Archive for March 2008

6

Railyard Graffiti

In like a lion, out like a lamb, March is skittering off the stage and April is rounding the bend. The CDPB Theme Day (first of the month) for March was Graffiti and in the spirit of March, I decided to offer you one more graffiti post for the month. I will postpone the April theme of "Water" until the second, so that I can make an announcement tomorrow; be sure to check back, it's pretty cool! The train is actually moving in this photo, I found the graffiti and was all set when I heard these Canadian Pacific GP40's chugging on from stage-left. It was a grimy pre-spring day when I was out and the colors were rather bland, so I ran for my trusty over-saturated look to process this photo. I process all my photos for mitchster.com in Adobe Lightroom only — there is no Photoshopping of any of my photos. I'm a bit of a National Geographic Photographer wanna-be. If you haven't tried Lightroom, I strongly suggest it, the power and speed is incredible. I can organize and process hundreds of photos very quickly. One of my favorite options is to copy-and-paste settings — adjust a photo, then copy the settings to another photo from the same shoot and you're done. In this case I had several photos of the graffiti and after I created the effects you see, I pasted them to several photos and found the one it worked best on.

2

Cell Phone Sunday

Cell Phone Sunday is back, but the snow is still here. In March, the snow doesn't go away, it just gets heavier, wetter and slipperier. What's Cell Phone Sunday all about?

2

Saturday Moment of Zen on a Wire

Extra Moment of Zen Video!

The Fetch Machine, sent to me by my sister and editor, Sharon.

3

A City Photographer's Self Portrait

Those in glass houses shouldn't cast stones, but they do cast their fair share of reflections. Perched above the street in one of Minneapolis' many skyways, my eye was caught by the reflection on the skyway window, but I quickly saw the reflections all down the street and saw the chance to capture myself in the act.

Composition Tips

Here's a few tips on composing an image: The rule of thirds is a classic and oft debated, but good general rule. Divide the space into thirds in both directions and try to place areas of interest on the intersections or along the lines. For example, you can see that I placed my head at the intersection of the left and bottom thirds, then the horizon on the bottom third and the dark shape of the building above my head is on the left third. Centering subjects is really boring for the eye. Also, if you have a person or critter in the scene, try to leave room in front of them, like the way I turned myself to be facing into the image.

A Scientific Study on Composition

I've been running this daily photo blog for almost 6 months now and have been keeping track of it with Google Analytics (one of the benefits of designing your own blog). Google Analytics offers a tremendous amount of information, for example, I could look at a chart of how many visitors came from the City Daily Photo Blog on each day. I was looking at this and saw a large swing the the number of visitors each day. If you aren't familiar with the CDPB, it shows thumbnails of photos from the participating blogs. The neat thing about this is that each of my daily photos appears there as a thumbnail along with 16 other photos on the page. This gives me a simple way to 'test' an image to see if people will pick it out as interesting enough to take a closer look. I looked at the top and bottom traffic-getting images and discovered a number of relationships. The lowest traffic photos all had one thing in common, the horizon was dead-center. I know that this makes an image boring, but in some cases, it made sense. For example, this image from Feb 20th: I explain the reason for the composition on that day's post and my friend Paul says this is his favorite photo of all the ones I have placed on the blog. But that day I only got three visitors from the CDPB; compare that to 13 the day before and 23the day after. The five lowest ranking days all had dead-center horizons. Some were daytime, some were night. One didn't have a traditional horizon, but there was a prominent horizontal line across the center of the image. It was an amazing realization to me. One of the most exhausting elements of art school is all the cookie-cutter rebels that bring to class these two-dimensional tragedies and then proceed to explain why they are "breaking the rules." I was doing the same thing with these images. Like a bad idea in the free market, nobody tells you why it's bad, they just don't buy it. So in the same way, nobody clicks on the photos with a centered horizon. So when you look through the lens, move around a little, recompose and take a few shots. When you place the horizon, move it off center. If you want to rebel against the man, go for it, but save the rebellion for the subject matter. The more well-composed and interesting the composition, the more people will be drawn to the image itself, regardless of the content.

2

Golden Canyon Reflections

The golden canyon walls loom broodingly over the abandoned street. I'm really starting to enjoy shooting through windows to catch the reflections in the image.

7

Snow Angel Impact Zone

It's so cold, the Angels are freezing mid-flight and crashing to the ground. The recent return of winter is claiming a good share of victims. A week ago, many of my friends were depressed as was I — now we are down-right angry. I lost interest in this blog and my friend Paul up and quit until April first. I've decided to stand my ground and get my act together; to raise my tiny fist in the air and challenge the forces of nature in bitter defiance! To take arms against this winter's sea of troubles and by opposing — end them. Not quite sure how I'm going to do that, but I'm setting my jib for warmth and by God, I'm going to succeed. I know how to start a thousand-mile journey and how to eat an elephant, so I'm going to start with this post and see where it gets me. Any suggestions or encouragement is greatly appreciated. Who's with me? Eh? They can take our spring and warmth away from us, but they can't take our FREEDOM!

5

Winter Wonderland - March 24th

My apologies to all who have tried to comment, it would appear that the wp-spamfree plugin for wordpress not only reduced my spam comments, it also prevented all comments! So, if you tried to comment over th past few days and were denied, please try again! If you get an error, please let me know! Thank you, - Mitch

1

An Easter Labyrinth of Snow

While I was out walking I found someone had make a labyrinth in the snow on the North end of the lake. I was impressed and walked it. I looked up labyrinths after finding one in Como Park this summer.  After walking the one I found and seeing another one on the West bay, I tried my feet at making my own on the Western side of the lake by the new house construction site — here it is. I don't know who made the first two, but thanks for doing it! I really enjoyed it and plan on making more of them as I go for walks. It gives me a reason to look forward to more snow.

2

Melting Hockey Dreams

Winter is dragging it's claws across the Minnesota landscape. Spring has arrived and the battle is in full swing; this morning's new snowfall is causing traffic accidents and the recent high temperatures (48°F!) have lead to the thin ice on the lakes claiming unsuspecting victims. Spring is a dangerous time in Minnesota, the weather can swing 60° in a day, the weather is completely unpredictable and everyone is so freakin' sick of winter that we will go running in the 35° rain in shorts. Lock up the firearms and don't put the shovel away yet. P.S. I spent a good stretch of time this week retagging all the photos. If you look to the right, you will see a list of tags. It was fun going back through the collection and re-evaluating it. I came up with some new tags like "simple" which are the simple compositions. Check it out.