Walt's farm

Today we drove to Woodstock, VA (near D.C.) to attend the funeral of a dear friend's father.  After the service we went to the farm his parents retired to several years ago.  It was a wonderfully peaceful place and a good way to celebrate Walt's life.  These are a few shots from this afternoon at the farm.

George makes the blog again

It's been a while since "subject" appeared in the blog.  I had no time to even think about photography today, so I shot this one of him while we were eating dinner earlier this evening.

More iphone - Sugar Creek Park and Target

Today I continued taking photos with my iphone and had fun.  I also realize that there are a few of these shots I'd like to go back and shoot with my dslr so I can get them at a higher resolution for printing.  The first shots are actually my favorites and I took these as I was leaving Target and saw the light coming through the dining area at the Starbucks.  There was something that evoked a railroad car about these.   The other shots were taken at the Sugar Creek Greenway park.  The way I did my workflow was that I took all these with my "Best Camera" app because it captures in a little high resolution.  Then I downloaded them into Lightroom and did some light editing.  Next I uploaded them back to my phone so I could apply the various apps from Polarize, Camera Bag and Lo-Mob.  Sorry that the ones from Target are somewhat repetitive, but I had a hard time chosing and finally just gave in and posted several.

Beryl's plane

Since my iphone now has all these vintage photography options, I looked around for something "vintage" to photograph.  I didn't find much in the house that worked, but I decided to take a photo of the photo on the back of a book "West with the Night" of Beryl Markham's plane after it crashed.  I liked the result because it really looked like an old photo.  I used my Lo-Mob app with a 60's Square Emulsion filter.

While using my iphone is fun, I'm starting to want a real camera in my hands again...

More fun with iphone apps

I decided to experiment today by photographing the same subject (in this case, a hanging fixture in our guest bedroom) with many different combinations of several different iphone apps.  The ones I used are RetroCamera, Hipstamatic, Camera Bag, ShakeItPhoto, ToyCamera, Polarize and Lo-Mob.  I didn't try all the options, but I took 72 images.  Here is a good representation of the types of effects produced from these cheap little apps....this if so much fun I may not go back to my dslr for a while!  At the end of the week, I'll send a few of these (plus some others) to Sarah for her blog.  (There are a lot of images here, so I understand if you get bored and aren't as excited about this as I am!)

New iphone app

I downloaded a couple of iphone photography apps today to play with and I'll be using them a lot this week.  A photographer friend (and instructor), Sarah Baron, is gathering cellphone photos to post to her blog on Friday and I'm going to play around with it this week so I can submit a few.  The app I used for this quick shot is called "Toy Camera" and provides random effects for each image.  You can't control the effect, so it's fun to see what you get with each shot.  I just walked around the house and took a few.....this is the dining room.  Be sure to check out Sarah's blog http://sarahbaronphotography.blogspot.com/2010/08/look-out-nikon-here-comes-iphone.html to see the cellphone photos that were submitted last week.  (Mine is the one I shot at 300 East and posted last week).

Trout Lake walk

A walk around Trout Lake with my macro lens this morning yielded a few nice shots.  Since I was too lazy to take my tripod, most of the images were too blurred to use.  I've also noticed that I've been shooting more in color lately.  Maybe it's all the rainy weather we've been having....maybe I'm tired of shades of gray.