Jack London once said “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a mouse.” Okay he might have said club instead of mouse.  Same difference these days in the realm of digital creation. If you’d like to discover amazing photographs by no one in particular, without a similar subject,  and with the only thing that makes them alike is that they’re sweet sweet eye candy then I suggest you try Flickriver.com.   Prepare to scroll down for as long you have batteries in that mouse.  The great images just keep coming.

Want a little more control over the context of the photos?  Take CompFight.com out for a photo browsing bout.  Maybe London’s quote inspired the name.  Inspiration can be a fight sometimes.  Consider yourself armed.

CompFight.com

Need inspiration without the constraint the camera? Then you may like the aptly named FFFFOUND! This last one was recommended to me by Joseph Grillo.
Thanks Joe.

God stopped by Newport today and I got off this shot. Okay, that’s not true. I actually took five exposures and stitched them together. Sunset photographs are passé I suppose but I’m glad I caught it. Many thanks to the “Big Guy.”

Note: Please click on the image to see the pop-up pano.

In stark contrast to the above is a quick shot from last week: a casual sunny parking lot portrait of my friend and colleague, the incredibly nice Ahna Fender. Ahna is a talented artist in addition to the preceding. Check out her art here at Artruckus.com.

Thank you, Ahna for having such a generous spirit and letting me take the snap. I wish I could have found a better background…like a houseboat would have been fantastic I think. These are the trade offs I suppose of “bloggety” photography. “Phoblography?”

So ends my 6th week of blog posts for Project 52. Thus far I’m both happy with and disappointed in the posts I’ve added. I’ll concentrate on the former along with the realization that it gives me plenty of room for improvement!

So for this week’s post I thought I’d share a collage. These are just quick grabs off my hard drive. The only thing in common is that these snaps tend to make me smile. Apologies to those who didn’t want to be included but hey, it’s only pixels! Plus I’m not naming any names. If you’re not in my collage and you should be then we haven’t been spending enough time together. Sorry, life goes fast, no?

This past week I had the opportunity to team up on shoot with my good friend Karl from Dimension Three Architectural Illustrations.  Karl was actually working while I was hard at play working on a shot for my latest #p52 post.   Karl does amazing architectural illustrations and hopefully he’ll let me share his finished work here when he’s completed it.

But back to playing.  Karl’s not missing a twin but here’s what they would look like if they were weird enough to dress exactly the same.

I also shot a quick 5 image panorama.  It’s stitched here.

Here’s my contact sheet for shoot.

These images were shot a few months back when a good friend was in town with his son. His son Jakob didn’t have much experience with the beach and so it was great to watch him interact with it and have some fun. Fortunately Jake agreed to confine throwing sand at his father and I was let off of the hook since I had camera in hand. The lighting was absolutely horrible and I hate to shoot mid-day but I’m glad I decided I tout along the Nikon.

Jake’s dad mentioned to me this past week that he really liked the shot below and so I cleaned it up a bit in Photoshop and added some effects. You’ll notice the coloration difference. It actually has a gradient color cast from one end to the other also with a touch of the diffuse glow effect. The other other change is cleaning up some of the sand that I found distracting.

This is the contact sheet from the shoot. Something I’ve missed since switching to digital is contact sheets. I used to come out of the dark room and lupe ‘em and try to find the shots to enlarge. The digital work flow is much better and easier to find the shots to work on but I still like seeing all the shots together. It gives a different sense of the shoot somehow and helps identify where I might have done something different next time.

I love panoramas because there’s something a little magical about them to me.  Perhaps because they’re a better substitute of human vision than more standard sized images because of the wide field of view.  Whatever the reason, you’ll likely see more of them here in the next 12 months.  By the way, click on the thumbnail image above in the post to get a pop-up of the full size image.

This panorama was created from 6 images shot with generous overlap with my D70 hand-held and then stitched in Photoshop CS4.  Here’s how Photoshop divides up the images which is surprising but yields a nice smooth result.  I have access to a pano head thanks to my friend at Dimension Three but I may never need to borrow it again.

Unfortunately the lighting is less than I hoped for.  Some foreground interest would be helpful also.

For 2010 I have joined Project52 and each week I’ll be adding some new photography to my blog here.

This was shot on Christmas Eve with available light for a 20 second exposure using my trusty D70. I like the overall effect and subject matter but the color balance is god awful. I originally liked the car tail lights in the image but more and more they look amateurish to me.  Certainly this is not professional level imagery.   Still, I think it’s a nice holiday image and one that appropriate to use to wish you all a Merry New Year!

My inspiration to get out in the cold and shoot was the lovely work of Blake Gordon and his holiday image of a lone tree lit up.