kodak, mon amour

blogging out.

hip2bdaniel — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 19:16:29 +0000

Hey guess what? My photos are showing up on blogs, and not just this one! It happened 4 times recently!

First 2 of my photos showed up on a blog for fans of Blythe dolls. Blythes are popular on flickr.com, so I’ve seen them before, but I didn’t really know what it was all about. Now I know. You can read the whole saga here. Basically, these crazy looking big headed dolls were originally manufactured in the early 1970s but never caught on. Now they’re all the rage.

The blog is from Brazil and written in Portuguese. I don’t know exactly what’s being written, but it seems that the doll they picture has an up-do hair style very similar to the ones at Honfest (and 1960s Baltimore), one of my favorite photo-ops.

But wait there’s more. A National Geographic blog also used one of my photos for an entry! OK, so National Geographic has a lot of blogs, and they do a lot of blogging, but it’s still cool. They also went with one of my Honfest photos.

This was in the National Geographic’s Intelligent Traveler blog. They used it for an entry called What’s for Dinner, Hon? about Cafe Hon, a restaurant in the Hampden neighborhood of Baltimore that serves comfort food with Bawlamer twist.

Last but not least, for 2 consecutive weeks I won the photo challenge on Jovee Henehan’s photo blog! This is the first time I’ve won a photo contest of any kind–so pretty exciting. Plus I like Jovee, so it makes me happy that she likes my photos.

The theme for the first photo challenge I won was “Evidence of Man.”

The next week [winning post] the theme was “Facial Expression.” This photo happened to also be from Honfest, an event which probably deserves it’s own blog post, so stay tuned for that. I think if I cropped this photo it would focus even more on the expression. I just need to decide exactly how I want to do it.

Thanks for reading.

UPDATE: 3 days later and my post is already out of date. Jovee’s latest contest was “favorite photo.” This picture of Joel is one of my favorites I’ve taken, and it was one of the 3 reader entries Jovee posted. I made an 8×8 print for Joel’s parents, but I don’t think they like it quite as much as I do.

Turnip Pixtures

hip2bdaniel — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 01:19:33 +0000

So every once in a while I get asked to do some freelance sort of photography work. Sometimes I’m even offered real money to do it (I know, crazy huh?) Before I bought my digital SLR camera, I didn’t really feel comfortable taking on these assignments. But that’s starting to change a bit now that I’m getting more comfortable with my camera and figuring out how to do a little bit of editing.

Martha and Ronald have been on me to take pictures of their baby for a while now. They had asked me to do maternity photos as well, and as you’re about to see, it’s a little late for that now. I saw their lovely family at the Earthfest concert and I’m excited about scheduling a shoot with them. In the meantime, I used the last couple bytes of memory remaining on my card Saturday to take a few pictures of their little dude.

More Kiddos

Earthfest

hip2bdaniel — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 07:12:33 +0000

Here’s a little sample of what I’ve been up to lately. I took these on Saturday at Earthfest Boston. Enjoy.

Earthfest Flickr Set

Hal-an-tow & Blues

hip2bdaniel — Wed, 06 May 2009 16:45:04 +0000

So I’ve heard that I have some friends that actually read this, and they want me to post more. Great! I’ll see what I can do.

I’ve been trying get out and use my camera as much as possible. I still haven’t read the manual, but I’m figuring it out as I go. May Day was one of the best opportunities I’ve had so far for interesting pictures with my new toy. My day began when I got up in the middle of the night to head to the Weeks Footbridge in Cambridge to celebrate May Day with several area Morris dancing teams. That was just the first stop of 3 near Harvard Square. In addition to Morris Dancing, there was also Garland and Rapper Sword dancing being performed. Interspersed with the performances, everyone was encouraged to participate in welcoming in summer with Country Dances, Maypole Dances, and songs.

I’ve also been working on my photo editing. In the rest of these I was experimenting with my trial version of Lightroom. The one above was edited with my Capture NX2 trial.

It was a pretty full day. That night I went to the Challenging Contra at the Scout House and from there I went to Koren’s Blues dancing birthday house party in Arlington. The party was lots of fun! Naturally, I took along my camera. I’d say I was up about 22.5 hours that day.

There are more photos from Koren’s party on flickr, and even more that I’ll be posting soon of both the party and May Day festivities.

Marathon

hip2bdaniel — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 04:28:51 +0000

I took a lot of photos of the Boston Marathon yesterday. It was a pretty great chance for trying out some things with my camera. There weren’t any really great photos, but it was fun. I didn’t even have to go very far, mile 16 of the Marathon course was just down the street from me.

Marathon Set

New Camera! [Day 1]

hip2bdaniel — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 00:09:04 +0000

I finally have a new camera – the Nikon D90 (if that means anything to you). I’ve only had it for a few hours, but I thought I’d share some of the shots I took today.

New Camera Set

Entering the 21st Century

hip2bdaniel — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 01:01:34 +0000

Although film is #1 in my heart, these days digital is where it’s at. I’ve slowly been accepting it. Fewer and fewer places are even developing film — Ritz is out of business and A&P supermarket has ended their photo lab services. You know technology has passed you by when people (usually children, but not always) want to see their picture I just took of them on the back of my camera. Then I explain to them that I use a different kind of camera that uses “film” and doesn’t have a screen on the back.

I don’t plan to stop using film completely. There is still much I’d like to explore and skills I’d like to improve. However, I have been making progress in adding digital photography into my repertoire. Last week I found the local camera shop and played around with a couple of DSLR models that I’ve been considering. And now I even have Photoshop on my computer! I’ve used it a bit before in school and at work, but I’ve never had my own copy where I could really figure out what I’m doing. Also, I just noticed that with my almost up-to-date version of iPhoto, there are actually some pretty decent editing tools that previous versions didn’t have.

Today I uploaded a picture from Pinewoods of Emma A. and Emma S. to my flickr site. The picture was taken with film that produced very vibrant colors. I liked the way it looked, but I was curious to see what I could do in Photoshop to make it into a good black and white. I’ve seen some great black and white photos that use Photoshop actions from Kristy Lane, so I that was the first thing I wanted to try now that I actually have Photoshop. I haven’t figured it all out yet, but here’s what I’ve come up with so far.

First the original.

So this is my blog.

hip2bdaniel — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 05:05:30 +0000

So this is my photo blog! That’s the plan, anyway. It’s not much now, but just you wait! You’ll see. This is just the beginning. Soon I will be sharing my photos, my experiences, and I don’t know exactly what else, but it’s going to be great!

While this figures to be just a bit slow out of the gate, I already have a flickr.com site that’s in full swing. If you don’t know already, flickr is an amazing photo sharing website. I love the most interesting photos from the last 7 days page. Go there, look at the photos, and then hit refresh. You probably don’t need to be told to do it again. Once you start, you might not be able to stop. Very addictive.

Being that this is a photoblog, I’ll get it started off on the right foot by posting a photo. Here’s one I took at the Ashfield Fall Festival, in Western Massachusetts this past year.

And here’s more Fall Festival on Flickr.

This photo above was nice surprise. Since I only took one shot of this, it wasn’t one of the ones I was even thinking about as I waited to get my film developed. But it’s definitely one I really like. What a somber expression she has as she looks through the strings attached to the lifeless marionettes.

One of the great things about shooting with film is the excitement you feel when you finally see your images. They’ve been stored on your roll, kept in the dark, and nobody has actually ever seen them. Nobody can even really verify that you actually have images on your film. But they are there, just waiting to be developed.

The first excitement is just the “Yay! It worked!” And then there are all the surprises. You never know what your pictures are going to look like — and then you find out. It’s the moment of truth. Sometimes there are several you like, sometimes they all suck (but it was still fun).

Come back for more photoblog entries. It’ll be great.

Daniel