The Daily Struggle

My Blipfoto 365 project struggles on. The need to find an image daily, any image, seems to be working against me and the quality of the images suffers as I focus on the daily requirement and my theme.

Is it the theme that is the problem? I have been sounding thoughts about dropping that and perhaps just going out into the bay each day to see what might be seen.

Or is it the fact that I have two Blipfoto accounts that is causing me to stumble? I created one especially for the project and now I think that was a little silly... especially since I paid to be a life member on my original account.

So now I have no idea what to do. I could struggle on with an artificial theme or I can concentrate on filling my original and paid space. Should I simply abandon my theme and its account and simply concentrate on making sure that I have one image a day that simply documents my life.

Oh, I don't know!

Anyway, here's the latest uploads from the 365 project - you can perhaps see what I mean about the deterioration/lack of inspiration that comes from being boxed in to the numbers/date thing. I have at least made my century. Only two hundred and sixty-odd struggles ahead of me now.

For full details of why I used each of these, see Blipfoto. My "real" Blipfoto account is here.

96Kettletoft Bay - the reference was to the song 96 tears.
97
98
99The atomic element Einsteinium has the Atomic number 99. Einstein's famous equation references a quotation.
100 K100, Revelry, tied up at Kirkwall
101Gathering 101 Dalmations together on Sanday seemed infeasible. Here's Nell instead. Every 365 needs Gratuitous Pet content.

See more in 2014 365 Project

Read more in 365

Challenge Assignment 4

The fourth Phogropathy assignment topic was Rust. This was an easy one for me to tackle, or so I thought - we have many rusting objects around and about the Windswept acre. It turned out that Rust, interesting as it is, provides an innate challenge in its depiction. I cared not much for any of my shots.

Mirrie Dancers March April 5th

I had noted early in the day the possibility of an aurora event so when we were preparing for bed last night I asked Mr L to take a look as he put the dogs out. He said that there was some light to be seen, and so I grabbed my camera.

Sitting on the northern horizon was a hemisphere of pale green light. Above was a dark sky with a clear view of stars and some interesting drifting cloud. Behind us was a crescent moon. There was no wind and it was mild.

I upped the ISO and took a couple of 2 second hand-held shots, just to see if there was anything worth working harder at. It is not always easy to tell what the camera might see when all the human eye can perceive is a general auroral glow.

A glance at the LCD screen convinced me to go indoors for the tripod.

I was thrilled at what I saw. It was the first time ever that I had captured anything at the violet end of the spectrum.

There was the usual light pollution from the school, sad to say.

Unfortunately angling upwards actually makes the images less interesting.

The colours changed rapidly from a blue-violet to a red-violet and thence to red, as the sky also clouded over. I was not out long but it was worth it.

More aurora images here.

Challenge Assignment 3

Phogropathy offered a week 3 assignment challenge topic of Time. Nicely timed for my first experiments with water drops.

Challenge Assignment 2

Assignment 2 from Phogropathy celebrated Spring with the topic of Green.

Challenge Assignment 1

I joined a photography community, aimed mainly at improving editing skills, called Phogropathy. There is a weekly Community Edit exercise, which is great fun and a useful experience, but now also a weekly assignment challenge topic.

The Week 1 topic was Windows and Doors. My submissions:

68/365 Terry Nation

365:68Terry Nation (8 August 1930 – 9 March 1997) was a Welsh television writer and novelist. He is best known for creating the villainous Daleks for the long-running BBC science-fiction TV series Doctor Who in 1963. I don't have a Dalek prop, but this peedie N-gauge Police Box came in handy

By rights I would have photographed a Dalek today. As we have no Dalek in the house, I used this tiny N-gauge Police Box as my Terry Nation reference for today's 365 Blip

It was late in the day when I got around to thinking about my 365 shot. I had been engrossed all day in setting up this new Koken site and the learning curve was steep. 68 yielded very little of interest, so I turned once more to On This Day. 

Terry Nation (8 August 1930 – 9 March 1997) was a Welsh television writer and novelist. He is best known for creating the villainous Daleks for the long-running BBC science-fiction TV series Doctor Who in 1963.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Nation

I  had attempted to use this prop recently in my 365 and failed. The recent arrival of the Sigma 105mm f/2.8 EX DG Macro OS HSM Lens meant that I could make something of it today.

The model was set up on one of my interlocking black rubber mats, and a second mat hinged up behind it. The lights were out and I used a tiny Mag penlight to paint the model. Having overdone the light a little, I had to reduce saturation and luminance on orange and yellow in Lightroom. I then cropped the image and exported it to Nik's Analog Pro and applied Vintage Camera 4 as my preset.

I love it!

Phlogging

365:1First day of the year, first image of my 365

There have been half-hearted attempts at 365 projects in my photographic past. I joined Blipfoto with the intention of daily snapping and soon fell by the wayside. When 2014 arrived, I determined that this would be the year of success, and that having a theme would help. For some reason I no longer fathom, I began a new Blipfoto account for this express purpose. Perhaps I believed that the theme would be less representative of me and my life and I wanted to keep space in my original Blip account for that purpose. At the time of writing I have kept up to date with the 365 but have made my normal "blip" only occasionally. I wish that I had kept it to one account.

There is also an existing photo blog, designed around my learning journey as an aspiring photographer, the obligatory Flickr account and albums at DigitalRev. It is difficult to keep it all up to date and well-maintained.

I need to make coherent sense of it all.

This space seems like a good place to collate my works in one place. It is so beautiful a space that I hope to apply some quality control and not just throw everything at it. Mid-March, and I am still making photographic resolutions.