Submission: Coffee

And here's mine. I started off with just a trail of beans, but decided that I wanted a bit more context, so used this grinder, which I thought had an interesting shape.

Submission: Coffee

Heres my weekend offering. I had 3 shots in mind, the first I couldn't get the composition right, the second was the above, and the third one I never got around to taking.
Took me quite a while to get the lighting right on this one above, I went and bought shiny beans, but then this was about the 9th shot. Decided to go tight in. had to put way more light into this that I thought at first. The coffee was in a tupperware box, and I had a flashgun to the side which diffused nicely through the side of the box. But I had to ramp up the light to get the exposure right. As soon as I saw this shot in the preview I knew it was right, as it had way more colour than the others. Gave me a bad back though as I had to hand hold it.
Thought I better get this uploaded in case you had done a bean shot as well :p

Assignment: Coffee

Pure and Simple. Coffee.

Inside or out.

Interpret it as you wish.

Deadline 9am 18th June

Submission#2: Take an action self-portrait of what you did this weekend.

But I thought I's surprise you with another entry. I did this as a test shot on Friday night. You see I spent most of Friday night doing some video editing, so this was one of my activities. Interesting thing is that it was still light when I did it. I stopped down so that I could just about make out the back of the mac, then I put a off camera flash on the keyboard pointing up at me. First attempt was way too bright, so I put a page from a reporters notebook curved over the flash head. Hence this picture. Really pleased with it as I've been wanting to do one of these for ages - pity it makes me look so old..

Submission: Take an action self-portrait of what you did this weekend.

Well here was my exciting weekend - this is the 5 minutes when I wasn't sneezing. Wanted to get the front of the mower in focus and then blurr backwards. Camera position was difficult, so used the beanbag effect on the bottom of a lap-tray. Then took ages trying to get the sun to blow the sky without leaving lens flare. The action part was the blade of grass desparately trying to get away from the blades...

Weekend Assignment: Take an action self-portrait of what you did this weekend.

Title: A girly afternoon in the sun.

This was taken on my balcony. The idea was to use a slow shutter speed (1/25) to blur the action of the hand to add some movement to the image. Ideally, i would have liked less depth of field, so that the background was more blurred, but that wasn't possible with a slow shutter speed in these bright conditions.

I had a few problems with unwanted shadows, but I liked this one , as it is broken up and has some form. I also had issues with blocking out the pringles logo, as othewise it just dominated the whole image. If you look closely, you can see the toes reflected in the table - he he!

This is really what I did on a sunny Sunday afternoon!

I also used mirrors to take the image, but found it a lot more difficult than I first imagined. Trying to the camera reflected in the mirrors took a lot of tweaking, but I wanted to get the camera from more than one angle. The white balance is also out, but since I have only had the camera a week, I have yet to master that. Did find where the self-timer was though!!

Mirror Mirror on the wall

I had trouble with the colour balance using the house lights, ended up using the flash - and what I didnt show in the setup was me holding the posterboard up behind it.

I had to tweak the levels as well - In the end I just bounced the flash in from the ceiling and didnt set the exposure - hence the levels tweak. Ran out of time in the end.

Also I was getting some double reflections from the cheap mirrors (or angle of lighting) i was using.
And here is the setup:

Assignment: The Camera

Take a picture of your camera with your new camera. Not the obvious down the lens shot.
Mirrors?
Deadline: 9am Monday 4th June