I Lied

No sooner had I posted about losing some Project365 pictures, then I re-opened Picasa and it decided to find them! How crazy. To celebrate, here's one of the photos I thought I lost:



My cousin Max, who lives in Philly, visited me over Labor Day weekend. We had a real blast -- I think he enjoyed his time in Austin and hopefully I've convinced him to move out here :-)

The photographic technique in the above photo is called a rear-curtain flash sync (also known as a second-curtain sync, which is what Canon calls it. In it, the flash fires twice -- once at the beginning of the exposure (to assist w/focus) and again at the end of the exposure. This means if you have a long enough shutter time, your picture will contain trails/blurs -- like all long exposures do -- but because the flash fires at the end of the exposure, the picture also has at least one sharp image in it. In this case you can see that Max moved his head to the right during the exposure, but because the flash fired at the end (freezing the action for a still shot), the whole picture isn't blurry.

I love this effect -- I also used it here.

One Month of Project365

Well, amazingly enough I'm over a month into Project365 and have hit every single day. Talk about commitment. The only snag has been that my camera-to-PC transfer lost a few photos from last Saturday & Sunday, which kind of sucks because there were some good ones. But since I actually took the photos, I'm not too upset :-)

Here's a nice picture to add to the "sky" collection:



It's been fun so far ... and it's definitely been doable because of my macro lens. Because of that, I can come home after work, take a picture of something at extremely-close range, have it fill the lens, and have the picture turn out halfway interesting. I don't have to think too terribly much about it.

Still, I'm already getting tired of that practice and it's only been a month! What I'm going to do is start taking my camera to work and then going different places after work to take pictures. I'm a big fan of variety, and that should help :-)

I'm still lagging behind in uploading photos, but I'm confident I'll get them all up eventually.

Project 365 Continues

Seems to be the thing to do 'round these parts on Sunday nights.

Note: The shot w/the car was made possible with my new macro lens that arrived Friday :-D







And of course more here.

Project 365 Rolls Right Along

Cake in a bowl.



Bill enjoying his new light-up ball toy that my parents got him.



Diana's outdoor plants that I watered while she was away.

Eyes and Books

So I woke up this morning and my right eye was all crusty. I looked in the mirror, and this was staring back at me:



Kinda looks like I got knocked around in a bar fight or something, haha. But really it's a sty. I went to the hospital and got some medicine for it, in addition to advice about warm compresses every so often. Good times! My parents didn't even mind that it canceled our planned trip to Salado. Instead, we went to Half Price Books where I ended up blowing some money on this stuff:



Oh, yeah, more stuff to add to the backlog of items to read. I'm currently reading this, then I have to read and review this (I promised the author I would; she is a fellow technical writer/blogger in Austin), and then it's on to other things. Oy!

In other news, you will likely be seeing a lot more pictures from me in the coming ... year. I've decided to do something called Project365, in which I take at least one picture a day for the next year. I probably already average at least one picture a day, but of course I skip most days and make up for those w/photo-intensive days, like trips to NY (or China!) or whatever. But this will be a daily thing. I officially kicked it off on August 10th and, so far for the first week, have been keeping up with it quite nicely. The photos will be archived here on Flickr. I won't lie; part of the motivation here is to convince myself it's worth it to buy a nice macro lens or maybe an external flash :-) But I swear that's only part of it ...