Boiler Works

This past weekend, my brother and I went to our friend's house for his belated birthday. We spent Friday afternoon/evening in NYC, and then walked around our friend's neighborhood on Saturday. One of the places we went to in his town was an abandoned boiler works...we were only able to stay there for about 10 minutes because it was getting dark, but I still got some cool pictures :).

I'm Back!

Wow. 

This summer absolutely flew by! And not only that, but I am now a month into my Junior year!! *gasp*

During the summer months, two jobs and numerous Bible camps consumed all my free time, which explains the lack of posts :). I think I only picked up my camera three times this entire summer. Oops...but hey, it just means I was having such a great time I forgot to take pictures! :D

Anyway, now that the summer is over, I'll be able to take lots of pictures, right? Ha, riiight. Innumerable Junior year courses took care of that one. 

So, as my schedule permits, I will be taking and posting photographs, but please bear in mind the fact that my posts won't be nearly as regular as last year. 

On the brighter side, I'm hoping to take some extra time after one of my riding lessons to photograph horses/my stable, so hopefully I'll have something to post here shortly :). Until then, God bless!

 Rhododendron flowers. 

 Messing around with colors...B&W looks pretty cool in my opinion.
(Sorry about the quality of these pictures. I was just goofing around, not going for a masterpiece ;))

Is it just me, or can you see a dragon in the flames??

Gradution Pictures

On Monday morning my friends came over so that I could take Morgan's graduation portrait :). She had just gotten back from her senior trip, and I had been away all weekend, so we were both extremely tired...it made for an interesting experience :D.

This is the formal picture, but we also took a bunch for fun.

MN

Here are some of the pictures from my trip to Minnesota. Most of them aren't very good, but my idea of 'not good' has changed so much over the course of this year :D.

 The ceiling in my mom's old bedroom. It's the coolest thing ever!

 Don't you love how subtle Southwest's advertizing is? ;)

 This picture doesn't look too good, but I had to put it in anyway. It was waaaay overexposed, so this is super edited. Oh yeah, BTW, since I am now mainly shooting in RAW, most of my pictures will be edited.

Project 3

Wow. Photography class is over, as of 11:15 yesterday morning! :'( 
I was showing my mom the class recording afterward, and noticed that all the pictures from my presentation were really weird...I'm not sure if it's just because of this computer, or if everyone saw them like that. Anyway, for those of you who haven't had a chance to see my work yet, here it is! Our final project of the year was to create a portfolio of fifteen images and present it, along with a project statement, to the rest of the class. *You've probably seen most of these images on my blog this year, but a few of them are new...enjoy!

Uuugh...for some reason, the picture that's supposed to go here absolutely will not load.

...and that way my last project! I hope you enjoyed it :). I was trying to post it yesterday, but that one picture wouldn't load, so I opted to wait a bit longer and see if it would cooperate. I have a few more pictures from my trip to MN last weekend which I'll be posting soon, so I'll try to upload it in that post instead.

OH! I bought Lightroom, and it's going to be coming in the mail soon! YAY!!! And since I have no intentions of stopping photography, I will continue to post some of my photos here. 

New post coming soon...

...I just want to wait until after my in-class presentation, so that some of the images are a surprise :).

Creativity 3 & Free Weeks

Sorry I haven't posted anything in a while :/. I need to get better at this. 
Anyway, a few weeks ago we finished up our creativity section by choosing a randomly numbered powerpoint slide. The phrase on the slide was our subject for the week, and we were free to interpret it however we wanted. My subject was "music to my ears", which immediately made me think of my mom playing her violin. Since this was a creativity assignment, I decided to challenge myself and incorporate the sun into the picture - something I had never done before. It took lots of experimenting, and close to 200 frames, but I think I'm getting the hang of it now :). This is the picture I submitted for class: 

I would have liked to have the picture a little bit darker, and I wish the bow didn't disappear, but overall I like it :). 

We are learning about post-production right now, so last week we didn't have to take pictures. I ended up trying to figure out my photographic vision (my personal 'style' of photography) and taking pictures of the bleeding heart plants in our garden. I really wish I had a macro lens, but I tried to make the pictures really sharp so that I can crop them down. I'm not going to upload any, because I shot them RAW and I want to edit them on Lightroom... once I download the trial version, which I don't currently have :).

Yesterday, I did a photoshoot for my friend Morgan, who won Miss NJ and is going to the Miss America competition :D. This was the first time I'd done a shoot like this, so there was a lot of trial and error involved, mostly with the lighting. I had a mini studio set up in my basement with a sheet and several desk lamps, but the lamps all had different bulbs, which made a good WB hard to find - even with a calibration target :/. In the end, I learned a lot, and ended up getting pretty good results. These are the two pictures we ended up with: 

Free Shoot

As you already know, this week's assignment was a free shoot. No limitations, do whatever you want. My friend Jacob needed a new profile picture taken, so I had this photo shoot be my free shoot as well. It was lots of fun, albeit cut a bit short.

 What do you want me to do??

Jacob and my brother, Daniel, goofing around.

After some comment on how what they were doing looked dorky, they really decided to ham it up.

This is the picture I submitted this week.

It's nearly impossible to take a picture without Daniel trying to photobomb. He's getting pretty good at it ;)

Creativity 2

This week's assignment was a lot of fun! To stretch our creativity, we had to have an assistant pick a subject that is similar in size and shape to several other objects, without telling you what it was. They then had to blindfold you and give you the object to feel and explore for five minutes - no peeking allowed! After that, the blindfold was removed and you had to take 25 different frames using the subject. After the shoot, we had to choose our favorite and least favorite shots and submit them for the week's homework. My mom was my helper, and she pulled out some little ceramic figurines for me to photograph. Below is my favorite shot from the shoot. I'm not going to show you my worst - that's just embarrassing, but take my word for it, you're not missing anything ;)

 This picture is one of my very favorites. You can probably see why :)

...and here are some more photos. 
 

It was pretty hard for me to pick my favorite of these photos. I like the light best in this one, but the composition and focus best in the one I submitted. 

I was trying to get both in focus, but the bird was moving too fast :/.

Mom hates this one, since I managed to find the dustiest place in the basement. I kind of like it.