I made a decision today!  Yes, your applause is appreciated… thank you.  For the last 53 days I have been taking pot shots with my camera hoping to get a picture for this project.  There were a few days where I actually thought about a picture and planned how to shoot it, but for the most part it has been pot luck.  I don’t think this is the actual intent of the project.  Have I been learning about my camera, yes.  Have I been learning about composition, yes.  Have I been learning about exposure, yes.  It just feels like I needed something else…

Now for my decision…  The Hobby Photographer’s Photo-Theme Page runs a bi-weekly theme where each photographer can submit three pictures for review.  At the end of the two week period everyone votes for their favorite picture.  The winner has bragging rights until the next theme’s winner is chosen.  I decided to submit photos for each theme which will focus my on creating at least three pictures with a goal in mind.  I think this will help me with composition and the peer review/exposure will help me improve my overall skills.  This week’s theme is Abstract…

Abstract Words

Scott Thomas, fellow Upstate NY photographer, has a great blog, Views Infinitum where you can read about his journey into photography, view great pictures from around New York State and learn about photography concepts.  I just discovered he uses his blog to run photographic assignments to help newbies like me improve their skills.

This weeks assignment is about the rule of thirds.  You can read about it on Scott’s site by following this link: assignment 17 rule of thirds.  As an added bonus attached to this assignment Scott will be picking a random winner from the submissions to participate in an online photography e-class.  I’m feeling lucky, are you?

Rule-of-Thirds

This was a picture I took early in my 365 projects.  As Scott mentions in his blog I purposefully composed the picture following the rule-of-thirds but as you can see from the original below I needed to crop the picture to achieve the image I wanted.  There was also a little tweaking in Lightroom to improve the mood and tone of the picture.

Original straight out of camera

Single digit temperatures and a losing battle with the sun left me with inside objects for my project picture.  I’ve discovered when shooting inside in low light I need to always use the tripod to ensure a sharp image.  I’m just not very steady at slow shutter speeds.  I also wanted to try more bracketed shots with the thought of combining them using Photoshop Elements – Photmerge Exposure option.

I found this fragrance diffuser on one of the end tables and it looked like it would catch the light nicely while providing a nice contrast to the wood grained top.  The automatic bracketing does work on my camera if you need longer exposure but I was able to get around this issue by setting the exposures manually.  Luckily for me I didn’t move the camera in between shots.

Once I had the three exposures merges in Elements I did a small adjustment to the levels and adjusted the contrast.  The picture didn’t turn out that bad and discovered another nice background to photograph objects against.  After reviewing the in camera pictures of this object I tried another bracketed shot of a candle topper with the candle lit to provide some contrasting light.

Looking at this image today I might have done a different crop to better highlight the detail in the top but overall this image works for me too.  This opens up more possibilities for exploration and with winter starting to set in here in Upstate NY, I’m going to need a lot more indoor subjects!