Rain.

Well, yesterday we had a pretty hard rain. It was very short, but for a bit, there was even some hail. After watching it pour like mad for a while, I decided I wanted to go outside and take pictures. I sealed my camera up to protect it from the rain, and started walking around the yard. I only got a chance to fire off a few shots before the rain stopped, and out of the shots I took, only liked one enough to finish. It's the daisy up above. I got some other shots that I thought could use improving, so the next time it rains, I'll be out trying to get those as well as looking for other fun stuff. There are some very big storms up north right now - perhaps they'll share some of their rainy goodness with me.

Fire.

Well, it appears I've had a relapse of the pyromania everybody has during their teenage years. The first shot I took, about 4 days ago, was the shot of the candle to the left. This was a pretty straightforward shoot, and I wasn't really attempting anything very special. I just wanted to see how much light a flame threw around. There was actually some pretty nasty haloing and flaring in this shot that I cleaned up with The GIMP. On this (and all the rest of these shots) I tried to make sure all the shots ended up with a black background (as opposed to a really dark background).

The shot of the sparks and igniting gas was taken on the next day. I originally wanted a shot of a hand holding a lighter, lit solely by it's flame. After a shot or two of the flame, I got bored and decided I wanted to catch sparks, so I started sparking. During the shoot, I came up with this incredibly lucky capture and fell in love with it. It wasn't very well composed, so I changed composure in The GIMP.

Now for the next shot. The incense. Originally I wanted to experiment with two things. One was firing some light through smoke to capture that, and the second was using a second film body as the source of said light. Since I've gotten my 30D, the Rebel GII film body I have has been relegated to a backup body position. When you use the AE lock on a Canon camera, if you've configured the camera to use the flash, it will fire off a burst to get a TTL reading. I wanted to see if I could use this burst as a ghetto manual flash. I can. At the beginning of this shoot, I decided I wanted the incense in the shoot, so I recomposed with that in mind. I also knew I wanted to see the incense and get some nice rimlight, so I set up the GII camera right slightly behind the incense/smoke, and a reflector camera left, opposite the flash. In one of the shots, I saw a little flare, and did what it took to eliminate it. While I was shooting more, I kept thinking about that flare, and decided I wanted to try to get a shot with that flare in, so I repositioned a few times until I found a flare that worked to my liking.

And on to today's shot. The burning CD. Thanks to a great response from the Zooomr community, and particularly to a user named flwrgrl (who has some very lovely work with flowers and water, by the way), I decided to push the fire thing a little more. I once saw a concept shot with a literally burning CD, and I'd wanted to shoot one of my own for some time now, but never really got around to it. But with all the fire-related shots lately, I figured now was a perfect time. I got out the lighter fluid, and started playing. First I experimented with flash (The GII and reflector from the incense shoot) as well to get some rainbow out of the CD, but the first time I lit it up, I realized the fire alone was bright enough to nullify the need for a flash. It took one burn to dial in the exposure to a reasonable level, and this was the second attempt. On the first attempt, I left a burn on my background material (it's actually white), and upon lighting this one up, I burned my hand a little. But I like the shot. All worth it.

Well, there it is. Four shots in four days. Now it's time to pack up my gear and call it a night (morning?) and think about whether I want to continue with the fire theme or not. There are plenty of things that can be safely set on fire, but I don't want to shoot random things on fire just because I can set them on fire. We'll see :)

Potato, Egg, and Sponge

I took these three shots today. They're pretty self-explanatory. One is a potato, the next is an Egg, and the final one is a sponge. All isolated against a white background. These shots put me over 10 in line to go to the agencies, so I'll be uploading them eventually.

Broken Filter

I took this shot for a post on DPS, and after isolating it, I figured I might as well throw it into the stock queue. I'm not really sure if it's something that'll get accepted at the agencies, but it's something I'll definitely keep around in case I ever need something like this.

Bread

Well, this is a shot I took very early this morning. I'm not too happy with the lighting, but there really isn't much more I can do until I can afford a better setup. It's one light to the bottom of the image, and a silver reflector towards the top. I wanted to get the texture of the bread, which I did, but I also ended up with some uneven lighting.

Dark Sky

This is my latest addition to the collection. It's actually not a new shot, but I decided I would add it anyway, because I realized I wanted a stock collection of some skyscapes. This shot was actually taken on the same morning the shot of the shed was taken. I'm actually planning on a sort of surreal project, something sort of like what Jerry Uelsmann's work is like. I've loved his work ever since I first saw it, and I would love to do some of my own. The way he can capture dreams and put on paper what a healthy imagination can come up with has always amazed me, and I would like to attempt to do the same. I've got my first idea sketched out, and need to start collecting lots of shots to put it together.

Right now, I'm kinda being a little slow with the photography thing. I need to get a job and get bills straightened out, and then I can work on getting real flash units. Once I do that, I can experiment more with lighting and really have fun exploring with photography.

Keyboard

This shot was taken using a flashlight as the sole light source. I threw a blue gel over the flashlight and this is what I got. The keyboard was actually quite dirty, and had words on some of the keys, so I cleaned it up and removed the words in the Gimp. One more to add to the list of pictures waiting for upload to the agencies. I'm at six right now. I had thoughts of uploading the five I had, as I haven't been shooting much and I haven't uploaded anything for a little while, but BigStock is backed up and throttling uploads anyway, so I'll stick with my original thought and wait until I get 10 images worth uploading.

Heart

I took this shot today. I'm a little late getting anything together for this year's valentine's day, but it's there for next year. I actually painted this heart for somebody for this year, so it means a little more to me than any of the other pictures I've taken so far. It's pastel on black paper. Anyway, this is pretty much all I could afford to do for my special someone this year, so I hope she likes it :)

Zooomr, Flickr, and a Logo.

Well, what you see here is basically going to be my 'logo' of sorts. The numbers are the fingerprint to my public PGP key, which can be found here. In other news, I'm considering switching over from Flickr to Zooomr. Mostly this is due to the recent news that Microsoft is trying to buy Yahoo. Although Yahoo has rejected Microsoft's initial bid, many people think Microsoft will either take over Yahoo's board of directors when the vote comes up and runs through March 14th, or increase the asking price. Either way, I don't have a whole lot of hope for the situation. Zooomr is still very much in a beta phase right now, but they claim they'll be done rolling out their MkIV (2008) release by the end of the month. I'll see then what their service is like. Right now the biggest thing that's keeping me from jumping to them is a bug they've got with displaying EXIF data. Other than that, there's also no custom set engineering (it has to be done by keywords), and no bulk editing. Those are less important though.

Either way, I hope to know soon so I can put more effort into more important things.

Weave

Weave
Originally uploaded by John Shao

I took a few pictures today, but this is the only semi-usable one that came out of the attempt. Even this one I'm not too hopeful on, as it's depth-of-field is pretty shallow, and it was taken hand-held at 1.15 second. That, and I hadn't set white balance manually or even metered off a Grey card for this one. Well, I'll add it to the list of things to upload and when I get a few I'll send them all along.

First Sales

Well, I've been out of it for a while now as I recently had oral surgery to remove my wisdom teeth, but now I'm back. I've just checked and I've actually had two images sell. The first was 20-Sided Die at Dreamstime, and the second was Artist's Pencil over at BigStockPhoto. Now, if I can increase my sales by about 25000%, I can make a living off it =P

That just means it's time to go take more pictures and upload a whole bunch more. Honestly, I'm surprised anything has sold anywhere at this point, but I'm happy it has :)

Barbell

Barbell
Originally uploaded by John Shao

This barbell is the latest addition to my collection of stock photos. I'm not going to submit this for a little while though - I'll just hold on to them until I get about ten or so images, then I'll upload them to BSP and DT all at the same time.

Current Events

Well, Since my last post, I've had one of my images selected as a runner up in a Digital Photography School weekly assignment, I unsuccessfully re-applied to Shutterstock, and I've started to upload to Dreamstime. So far none of the DT uploads have been reviewed.

Other than that, I've been slacking. I only have 5 new images since that post. They can be found on my Flickr page. Hopefully a decent amount of the photos I've uploaded to DS will get accepted, and I think I've got a good set of images that should hopefully get me through Shutterstock's initial review next month.

New Images

I need to get some Valentine's day images into my collection, including one to use as a background for my MySpace >.>

I tried a few shots last night, but nothing came out too nicely. I liked some of the concepts I came up with, but I don't have any suitable subjects to make them come to life. That, and I wasn't trying very hard either, as I wasn't feeling very well for whatever reason. I will try again soon. Maybe tonight.