Week 5: Yellow

This week's theme was Yellow.

At first, I thought this will be hard to do. It's Wisconsin, in the winter. Everything is grey and blah. Until I started to look around more and try to find some color. Street signs, school bus. I have yellow plates. My fruit bowl on the counter is yellow. I almost posted a picture of beer. It is yellow and I had not seen any other beer pictures in the group. In the end, I went with flowers.

I bought some tulips at the store this week and picked out the yellow and yellow/pink ones for this project. Over the course of two days, I took over 100 pictures. Some with my camera and some with my phone. I did some in the morning and some at night.

In the end, I liked this close up picture the best. I cropped it a bit but otherwise didn't use any filters.

Tulips!

Next week's theme is Black and White.

Week 4: My Favorite

Week 4: My Favorite

Meet Rufus. He is my 14 year old Shih Tzu. Don't tell his brothers, Riley and Boomer, that Rufus is my favorite.

Rufus

I took this picture last summer. I had just got my new camera and was testing it out in the backyard with the dogs. I was laying on the ground and Rufus was walking towards me.

While the picture is not very good. It's slightly out of focus, I wanted to use to to keep a diary of how my skills improve over the year.

Week 3: Rule of Thirds

Week 3/52: Rule of Thirds. This one was a bit challenging. I had never heard of this before so I did lots of Googling. I think I captured the essence of the theme. I set the camera on my phone up with the grid to make it easier to remember to try and use it.

I started this project wanting to use my camera more but with the weather in Wisconsin being rainy, grey and foggy for the past week I had to snap a picture whenever I could and this week it was with my phone.

Milwaukee River, looking south

This photo was taken from the foot bridge over the Milwaukee River looking south towards the city. I love being along the river and thought the frozen river with the boats on one side and the tall, Milwaukee Center building on the other side looked interesting.

Week 2: From Above

This week's theme in the Everyday Eyecandy Project 52 is From Above.

I had all sorts of ideas on what I wanted to do but time and weather had other ideas. I wanted to go out to Seven Bridges and shoot the creek from one of the bridges. Another idea was to use the marsupial bridge over 794 and get a picture of the traffic.  Sadly, neither of those happened.

I was kinda starting to stress about it by Thursday and pulled out one of my coloring books and pencils. I spent an hour relaxing and coloring while watching tv. I had left everything on a tray when I was done. Friday morning, the light in the living room was pretty good and I thought what the heck.I will take a picture of the mandala I colored. It was pretty and colorful and I basically had no other ideas.

This was my original picture

I used my phone to take a bunch of pictures and I set the focus at different spots to see how they would look. I liked how when the focus was set to the pencils the mandala kinda blurred. When getting ready to post it on Instagram, IG always ties to crop the picture for you and it was then that I noticed the details of the pencils really came through. I like how you could see the grain of the wood in the pencils. So I went back to that photo and used my phone to crop the picture the way I liked it. I posted it to Instagram and the facebook group as is. I didn't use any other filtering or editing other than to crop it.

This was the final result.

While it was not the picture I wanted I was happy with the result.

Next week (which is really this week) is the Rule of Thirds.

Everyday Eyecandy Project 52

Last summer, I finally bought a decent camera. The Canon Rebel T5. It is nothing fancy but it is way better than using my phone to capture things. I have played around with it a bit here and there but still not totally familiar with how to use it.

My friend, Jenn, sent me a link to a a year long photography project called Eyecandy Project 52. I liked this concept as it is once a week vs every day. Each week has a theme and you have the entire week to take your picture and upload it to the facebook group and other social media outlets.

I'm going to try to capture my pictures here each week as well as Instagram.

The theme this week is Me:At the beginning.

While most of the group, so far, has taken selfies. I wanted one that captured me on the first day of 2017. Doing something I, for the most part, love doing, running.

This photo was taken of me after finishing the Polar Bear Dash 5k in South Milwaukee on New Year's Day. The sky and the lake were such a brilliant blue and it looked so pretty with the sun shining. I knew I wanted that as my background. I suck at taking selfies so I had my gym pal, Maura, take the photo of me.




Next week's theme is From Above. I have a couple of ideas for this one but it will require the weather behaving.