The sun was in and out for much of the day today. It was out when I left my office but by the time I got outside the clouds were back and they stayed around until well after I had finished making photographs. This post is one of many that form a fence linked up with chains. This particular post, though, had no chain and only this little slender bit of string with a knot in the middle.

There was some variety in the 42 frames I made today. I particularly like the picture of the bus stop, with the newspaper and magazine stands in a line like they’re waiting for the bus themselves. And the one of the new tree along 156th Ave NE. I don’t know what it is about pylons, but the bright orange color always draws me.

And today is a sad one for those few of you who are fans of the pictures of the red bushes. The landscaping crew has started trimming them back in preparation for spring growth.

Shooting and processing notes
17-40 F4.0 L, 27mm, f5.6, 1/200, ISO 200. Converted to black-and-white in Lightroom, a bit of tonemapping in LightZone to spread out the tones, and local contrast.

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I didn’t have nearly as much trouble getting out to take pictures today. The sun certainly helped me capture today’s 39 frames.

Nothing too compelling to me today, though. I felt like I was just standing around marveling at the shadows and hoping that the clouds wouldn’t come back too soon.

This view of a picnic table next to a basketball court has some promise and I did like the view of this street although something is missing (and, no, it isn’t the cars).

Shooting and processing notes
17-40 F4.0 L, 17mm, f8, 1/250, ISO 400. A few tweaks with a relight tool in LightZone and that’s it.

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I had to force myself to go out and take pictures today. I did not feel like it but I have Ignacy Paderewski’s words in my head (I doubt he said them in English, though): "If I miss one day of practice, I notice it. If I miss two days, the critics notice it. If I miss three days, the audience notices it." I managed to squeeze out 37 frames today.

And though my expectations were low for the day’s results, I ended up choosing 9 photos from the set to post to Flickr.

I had my usual pictures of cracked and moldy concrete structures, but this arrangement of trees and utility pole struck me. This is probably my favorite of the concrete forms from yesterday.

I also had a glimmer of a realization yesterday that will take more exploration to work out, but I looked at these trees and saw them like a figure group (or, rather two figure groups–one lone tree and the other two together). The photo I took isn’t great but I think it’s a big step forward in the way I frame things. Keep watching and see what happens.

Shooting and processing notes
Canon 17-40 F4.0 L, 33mm, f7.1, 1/30, ISO 400. Converted to black-and-white in Lightroom where I turned up the green a bit to separate the tones of the grass from the trees. Used a tonemapper in LightZone to stretch out the tones a bit, then added local contrast and midtone sharpening.

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40 frames today although nothing particularly stands out. There’s this one where the idea of the picture is much stronger than the result. Dawn likes this picture of the gravel extending deep into the distance.

Shooting and processing notes
The 17-40 F4.0 L was back on the camera today. 40mm, f6.3, 1/125, ISO 400. It rained most of the day but I got outside during a break in the rain and loved how dark and glossy the rocks in this retaining wall were. This might be more compelling in the fall when it would seem like a paean to the harvest.

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The sun peeked through the clouds a bit this morning and, playing with the dark bark from the rain, made interesting shapes. I took 35 pictures this morning but expected I would take many more in the afternoon. But I didn’t, so those from the brief spurt this morning stand for the whole day.

This picture of Maya might very well be one that I forget about after a few days but there is a little spark of something in it that says it will hold my attention longer. We’ll see.

Shooting and processing notes
Took this with the 17-40 F4.0 L at 40mm, f4, 1/15, ISO 800. By some mysterious ability, Maya has learned to freeze in position when she hears the beep of the focus lock and hold that position until she hears the shutter click. I have no idea how she learned it but she’s like a model when I have the camera out, freezing long enough for me to take a picture, then moving to another pose for the next shot. I converted this to black-and-white in LightZone rather than Lightroom. I slid the color balance over towards blue (to simulate a blue filter) and dialed up the strength a bit to darken the overall tone. Added a bit of sharpening and that’s it.

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I attended a caucus today for the very first time. I had always thought before that you had to register ahead of time and meet special requirements in order to attend a caucus. There were a lot of people there crowded in shoulder-to-shoulder. It seems like this was common throughout the state of Washington today.

Though this was my favorite single picture of the day, I got two pictures that, together, beat it: one of the women in our precinct speaks in favor of Senator Clinton and a man speaks for Senator Obama. These would go well together in a book on facing pages. But then it’s too early for Solo Photo Book Month.

BTW, I made 37 frames today and not all of them were at the caucus.

Shooting and processing notes
Took this, and several others today, with the Sigma 20mm F1.8 EX. 1/15, f3.2, ISO 400. There was a mix of fluorescent and a bit of daylight in this cafeteria but Lightroom handled the white balance nicely. It was pretty flat coming out of Lightroom so I used either the "Wow" or one of the "Soft Wow" styles in LightZone, then some local contrast adjustment to make the sign pop.

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It seems like I spent the whole day in meetings at work yesterday and I was not able to get outside and spend time photographing. I still managed 31 frames, though. And something else happened, too. I made a few pictures in my office but I was still a long way off from my 29 minimum by the time I got home. After a nice sushi meal from Tokyo Japanese Restaurant, I knew I needed to take photos of something, and soon. Rather than locking me up, that imperative freed me up to see things more clearly around the house and take some photos that I like. I will have to explore the implications of this more.

Shooting and processing notes
I kept the EF 35mm F2.0 on the camera today. I took this at f2.2 (1/160, ISO 800) so I had a narrow depth of field. But it worked out well in this case since I focused on the candle in the front and let the vase and the lamp go just a little bit soft. The contrast between the sharp edges of the glass candle holder (it holds a tea light) and the other large, smooth forms is very satisfying. Converted to black-and-white in Lightroom where I simulated the effect of a red filter to darken the reddish vase. In LightZone, I used a tonemapper to spread the tones out for dark and light, and then sharpened the midtones to bring out the sharp-edged clarity of the glass candleholder.

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I had a hard time choosing between this photo of the stairs and this other one.

Not a great day for photography for me. There was a lot going on at work so I stayed close to my office. Not a great move since I was stopped three times by people with questions about all the things we’re doing right now. Made it hard to get in any kind of flow.

Shooting and processing notes
Bet you think you know what lens I used, huh? Guess again. I brought a nice little prime lens today that, with the 1.6x crop factor of the 20D works out to about 56mm–a nice normal lens. The EF 35mm F2.0 has nice optical performance even if it still has that ancient buzzy autofocus motor. But it doesn’t usually bother me. Shot this at f7.1, 1/40, ISO 400. Converted to black-and-white in Lightroom where I turned down the orange to emphasize the texture of the concrete. Darkened it a bit and emphasized texture with the relight tool in LightZone and then brought back a full tonal range with a tonemapper. Sharpened with midtone sharpening.

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This was the first thing I saw at the Overlake Transit Center today and my favorite picture of the bunch. I rode my bike over since I didn’t have time to walk. I knew there would be a good place to lock my bike while I wandered around but I should probably have brought a pair of shoes to walk in. I have Speedplay Frog pedals and a recessed cleat on my shoes but they’re still not great for walking around a bunch, or for squatting down low, as with this picture.

I decided to go to the OTC for the cranes that are in service on the other side of 520. I counted 9 of them but I was never able to get all of them in a single picture. I considered this picture of trees on a hill as the photo of the day, but it just missed the cut. I might change my mind tomorrow.

I finally noticed something else today as well: the effect of continuous car noise (in this case, from 520) on my ability to photograph. I have a great ability when reading or working at the computer to tune out all kinds of distractions around me. It’s something I have been able to do since I was a child. In environments where other people can barely think, I’m happy as a clam. But when I am taking photographs, I guess I try to open myself up and sense everything around me. At that point, the noise from the cars distracts me terribly. I had a hard time in an area that, for me, and compared to where I have been shooting each day at work, should be full of opportunities.

Shooting and processing notes
I had a hard time balancing on my cycling shoes while trying to squat down to take this one. Shot with the 17-40 F4.0 L at 40mm, f6.3, 1/80 at ISO 200. The 20D metered this pretty bright (it didn’t blow any highlights by any means, but it was bright) and that worked well in LightZone where I used the Hard style, then a bit of local contrast enhancement. Maybe I used a touch of midtone sharpening, or maybe I turned that off. I have already forgotten and I am too lazy to fire up LightZone and check.

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I just can’t seem to get enough of these yellow rectangles in the stairwell of the parking garage.It rained most of the day today so I wasn’t able to spend much time outside. In spite of that, I still managed to get 34 frames and cover a range of subjects. Doug Plummer has just posted the one thousandth photo in his daily photo blog. "It’s changed how I see," he writes. I believe him. I have only been at this officially for over a month (I have only 36 photos: a mere 3.6% of Doug’s achievement) but already there is a difference in what I see and how I shoot. LightZone has changed the way I process my photos in the past few days so, superficially, there is more texture and the photos are often darker (thank goodness I am free of the unable-to-resist reflex of Shift-Ctrl-Alt-L in Photoshop) but the structure of the photos is different. The easy answer is that I am simply more careful now, paying closer attention to the selection of what is in the frame and what isn’t, but there’s something else going on.

And this is happening with very little feedback from the outside: there’s something about the cycle of taking photos, selecting them, and processing them that is changing what I am producing. I don’t know how that is happening but so far I like it so I’m not going to mess with it by trying to analyze it.

Shooting and processing notes
I saw this on the way down the stairs to go look for a picture and something about the way the light came in from the opening just floored me. I had to stop, look, back up a couple of steps, and take this picture. I just love the quality of the light, the wetness from the rain, and that bright, graphic, yellow rectangle. Shot with the ever-present 17-40 F4.0 L at 27mm, f5, 1/20 @ ISO 800. Set the white balance to daylight in Lightroom and then tweaked a bit in LightZone: put a region around the yellow rectangle, inverted the mask, and applied the Hard relight style, then some midtone sharpening (I dropped the opacity of the tool to about half or maybe a bit less), and then the Clarity relight style, but very, very slight, with the opacity slider at maybe 10% or less.

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This picture loses a lot in the conversion to sRGB for the Web and certainly doesn’t look as good on non-calibrated monitors. I deliberately emphasized the green of the moss to the point that it seems to fluoresce. I downplayed the browns and ended up with a photo that almost looks like a painting: it reminds me for some strange reason of the painted covers of the Tarzan books by Edgar Rice Burroughs that I loved when I was a child, even though this is nothing like any of them. The more I look at this photo, the more I like it. I’m sure it wouldn’t print worth a flip and I imagine most people who see this will wonder what I’m going on about.

On my initial sweep through today’s 33 frames, I thought I hadn’t found anything at all. But I kept looking and poking and suddenly I started to see some things that I liked. This picture of daffodils beside a cable TV junction box was an idea (contrast the daffodils with the word "television") and every time I base a picture on an idea rather than on what I see, it’s terrible. This time, though, it’s not so bad.

And lately I have started to take photos where there are just little rhythmic grace notes of thin tree trunks or the legs of a bus stop in the upper corner of the frame. I have no idea what that’s about but I’m going to keep watching and see if I can figure anything out.

Shooting and processing notes
When I looked at these trees, the moss everywhere just seemed to glow at me and even though I did some exaggerated work on the picture, it does represent what it looked like to me. Shot with the 17-40 F4.0 L at 32mm, f8, 1/60 at ISO 400. I don’t think I even changed the white balance in Lightroom (going to Daylight or Cloudy looked far too warm). I cropped just a bit off the bottom so the tree trunk filled the left side of the frame from top to bottom. I then applied the Hard style in LightZone, and then added some Hue/Saturation layers where I limited the effect to the greenish-yellow of the moss (using the eyedropper) and bumped up saturation and luminosity, then chose the brown of the leaves and darkened those.

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I think the hydrangea blossoms are almost as pretty in the winter as they are in the summer and they might make an even more interesting photograph. I spent about an hour walking around my neighborhood, hoping for the sunshine the weathermen promised. The clouds did make some interesting patterns on the lake, though. I shot 47 frames today, so there’s one more day beyond the requirement of 29.

I have been turning more and more of my photos into black-and-white. I’m quite surprised since it seems like colors draw me to make a picture more than anything else but then I find myself in Lightroom or LightZone thinking that the color is distracting. Even the picture I chose today is very much like a toned black-and-white rather than a color picture (though I was attracted specifically to the golden-brown color of the dried blossoms).

Through a route I can’t retrace at the moment (though I’m pretty sure I started from Doug Plummer’s blogroll) I found the pause | to begin blog. There is a well-written post that, among other things, talks about the role of color in art photography: "One of the main culprits of boring color photography that seems to be everywhere these days is [the] fact that the color has nothing to do with the image." As a nice bonus, there are several examples of good color photographs and some analysis of why they work.

I took a photo of a natural gas access cap in the road and my first impulse was to treat it as black-and-white. But Dawn pointed out how much more she liked the color version and how the color made the debris around the cap seem like confetti and the gas cap like an Olympic medal. In this case, as in every one where visual sensitivity is involved, she’s right.

Shooting and processing notes
Shot with the 17-40 F4.0 L at at 40mm (yeah! I finally got it all the way to the long end for a change), f4, 1/250 at ISO 400. I simply adjusted the white balance in Lightroom and then applied the "Hard" style in LightZone.

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I noticed this as we were going into Crossroads Mall. I was drawn first by the patterns of light on the textured concrete blocks of the wall: on gray days like today I am not used to see light and texture variations like this. I did get my 29 frames in again today (46 frames) but other than the picture of the lake this morning and the pictures of Maya, I didn’t get anything interesting out of the yard. There is plenty of moss and I am always attracted to it but perhaps there was so much of it that I had nothing to contrast it with. Or something.

Shooting and processing notes
I shot this with the 17-40 F4.0 L at 39mm (I swear I thought it was all the way at the longest end of the zoom), f8, 1/250, ISO 400. I was standing right at a 4-way stop and had to wait for cars to pull through, then take the shot, then wait for the cars. I was surprised, though, because drivers actually seemed to wait for me to take a picture before they would pull up all the way. I didn’t make too many cars wait since I got the shots I wanted with just a few presses of the shutter. I did try some experiments including parts of the Old Navy sign. I’m not sure if that’s a stronger picture or not.

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Today is the first day of February and the first day of my 29 Frames experiment. I made it easily today, shooting 56 frames. I posted 12 of them to Flickr. There are more experiments with the red-branched bushes; more successful ones than yesterday, I think. And some photos from a visit to a new (to us) sushi restaurant down near Factoria Mall, including a nice one of Dawn.

Julia left a comment about yesterday’s picture, suggesting that I focus on the slanting lines and the vines. Rather than cropping that photo, I went back and took some more pictures and got the crop in-camera. It is another good way of looking at the scene. Except I just can’t manage all three axes of movement without a tripod, so my lines aren’t at the angles I wanted. And there’s something about those bushes at the base that I like that didn’t work as well when in this format. Maybe. As always with my pictures, I need time away from them, and more time with them, to let the ones that I like settle in.

I might have picked this one for today just because it’s all happening on one plane, like some scribbles on a canvas made of dirt.

Shooting and processing notes
Shot with the 17-40 F4.0 L at 40mm, f5.6, 1/40 @ ISO 400. I again used LightZone. I love the quality of the photos but, oh, the slowness just about kills me. It takes so very much longer than when I use Lightroom and Photoshop. But I am getting pictures that look like what I imagined when I pressed the shutter and that’s got to be worth some time, isn’t it?

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These vines fascinate me and they are on several areas of the parking garages around the building where I work. I think it’s the contrast of the organic shapes with the lines of the concrete, and yet the vines themselves are just lines this time of year as though they were drawn onto the scene rather than being real. I took another photo today of bushes that draw my eye any time I see them around work in the winter (they seem to be planted all over) but it’s devilishly hard to get a photo of them that shows what I see in that first instant. There’s this surprise of the red and it stands forward from everything around it, so clear and obvious–but the camera sees so much more than I do with my eyes and so the scenes look messy. Dawn said this picture reminded her of colored fountains and she’s right. It’s a good observation and lends order to something that (even now) still looks chaotic to me.

Administrivia
This is the last day of January and I have taken and posted pictures (to Flickr, anyway, I’m catching up here on the blog, so you’ll see a number of older posts come through over the next few days) every day this month. Once I have caught up with the backlog here, I will write up a retrospective of the month and note what I have learned. For February, I am setting myself a bit of a challenge: not only will I make photographs each day, but I will take at least 29 frames (this is a leap year and there are 29 days in February) each day. That doesn’t mean I will have 29 frames to post. It does imply a bigger commitment of time for shooting. Today, for example, I took only 16 frames.

Shooting and processing notes
Shot with the 17-40 F4.0 L at 38mm (guess I didn’t quite make it all the way to the end of the range), 1/100 at f8 and ISO 400. Again processed (slowly) through LightZone. I do like the controls in LightZone and the nature of the pictures after I tweak them there. I tried a variety of different things with each of the photos I selected of this vine-covered wall, so not sure quite what I did with this one, but I think I used the "Hard" preset and reduced the opacity a bit, then sharpened the mid-tones.

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Another walk on the trails around work today. This is on the other side of the main campus from my building so it took a bit of time to get over there. I felt like I was forcing the photos today and it shows. This construction zone sign seemed so incongruous among the trees and the trail, although this is not nearly so peaceful a location as it might seem: just the left of the frame is a busy road and the sound of traffic is close. And yet it is peaceful walking these trails with the mossy trees and the tall pines moving in the wind.

Shooting and processing notes
I downloaded a 30-day trial of LightZone 3.4 today to see what it would be like to use it. Uwe Steinmuller has written a lot about it and I had tried it once before when it was still version 2. This definitely has power but–oh my!–is it ever slow on my computer. My computer at home has fallen way behind the power curve but since I still shoot with an 8-megapixel 20D I have never been bothered in Lightroom or Photoshop. LightZone lets me know that my computer is old.

The shutter speed was way too low on this shot even though I was braced against a tree. It was dark under the trees (and the clouds were thick, too, so a double whammy). This was 1/10 sec at f/8 and ISO 400. Shot again with the 17-40 F4.0 L at 17mm. This is one of those places where I could use the EF-S 17-55 f/2.8 with its image stabilization.

As far as changes I made in LightZone, I used the Relight option to punch up the mid-tone contrast and I drew a region around the sign and increased the saturation of the yellow. I also used the tone mapper to deepen the color a bit. From the angle I shot, the sign reflected some of the sky and was washed out in the picture–quite different from the way it looked to me.

Update (31-Jan-2008): I meant to mention Martin Doonan’s blog and a post he made about LightZone that finally pushed me over the edge to try the program. His posts are not just about technical tools like LightZone but about photography, art, and the process of making it.

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I am glad that there are such rich photographic opportunities within a few minutes’ walk from my office else I would taking a lot of pictures of objects around the house given the short days this time of year. I do hope one day to be able to reach the state of sensitized sympathy that Minor White talked about* but I hold no illusions of that right now.

I liked almost all the pictures I selected from today’s shots equally and had a hard time picking out one as the picture for the day. Maybe I just need more time with them. The picture of the sidewalk under construction was the one I had the most hope for when I shot it and the one whose result most disappoints me. I tried to tweak it by duplicating layers, blurring them, and messing with the layer blending modes but should probably have just left well enough alone.

Shooting and processing notes
Like usual, shot with the 17-40 F4.0 L at 17mm, f9, ISO 400. This patch of water and its melting skin of ice surprised me as I turned a corner on the trail. I shot several frames but I never quite understood what to do with all the messy branches everywhere in the frame and I was pulled towards the texture of the ice, and the dark reflections of the tree trunks in the water, and the leaves under the water, and the moss along the shore. This was just a straightforward conversion to grayscale in Lightroom. I opened it in Photoshop but discovered there was nothing else I wanted to do with it.

* "If he were to walk a block in a state of sensitized sympathy to everything to be seen, he would be exhausted before the block was up and out of film long before that." - Minor White.

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We woke up to snow again today. And, as usual, I walked around the yard and took a few quick pictures. I’m not sure why I take pictures whenever it snows except that wherever I have lived, snow has been rare and it was just what we did when I was growing up. Today’s pictures, though covering the same subjects as I have many times before, are a little bit different. Maybe they’re a little bit better. I don’t know that yet and will need some time with them, and then some time away from them, before I can say for sure. But I do know that my approach to the pictures was different and I attribute that to yesterday’s workshop. You can see the rest of the photos on Flickr.

This is the first photo I took of the snow. I saw it on my way up the stairs and just raised my camera and shot and tried not to think too hard. I did make another frame or two of this but by that time I was thinking about it and they were dull. This one has some energy to it.

I think Dawn’s favorite is the one of the sun breaking through the clouds over the lake. I was drawn by the steel-color of the lake and the clouds down close but I didn’t have a long-enough lens on to focus just on that area. I knew that the light would change before I could retrieve one and so, rather than taking the shot with the intention of cropping later, I just looked through the viewfinder to see what I could see with the lens I had. This is better than the original idea I had. Without the experience of the workshop, I doubt I would have made it.

Shooting and processing notes
This was shot at 1/25 sec at f/5 using–you guessed it–the 17-40 F4.0 L at ISO 800. I hadn’t even had time to think about the camera settings. I just dialed in an approximation of aperture and ISO that I thought would let me get a steady shot and made this before the the idea was gone.

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Doug Plummer and Robin Shapiro led a new photography workshop today in Seattle: The Photograph Within. It’s different than other photography workshops I am aware of since the focus was not on technique, or other technical matters like printing or digital darkroom work, nor even about the topics that typically concern most artistic workshops like composition. Instead, the workshop was about the zone of awareness where you’re engaging your right brain, how to listen to the messages that come from that non-verbal but essential-to-art part of your brain, and how to get into that zone.

There were 12 participants and they all had significant experience with photography; the workshop included several current (and one retired) professional photographers. There were amateurs there as well and I was far from the only one without a formal art background.

Developing sensitivity to your body was the foundation for most of the exercises. As I understood it, the right part of your brain communicates through sensations in different parts of the body. They would help us clear our minds and "listen" to our body and then go make some photographs. We then explored what we felt as we composed the photos and pressed the shutter. There were other exercises, like thinking about our preferences for different things like particular foods or favorite types of movies and where we felt a response in our body to those.

This seemed to be easy and even natural for most of the people in the room but I–not surprisingly–had a hard time with it. I approach everything analytically and verbally. I think I have managed somehow to build a simulacrum of the functions of the emotional right brain out of purely analytical thoughts but it clearly limits what I can do with photography–or at least it limits how much I can enjoy what I am doing with it.

Today was the first time they have done the workshop and I suspect they will change the format a bit in the future. There was too much to fit into the time but not nearly enough time to experiment with the day’s lessons and discover what they mean for each of us personally. There was especially not enough time for me, though Robin did give me some "homework" that I will be practicing. First, when I have to make a choice, I am supposed to quiet my mind and find what part of my body is responding to the choice. We all make thousands of choices a day so I suppose I will just do this as often as I practically can. The other exercise is more directly related to photography. I should find something I haven’t taken pictures of before and I am supposed to stand in front of that thing and look at it until my analytical brain gets bored, then I will be ready to take my pictures.

It should be interesting. I have a selection of my photos from the day in a photoset. The pictures are OK, but they are not nearly as good as even my normal daily work. It’s not surprising because the focus for the day was on the process of taking the photos, not on the final result.

This wall is near our basement and shaded by this huge camellia bush–tree, really–and the light there is sometimes dappled, sometimes streaked, but always subtle and lovely. I didn’t capture what I wanted here, which was the way the moss on top of the wall just seemed to glow in the dark rainy day. But this is still a satisfying photo for me.

Shooting and processing notes
Shot this time with the 70-200 F4.0 L at 73mm (must have tweaked the zoom ring a bit by accident), f13, 1.3 seconds at ISO 200. I told you it was dark. I’m pretty sure all I did was choose the white balance for this one. It was lovely right out of the camera.

Photo a Day 2008 Links
Photo a Day 2008
Photo a Day 2008: January
Flickr: Collection: Photo a Day 2008
Flickr: January 2008 Photoset
Flickr: January 2008 Extras Photoset