined the offer because I didn't feel comfortable judging, critiquing, and providing detailed feedback on technique to others while I'm still learning myself.

Even though I wasn't comfortable with judging their bi-monthly contest the phone call at least provided me with information about a very local club that I didn't know existed. The person I spoke with shared information regarding the club along with their website so I could review it. Thanks to Cranbury Digital Photography Club for the offer! :)


On another topic:

A few photoshop tutorial site links that were shared on my forum tonight:

http://www.worth1000.com/tutorials.asp

http://www.pslover.com/

http://www.good-tutorials.com/

http://photoshopcafe.com/