Day 1, Part 2: This is Gonna Be a Long Year

Well, the first day of shooting is done and out of the way. I ran into a bit of "cabin fever" though. It was raining all day long, which meant being confined to shooting in the house for the most part. And man did I have a hard time with that. I was literally walking around with my camera thinking, "Hmm... Should I shoot this? How about this? No. That would be silly." But my goal is to take pictures no matter what, so pictures were taken.

10 sec. exposure at F/11. ISO 100
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The first thing I tried was something that seemed cool in principle, but ended up not coming out as I had imagined it. I think it's due to several things. The room was too small, so I couldn't move the camera back any further. I imagined it without the door still being in the shot too, but that was as wide open as I could get it. Also, I planned on taking this a little earlier with some more light, but I fell asleep watching a movie so it was starting to get a little darker on top of the already gray sky. All in all, meh. But the good news is, they can only get better. Right?

2 sec. exposure at F/9. ISO 100.
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Since I tried my hand at outside shooting while inside and it didn't work too well, my journey around the house began. First stop? The refrigerator. I've seen some really cool photos of the inside of a fridge before and thought it might be fun to try it myself. Not so much. All it made me realize is that I really need to clean out the fridge tomorrow.

1/4 sec. exposure at F/5.6. ISO 400.
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The next attempt at random household object shooting was the water cooler. I took close to 30 photos of the water cooler. With this one I also tried to play with lighting as well (though it doesn't show at all). I pointed a spot light (the kind you can buy at a hardware store for your garage) at the ceiling away from the cooler. I wanted more available light so I could shoot at a faster shutter speed. I was trying to "catch" a bubble as it went up the bottle. This turned out to be much more difficult than I thought it would be (thus the 30 attempts). The photo to the left is the closest I got to capturing it ( you can barely see it at the top of the water). But I needed to stop. I was drinking so much water it was starting to make me sick.




Closing out the day, though, I ran into some really great inspiration. I headed into town to meet some friends for dinner (well, they ate. I just went for the company). Of course, I took my camera with me and had the idea that I would set my tripod up in my passenger seat. I used manual focus and attached my remote shutter trigger. I set the shutter speed to "BULB" which would allow me to hold the shutter open for as long as I wanted (thus negating the need to switch shutter speeds while I was driving. I realize this probably wasn't the safest thing to do, but I was at least trying to minimize the amount of stupidity). Then as I drove home, I'd wait until I got to an area that had some lights or until a car was heading towards me, and I'd press the shutter release button and hold it for a while (I also tried swerving on purpose for one of them, but then thought better of that. While it would have made the light streams move more, it also made me look more like a drunk driver. I didn't really want to try and explain to a police officer what I was trying to do). I'm really happy with how these came out. I definitely want to try some more of this in the future, but with someone else driving so I could sit in the back seat (with the camera still in front) and make some minor adjustments while shooting.

10 sec. exposure at F/14. ISO 100.
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20 sec. exposure at F/14. ISO 100.
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11 sec. exposure at F/14. ISO 100.
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All in all, I suppose it was a good day one. I realized how tough this will be sometimes (maybe pretty often actually), but I still ended up with something I was happy with. And that's really why I'm doing this. I figure by the end of the year I'll at least have a few things worth remembering.  Thanks for stopping by and I hope you'll stop back. Please bear with me as far as formatting issues and things like that go. I'm still trying to navigate my way around blogger and until I figure things out it might look a little ugly around here.