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?

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.

Project52

For this year I’ll concentrating on photography (or imaging) every week for a fresh blog post. I haven’t done consistent photo projects in a long while and I think it’s an opportunity for some growth. I may add in other posts during the year as well but the focus will be photography and imaging.  I’m blessed to have some talented friends who either are, have been or will be professional photographers, illustrators and imagers and so I’m hoping to get some critiques and comments along the way that pull no punches.

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.