Weekly Photography Challenge

This week I was hired by Scattergood Friends School to photograph Scattergood Day(homecoming). I was very excited to do it partly because it would make it worth the long trip down there to visit with old friends. I made a lot of photographs and had a hard time limiting it down to the ones here. The one above is my favorite because I like the dramatic viewpoint with the farm tour walking down the hill backdropped by huge clouds. I also had some fun with the next one down where I used three different photographs to show the path of the disk.  On my way down to Iowa I stopped at my grandparents and was enlisted to photograph my aunts alpacas. I made a few different compositions but I like this one best because you can see the rolling pasture in the background. 

Well I have gotten very behind on uploading my weekly photographic challenge photographs. I have been so busy with school photo projects and photo jobs that it has gotten pushed to the side. Hopefully I will have some time to catch up over winter break. Here is one section. This week I photographed a wedding. This was a special one for me because it was the first wedding where I was the primary photographer and it wasn't family or friends. I had a lot of fun and pulled through it alright. I have decided though that people management and posing is where I need to most improvement. Also this week I photographed a Fun Run with my class. It was a lot of fun and I got to photograph a skunk that was nearby. To my dismay the police then came and shot the skunk because it was in the way of all the running kids.

Astonishingly I hardly made any photographs this week. I spent the entire week studying photography in and out of school but did not use my camera much. I did however do one neat project of photographing a silhouetted person. At first my inspiration was to try to make a silhouet that looked like the guy on the Quaker oatmeal box, who so many people incorrectly think is how all Quakers dress, but I couldn't figure out how to get it to look right. So I did a nice hat tipping instead. It is a lot more interesting compositionally with all the diagonals and shapes. 

This week I went on a school out-trip where we all photographed the fall colors in a natural preserve. I made a lot of photographs I like and really enjoyed using the scattering of ponds in my photographs. I also was really excited when I found this tree that was dripping sap. It was in an area that had burned recently and from the burned areas of the tree loads of sap was suspended beautifully.  Also this week there was student success day at Central Lakes College. It involves many workshops and events all in a day free from regulare classes. The star show this year was a hypnosis. It was exceedingly fun watching and photographing the volunteers as they "watched" scary or funny movies, tried to separate their hands, touched their noses, forget their name and the number 4, and thought they were 5 years old to name a few things. It was a blast for the audience and for the volunteers they said it felt like they had taken a long nap and they didn't remember much. WO

I have so many amazing photographs I like from this week. Most of them are from various class assignments that I had to do but caused me to find a photograph that I loved to make. This one above is such a photograph. I was supposed to make a photograph of the blue sky reflecting off non glaring water. Sincere there was no blue sky I instead decided to photograph the school of goldfish in the pond. Now I have photographed fish in ponds many times before and was never very happy with the results because the somewhat dirty water would always make the photographs murky. This time though I had the brilliant idea of including one bubble from the cascases leading into the pond. For me this single bubble makes the photograph seem crisp and sharp but still lets the main attention be on the goldfish. I made another photograph I like this time on the theme of photographing a white subject on a white background. I was surprised at how hard it was to find a white subject I wanted to photograph

This week I did a lot of photography. I had a few class assignments one of which was to photograph a path leading somewhere in the photograph. I thought on this assignment a bunch trying to think how I wanted to put it together. I decided I wanted to have a long straight path or road leading off into the distance and nothingness. The next challenge was finding a place that would be able to depict that feeling of nothingness. Fortunately I happened to find this section of large four lane road with no cars on it. Supposedly it was built by a developer but then the development was never completed so it just dead-ends. It was perfect for what I wanted so I set up my tripod and photographed it. I tried a few different variations but ended up liking this symmetrical panorama most. I like how all the lines lead into the center distance.  I also got to play around with a few lenses I borrowed from my college one of which was a macro which was so much nicer to use than the extension tu

This week I spent some time exploring the local Arboretum. It was fun and photographic although I did realize its limits since I was able to hike the majority of the trails in one session within a couple hours. I did enjoy the hike and especially liked the flower gardens. I really like the photograph above even though there are aspects of it that seem to be objectionable. I really liked the setting with the flower clumps with the green bed of leaves and the small waterfall in the background. I made a nice simple composition without the flower up close in the left of this photograph but for some reason I really like this one and the depth gained from that blurry flower. What do you think, does it work like this?

This week was a great week for photography. I have started college and am doing an AAS photography program. One morning as I was driving to class I saw this crop duster plane flying around right next to school. I have seen crop dusters working before but never from this close. It was amazing watching the plane swoop down low that it looked like it was riding directly on the ground then when the end of the field arrived it would pull up hard at the absolute last minute barely lifting above the tree line. I decided it was worth being a few minutes late to class so I stopped and made some photographs and I like how these three turned out. Earlier this week I also did some photography down at the Mississippi River just a block away from my apartment and got some nice portraits of Laura and myself. Finally the last photograph is from right outside my door where there is some construction and they had a big pile of signs all with those flashing lights and I thought it was so neet seeing t