Staircase

My bathroom

A bathroom

Stove - another version

Stove - draft #1

I eat a squash

A melon

The Neighbors in color

Manu Chao concert. Don't look away!

Coffee

The neighbors

My sleeping girlfriend

Takoma Park in B&W I

I didn't think I would like any of the pictures that came out of my last roll. As it turns out I liked a couple of them. I still hate the blueish tinge that comes with the black and white film that can be processed at CVS, but until I take a dark room class and get a high powered scanner and/or a digital camera there's nothing I can do about that.

An alley

Old Town Auto Service I

Old Town Auto Service II (I think my focus isn't very good in this one but I like the photo over all)

Silver Spring in Color II

A graveyard of Benzes.

Georgia Ave.

Some suburban graffiti.

The Hirshhorn

Here's a series of pictures from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. It took me longer than you would think to put them together like this in a single frame/file. I like each picture individually but I like them better as a group. None of the pictures were posed, and the last one is actually at my house and not the museum, although it was in the same roll of film. There does seem to be a theme of loneliness on the roll, or a sort of film noir style, and maybe that's why they look good together to me. I used KodakCN film (I think this is the name - chromogenic black and white by Kodak. I know, I need to move to real black and white but I haven't found a lab close to me that develops real B&W) and took the pictures with my Nikon N75 with Nokon AF Nikkor 28-80mm lense.

Silver Spring in Color I

This is my first attempt at using color film. As it turns out I didnt have any black and white film on the day I went out taking these pictures, only color film, and all the photo stores that would carry black and white film were closed on Sunday for some reason.

The film I used was Kodak Gold 400, which game me some weird results. There appears to be some noticeable 'grain' effect on all th pictures, almost like digital noise on digital pictures or when you use a higher ISO setting. You can see that areas out of focus appear pixelated. I checked out some reviews online for this particular film and several people said that they noticed the same thing, so it wasn't the developing process or the scanning process. But I guess it's possible that these problems are more noticeable when the film is scanned in.

I believe that this is the MARC/Amtrak station in Silver Spring off of Georgia Avenue. I liked the pink and yellow on the left side of the image and how they almost converge towards the middle of the picture, before the yellow line is interrupted. I also like how lines (the fences, train tracks, yellow line) appear from each corner of the image and travel to different depths of the picture.

I do get the feeling that this image looks more like a documentary rather than portraying any sort of artistic intention (or is a documentary photograph an artistic intention in and of itself?). I'm tempted to take it again in black and white and see if it works better, but I won't because, one, I think I like the colors, and two, I'm lazy.

This next image is of Piney Branch Avenue, NW on the Washington, DC side of Takoma Park. It's not Silver Spring but it's only down the road so I'm lumping it into this post.

I really like this one. On a purely personal note I love the image of a series of unused parking meters on an empty street. I thought I should wait until I took more pictures of scenes like this so I could present it as a series but I'll probably just recycle this image when and if I ever do take more meter pictures. I'm particularly fond of the winding road and the winding line of meters and how it contrasts with the sharp lines and angles of the overpass above. I do wish I had a longer lens to shorten the distance between meters and make it look more crowded.

I have decided to never again get CDs with my pictures when I get them developed. I just can't afford it. So while i try to set up my dad's old scanner at my house I will continue to post old pictures. They're decent, I feel, but I've looked at them so many times that they aren't all that exciting to me anymore and I don't have much to say about them. Plus, they're still part of my classroom exercises where I try to maximize my use of aperture and shutter speed, so there isn't any sort of story behind them besides "I had to do this."

In any case, this picture here is of my living room. I like the cropping and the numerous doors in the frame, and the one that is slightly off focused and open. Makes me feel like I'm looking in a room where I'm not supposed to be. Again, I did a little work with the contrast using GNU's GIMP software.

Here's another photo for my imaginary friends. This one has my girlfriend in the foreground and her friend in the background behind the bar. I like the way they are looking away from the camera. When I was getting ready to take the picture they were looking right at the camera but then they turned to look at someone coming in through the door right when I was pressing the shutter release. I like the way it turned out. It appears to catch a more spontaneous moment than if they had both been looking right at me. I wish that I could somehow photoshop the random chick drinking a beer out of the picture. Oh well. I also did a slight color correction by adjusting the levels of the picture to a tighter setting (is that the right lingo?)...

This is my favorite picture right now. The shape at the front of the car is a woman wearing a large hooded jacket. She's sleeping so her head is down. For a second I considered making loud insane noises before taking the picture in hopes that she would lift up her head and make a more interesting picture. Unfortunately, I ended up with a woman that looks more like a large sleeping bag or grocery bag.

I took this picture as part of an exercise for my photography class where we were supposed to mess around with aperture settings and depth of field. If you look at the seats immediately in front of the camera you'll see that they are relatively in focus. At the same time, the parts of the train car farther away from the camera are also in focus. I think this picture worked well because the bright natural light coming through the windows allowed me to also use a relatively fast shutter speed so the outside of the train, which is moving fast past the camera, also apperas somewhat clear.

This is my second train picture. The same lady is still asleep in the front of the car. I took it once the train had gone into a tunnel. I like the effect of the train lights in the train and the effect that they create as they travel through the depth of the picture. In order to get a good exposure on this picture I had to use a slower shutter speed and a larger aperture setting (no natural light). As a result, the seats closer to the camera appear a little bit blurrier and out of focus. I feel like this picture is less effective than the day picture because I focused on the lady in front of me but her image is not all that attractive or attention-grabbing. The blurry seats in front of the camera make it look like I'm not really focusing on anything at all - there isn't any strong image to catch the eye. The night/dark effect is nice though.

Allow myself to introduce myself

Who the hell is this guy? Washington, DC resident, 29 years or age, and occasionally bored with some free time. Hence this blog. I recently started a photography class and thought 'what's the point if no one outside the class gets to see the pictures?' I tried posting the pictures on MySpace but this wasn't very fulfilling - you only get a small caption space next to each picture, and MySpace is getting on my nerves anyways. So here we are. Whether you are interested or not I will be posting my pictures (class assignments and otherwise) on this blog and maybe discussing a little bit what I was trying to capture and how I went about it. I assume that this won't last for more than a few weeks before it starts to get old and tedious, but who knows. Since ABSOLUTELY NO ONE IN THE ENTIRE WORLD is reading this right now I'll save my energies for something more important and leave it at that.