shitbrixxx

well, deep cove was kinda boring. guess i'll be not winning that contest LOL. but yeah, between the fact that i'd just gone there last week (and nowhere else in between), and the lighting was kinda bland - some skies, some cloud, nothing particularly dramatic (when i got there anyways. there was a bit of mist in the woods, but not a lot,  and it got cloudier later on, which was nice). but yeah, it was also my first attempt at using only one lens, to kinda force myself to "see" with it (basically, i'm feeling guilty when i leave lenses unused so i'm trying to make myself use them (Y) though i guess if i can't/don't use them much i might as well end up selling them) (i think in this paragraph i've typed more in brackets than actual sentences), and, well, if the results speak for themselves, it was pretty boring as a photowalk so i'm not sure the one-lens thing worked (it was my 50mm, which is pretty fun sometimes, but on photowalks i've quite warmed up to wide-angles, the 28mm and the 15mm are where it's at for me), though i can't really tell if it was boring cause of the one-lensing or the repeat location, just with boring weather this time. that sentence should be included in textbooks everywhere as an example of horrible runon sentences.

anyways, this photowalk WAS of some significance in that, during it, i shot my 20,000th photo on my camera :D the photo itself was kinda shitty - just an exposure check for a long exposure (which failed, btw. LOL). but i did get a shot with a similar setup that, we'll say is what the 20k shot should've been ;D

also, the shitbrix part of this photowalk.

i slipped and my knee went into mud. my jeans cried a million tears. also, mud splashed onto my camera. at which point i cried a million tears (in my head, anticipatorily - that's a word now, mothafucka). it also splashed onto my super-tak 50. and i was wearing my white jacket so i couldn't just wipe it off. and i mean it's not like the lens was super-expensive (~$55 or so IIRC), just that it would've been pretty shitty for it to have been around for some 45-odd years to be wrecked by me. but then in a few moments it showed why it survived so long - a few wipes with my cloth, and it was good as new. i could hear some tiny pebbles when i focussed it back and forth, but eventually that stopped and they fell out or were digested by the lens or something. and, luckily, nothing got into the camera itself - if it got on the sensor i would've been so fucked.

anyways, ONTO THE PICS:

actually, first, i wanna show something: the effect of lighting and atmosphere and all that on a shot.

i took this shot last week. it was heavily foggy, with some light filtering through the dense clouds. overall, very atmospheric, and a shot that i love.

and now the exact same thing, but shot today, with some sun popping out, and no fog:

it goes from an epicly creepy/spooky/holy tree-cradle-thing to...nothing. the subject's the same, the composition is for all intents and purposes the same, but the light is different - and that's all the difference you need to make or break a shot. in fact, light probably matters more than anything else, more than whether you have an iphone camera or a nikon D3x.

i actually mainly took that shot just to put it on here and talk about it. aren't i lame ;D anyways, onto the actual photos from the photowalk:

the adage "sharpness is a bourgeois concept" is pretty applicable here. there's practically nothing that's sharp, but in this case it doesn't take away from the photo - where the main theme is the crisscrossing lines and the myriad subtle shades.

this was pretty epic at the time - the tree was kinda spotlit and the moss was practically glowing. looking back on it now though, it's a bit too cluttered to be a good shot to me.

because serial killers of the forest need to have a mcdonald's too.

i'm pretty bored with shots like these - i feel like the watermotionblur thing is so cliche, and only really works when the shot has other stuff going on, and it adds to it instead of being a  main focus. as a main focus, it's pretty lame imo.

same thing here.

photo #19,998! 19,999 was kinda shitty so i deleted it.

photo #20,000. i didn't really put much effort into editing it at all really; it's even still tilted. this shot was just meant to check the exposure (because it's easier to take a shot at 1/30 of a second and calculate from there, than to take a 240 second exposure and then fine tune after the fact :/) 

the only one i ended up liking from the few i took around #20,000. note my amazing cloning skills (the tower thing)

i don't do all that many shallow DoF shots, i  don't think, so i'm allowed this now and then ;D 

and that's it for deepcove: revisited. overall i don't think i liked it as a photowalk too much, though it could've just been because it was spoiled by my slipping in the mud and subsequent shitbrixing (though the trail was pretty boring regardless of that.) anyways, after this, i went home, changed, did some shit with some people ( ;D ) and then bussed home from there. and on the way, i got to take a shot that i'd been wanting to take since forever. as in, i tried it once when i was taking film photography in school (and idk what happened to that shot, or maybe i never ended up taking it, or i lost the negative, who knows), and that didn't work out for reasons specified in the brackets, and now i finally got to try again. it worked particularly cause i now had the 28mm lens - before, the 40mm was too long and the 15mm too wide, but now it was just right. but anyways, here's the thing (i love this shot, and for that reason alone i give half a shit what anyone else thinks of it): 

juhjuhjuh jizz.

i took this shot about 30 times, so here's the 2nd alternate version i ended up keeping. there're more lights but i prefer the top version more - gives a lonelier feel, which matches it better.

and another random shot on the bus too - nothing special this time though.

and now at this point, i'm kind of photo'd out. which is kinda pathetic cause i've gone on like, what, 4 photowalks all month? but it doesn't matter anyways because with midterms coming up, i won't have another chance for one for a week or two anyways. or maybe next weekend depending on how i feel about math. oh fuck, math....

sidenote: i love how i have more text than photos for today's photowalk. covering up my incompetence with text, ftw.