my nd filter has arrived and i really, really, really don't like chem.

so, first of all, my nd filter has arrived.

i do not live near any waterfalls or rivers (okay i do, but the fraser river is kinda boring), so to make the best use of this epicness, i just camwhored with it, f4 at 256 seconds ish exposures. and if you dont know what an ND filter is, basically it blocks out light so that in really bright situations, you can still do long exposures. like so:

i thought it would look cool if the food slowly disappeared over the course of the exposure. unfortunately, it looks fuckin' disgusting.

so i learned from these shots that i don't really move that much over the course of 4 minutes and 16 seconds. but anyways, chemistry. chhhhhh emistry. pronounce that with me, like you're saying chewkok. CHHHHHEMIS--fuck it. i don't like chem. and it took me a while to figure out i should put it off till the day it was due. but i should really be thanking my teacher. if it wasn't for her assigning this chem lab, how could i practice using my takumar lenseserses so much - focussing, metering - or practice the various PP effects i tried out and went crazy with, or had an epiphany that went along the lines of, wow, fuck if there're blown out highlights or totally black shadows, screw detail, if it works for the shot and adds to it, go for it, PP-wise.

past its glory days? time to throw it away? ...nah, fuck no ;D

rather odd/severe crop, this one

thank you, chem lab, for being so amazingly annoying that it gave me the perseverance to try this shot for about 15 minutes before i finally nailed the focus on the missing key

can't decide which one i prefer so here's both; i'm leaning towards the b&w though, which i'm quite happy about cause before, i was pretty shitty at b&w conversions

at the end of the day though, there's no going around the fact that chem is incredibly lame. so lame that it can counteract bacon, almost. through some horrible chemical reaction or something, probably. and as a result of this lameness, here is my sad-chemface. again, can't decide which version i like better. as a sidenote, i'm getting really good at camwhoring with manual focus lenses. i think that's a bad thing. i'm sarcastically narcissistic enough, let's not take out the sarcasm in that equation...

so anyways, chem sucks and took me forever, but i spent about 2 of the 3 hours taking pictures of stuff. but i wouldn't've taken those shots if chem didn't make me that bored and desperate, so in the end the 3 hours is still chem's fault. that's my fucked up justification, and i'm sticking with it. surprisingly though, for just normal screw-around snapshots that aren't much more than practicing manual focus, i quite like the shots that i got out of it, especially after PPing them. also, i'm really excited to go out and do some shit with that sextastic ND filter.

also, since we're on the topic of PP, here's a shot i meant to post in an earlier thing but couldn't find. basically, editing is fine unless you're making shots that look like this

and (keyphrase) try to pass it off as legit after editing it into: 

this shot was a rather self-esteem crushing attempt at slightly more advanced editing than RAW conversion.