Eye

The lens of my camera.  Taken with my camera.  So the lens is actually taking a picture of itself.  Think about that.

Life

I need to take pictures of things that are important to me.  Like Peruvian coffee beans.

Island

I liked how the light just illuminated one little spot with nothing else behind it.  Not a remarkable picture for the most part but I thought the lack of a background was interesting.

Fire

Noticed this sclupture walking back from lunch yesterday.  I thought this would look good at night with the sodium lights all around, I'm pretty happy with it.  It's one of the modern art type sculptures I've seen that I liked better, it's too bad they didn't put it somewhere more people would see it.

Shoelaces

I expected the untied shoe to be more visually interesting than it was.  These are my shoes after going to a Flagstaff Symphony concert.

Foreground

So my attitude about this picture is a little bitter; this is the best view of the peaks available from within walking distance of NAU campus.  As you can see, not particularly good.  I stood on the porch of one of NAU's north campus administrative buildings this morning and took this one, leaving the city in the foreground to show one of Flagstaff's problems... awesome as the Peaks are, there are not as many unmarred views of them as one would like.

Orange

See post title.

Footsteps

My footprints early this morning.  I was the first to walk in the tiny amount of snow on top of the parking garage across the street from my dorm, so I turned around and took a picture of my footprints.  I am struck by my apparent inability to walk in a straight line.

Schooling

Lots to do tonight.  This picture is school for me.

Chillin'

My roommate Sean Collins is also doing a 366 day project this year and neither of us had a really great picture at the end of today so we ended up spending an hour playing with light painting on 30 second exposures.  These are, obviously, some stick figures we drew sitting (chillin') on our couch.  Maybe they are even impressions of us...

Auto

Went for a rainy walk with my roommate who also happens to be doing a year-long photo project and found this old truck parked in downtown Flagstaff, which seems to be one of my main locations for taking pictures these days.

Professionalism

This is the picture for 1-20-12, I just didn't upload it until now.  Another unimpressive picture, but it's not something you see every day.  This is the office I work in...

AM

About 7:30am in downtown Flagstaff, across the street from my picture two days ago.  I think for good sunrise pictures I should actually try to get to my location before sunrise but that hasn't happened this week.  The exposure on this one (1") may have been too long because I couldn't get anything but the top left corner of the sky to darken at all.

Wednesday

Tonight was Bagel Night Wednesday with all my friends, meaning at 8:00pm, go to the library, get coffee and bagels, and do homework!  Homework never really happens, hence why I didn't really take a great picture today and will still be up for another half hour, but Bagel Night Wednesday is an important part of my week and this was the first one of the semester, so this picture is quite appropriate.

Flagstaff

First day of classes at NAU and I woke up a little earlier than I needed to, so I took a walk out to the tracks downtown and took this at around 7:20 am, just before sunrise.  Walking back I realized that I could have included the sunrise if I had stayed for just a few more minutes but I like this predawn picture.

Door

Busy day and unfortunately I forgot to bring my camera most places.  This was my first full day in Flagstaff for my Spring semester at NAU, so I thought that the door to my dorm room would be an appropriate picture for today.

Cameron

Cameron Trading Post, home of the very best Navajo Tacos in the world.  I say that with confidence.  My family took the long way to Flagstaff today through Cameron and I liked the Southweste clouds.  I was also trying to recreate one of the classic pictures of trading posts along highways (Route 66 mainly) and for a first attempt I'm pretty happy with it.  This is a complex of buildings in the middle of the desert on the edge of the Navajo reservation, so I use the cities tag with some reservations.

Shiny

Different textures for this one were the interest for me.  I went shooting with a friend today and these are the casings from a .22 we were shooting sitting on the blanket we used to cover the ground for prone position.

Dog

So at 10:30 pm when I realized I still needed a picture for today, I figured out that the only way to get a decent picture of the dog (Tiko) was to take it when he's about to fall asleep and is not interested in getting up to sniff the camera.  Not my best or most creative picture (or title) but it's the first semi-good non-vicious dog picture I've every taken.

Awesomeness

One of the top things on my list of toys that will never stop being awesome: Legos!  You can see that this one has been well used and is, of course, carrying a camera.

Light

Fireworks in a national park?  No!  Of course not!  Who said that? This is a 1/10 second exposure at f/3.5 of one of those party sparklers.  In case anyone is interested, I did manage to burn myself while taking this, but it wasn't the sparkler.  I just got so occupied taking pictures after I got the sparkler going that I kept my hold on the match that I had used right up until it burned to my thumb.  Can't say I'm displeased with the picture though!

Time

Okay, this picture is way too artsy-fartsy for my taste.  And to compensate, I will use the term artsy-fartsy in the first two sentences of this post.  However, this was available, so I decided to try it.  These are the hands from a clock kit.  I had used the motor to replace the motor on another clock and threw these down on my desk and thought it would make a decent picture, so, thinking red would make a good background color, I took them back out to the garage and took this of them sitting on top of a toolbox.

Work

Splitting firewood in January keeps you warmer than burning it.  On a note unrelated to this particular picture I'm beginning to notice one of the problems with digital photography: monitor calibration.  I have two monitors set up on my computer and no matter how hard I try I can't seem to make them match, which makes me wonder how these pictures look on other screens after I edit them on mine.  I'll have to work on that once I move back to NAU and have my computer screens set up in a permanent location.

Grand

Well I keep threatening to put up a picture of the Grand Canyon so here it is.  As far as pictures of the canyon go I can't say this one is anything special but I figured I would try to get one before I go back to Flagstaff for next semester.  I think this one would have been better if I had managed to get to the rim sooner so that the foreground would be more illuminated but aside from that I find that I like winter sunsets here better than summer ones not only because you can enjoy them without 200 other tourists but also because of the different way the shadows are angled.

Clouds

Back to good pictures!  I saw these colorful clouds over the San Francisco Peaks on the way to dinner after another long day of car shopping.  I may have been able to frame it better somewhere else but this lighting was gone after three pictures and just gave me a great example of how much of photography is about timing.

Consortion

Not having wanted to take the nice expensive camera to a crowded gymnasium, I wasn't expecting any good action shots from this Grand Canyon High School basketball game.  However I ended up taking this picture of the referees talking during halftime.  In spite of their being pro forma the most hated people in the room, they looked awfully happy.

Uninspiration

Well it was only a matter of time before I put something up here I wasn't proud of; hoped it wouldn't be on the fifth day, but here it is.  After half an hour crawling around on the floor trying to get a good shot of the dog (this was an extremely uninspired evening as far as my photography goes) I ended up with this.  I did bother to do a little editing on it for lighting but as far as rotating it to put myself right side up...nah.  I will probably include some other (hopefully more artistic) self-portraiture throughout the year though, as this project is not only about practicing photography but also about documenting some of my life.

Bemusement

This is one of the Park Service trail maintenance mules.  I don't think they liked me very much; I didn't feed them or pet them, I just brandished a camera in their faces, which was a little horrifying because I'm sure that they could have easily fit their teeth around my lens and my fingers.  I like the way this one turned out even though it's not the best composition I've ever used- I love the mule's bemused expression.

Cold

Again, I was planning to photograph the canyon, and I obviously didn't.  I'm sure I'll do that sometime.  Working with long exposures was my main plan for tonight (this one was 30 seconds with f/3.5). I was happier with the composition and lighting in this shot from the woods on the way up than with any of the pictures I took of the canyon.  I'll give a brief explanation of the title, since it is a bit cryptic: with snow on the ground and a clear sky this will absolutely be a cold night.

Alley



This is one of the alleys in downtown Flagstaff taken at around 4 pm, where I was taking a quiet break from talking to car salesmen all day.  What I was most interested in were the shadows and highlights on the buildings but I also spent a lot of time looking at the web of power lines strung above the streets.  This picture, though it has a decidedly unimaginative title, was my best attempt at capturing both.

Edge

So this is the first day of my project and I was trying to think of a good thing to photograph to start it off.  My first idea was to take a walk up to the rim of the canyon for a picture, which would seem suitably spectacular.  However, on the way up to the rim, I found myself staring at the ice that was melting along the side of the path I was following.  I never made it to the rim.