Ye Gods – no post since September! Well, as the old saying goes: “Time flies when you’re having fun.” In truth, it also flies when one is not having fun! So I’ve discovered.
True, I have been busy with my Camera Club activities, my new social life, and entertaining visitors. But, despite good intentions to get back to posting, it seemed that whenever I got some leisure time I would either be too lazy to post or use the time to catch up on my reading.
And I have just now discovered that WordPress changed the posting process – rather confusing, but I shall soldier on!
I intend to write in the future about some of the things that have happened since my last post but this post relates to the weird title above.
First – Hands
The theme for my Camera Club’s January competition was hands. Actual judging will take place tomorrow, January 20. I was not very enthused about this theme but I suppose it helps one to improve one’s skills trying different things. I took many photos of hands – both mine and those of others – and finally settled on entering the following two in the competition. Frankly, I’m not very enthused about them.
The first photo is of my own hand. I placed a black foam board against the back of a dining room chair for the background and set my camera up on a tripod a foot in front of the chair. Then, after I set the camera aperture, ISO and shutter speed to fit the lighting and depth of field I wanted, I set the timer to 10 seconds; leaned way over so that my hand would be approximately where I intended it to be when the photo was taken; pressed the shutter button half-way to set the focus on where my hand was; pressed the shutter button fully to start the 10 seconds; rushed behind the chair and and posed my hand holding two dice in front of the foam board – and waited for the shutter to snap the photo.
It took a few tries before I was satisfied with the following:
The second photo I chose was of two elderly ladies’ hands. I enhanced the photo in Photoshop by posterizing – a process that thickens edges and overall adds emphasis to almost every feature.
Second, Cookoobird Bikers:
I couldn’t think of an appropriate word to describe a group of more than a hundred crazy bikers, who for the 2nd year in a row on Martin Luther King’s Birthday (National Holiday) staged a foolish and dangerous demonstration to encourage people to put down their guns and get on their bikes. Nice thought, I suppose; it certainly is a good thing to discourage violence – – but I’ll let this video I made from part of a local newscast show what craziness was going on in South Florida yesterday.
A wee bit of the top of the TV screen unfortunately doesn’t show in the video because I had my camcorder on the kitchen table in my breakfast nook aimed at my little kitchen TV and didn’t realize it wasn’t quite high enough to capture the entire screen.
