Candlelight

Day 29. The letter C (1/14).

Is candlelight one word, or two? Two! Portmanteaus are a fantastic feature of the English language. I was having a conversation with some Korean coworkers about the lexical complexities of the language as compared to Korean and… this has nothing to do with the image.

Basically, I’m tired. I’m tired, and I need to give this project a boost. Finding a bajillion votive candles in a cupboard in my apartment from the previous occupant, putting them on the floor, and taking a picture of them does not constitute “expanding and testing my creative photography.”

Anyway, that’s what I did: threw down a ton of votives, lit ’em, and took a picture. The reflection you see is from my hardwood floor. Kaboom. Not a great way to start off my third letter.

Bacon

Letter B, day 14/14, 28/365

This is not bacon. This is “Korean bacon” also known as samgyeopsal (삼겹살). This basically means “three layer meat.” The name is apt because this cut of pork is supposed to have meat, fat, meat, fat, meat, and fat.

The fattiness of this meat is a virtue, though. Truly; for the grease filters down across the domed grill you see here, then through the kimchi, mushrooms, and bean sprouts grilling alongside it. My favorite way to eat this meal: take a piece of meat, smear it around in a mixture of oil, salt, and pepper, then wrap it in grilled kimchi and top it with a slice of grilled garlic.

So, so good.

By the way, pictures on this blog will be mediocre until I’ve recovered creatively from Cambodia. I’ve got some ideas in mind. Send me your C prompts, folks! I’ve got a fair number, but as I expected, interest in my project is waning and thus I receive fewer suggestions. I hope that changes soon.

Bricks

Letter B, day 13/14, 27/365

Lieutenant Chan Ya-Zhi grinned as his BJ212 utility vehicle sped toward the capitalist pigs’ position at the base of the hill. Fierce, hot desert sand hissed like snakes beneath the vehicle’s tires. Hot grit flew in Chan’s eyes.

Glory to the Motherland!

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You might wonder why I’ve made a picture of what seems like Chinese PLAGF forces made of Legos. It all started with a trip to El-Mart.

I went to El-Mart to find some balls. I wanted to find some to do something creative with for a picture. As I walked through the toy section, I found this:

I started to pull out my ever-present Lumix LX3 to snap a picture of this hilarious Lego knockoff, when I noticed the name: Brick. Hey, Brick starts with B, and I love Legos. I couldn’t pass this up. I immediately bought two sets.

The Century Military Enlighten Brick Play Set comes with instructions to build a jeep-like vehicle and two soldiers. I used one set to build the jeep and the other to build an outpost of my own creation. As an avid Lego builder in my youth, I found these knockoffs to very closely model the real deal. I believe the manufacturer directly copied certain lego sets, adding decals appropriate for a proud, prosperous, great socialist nation. The officers come complete with rank tabs on the collars, and red stars on their belt buckles and hats.

To create the scene at the beginning of the post, I threw a beige towel down over some pillows and arranged the models. Above them at a slight angle is my SB-26 through a softbox. In order to ensure the models were also visible from the side, I threw an SB-26 behind a white t-shirt camera right and back a bit.

To light the box, I used an old, somewhat crappy macro box I created. It is simply a cardboard box whose sides have been cut away, with a white t-shirt lining the inside of box and covering the aforementioned holes. Strobes are placed outside the box’s holes, passing through the shirt for even, white light. I could make a much better box, but I haven’t the need.

The toys themselves are as you’d expect, quality-wise: somewhat poorly made and smelling of chemicals, perhaps petroleum products.

I can’t wait to buy more and play with them.

Borders – Cambodia – Six Images

For this post, I begin with text, because it will be quite image-heavy. As mentioned before I departed for the Kingdom of Wonder, I intended to choose a post from each day I spent away from Korea to use for that day’s entry in this project. Of course, I knew I would take a bajillion pictures over the course of the trip, so that presented no problem.

What posed a problem, was that I knew there wasn’t a really practical method for receiving, choosing, and making a picture for various B-related prompts while travelling. Plus, I just didn’t want the hassle on what was ostensibly my vacation.

I chose to take an easy way out, and went with what was suggested to me by Rachel Sanchez, a colleague of mine from graduate school: borders. Now, I could have been super creative, but like I wrote, I wanted this to really be a vacation. Thus I decided that every picture taken on this trip would more or less qualify as fitting into the concept of borders, although that didn’t stop me from occasionally shooting with that specific idea in mind.

Travelling, as those of you who have done so know, is all about crossing borders. Whether you travel in your home country and pass between municipalities, provinces, states, or regions, you experience borders whether you’d like to or not. Borders come in the form of people; through emotions, speech, and ideas; through places, environments, and geography; through gastronomy, aural and olfactory perception; through everything that is different.

Thus I present six images from my trip. They’re not all great, but they reflect my trip well. Please check this Flickr set to see the rest of my Cambodia images as I edit them and upload them.

Now, get out there and travel!

Day 1: Ting and a bowl of pho: Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam

Day 2: $.50 Anchor draft beer and a map of Angkorian temples

Day 3: Light and shadow inside Angkor Wat

Day 4: Lines and reflection at Preah Neak Pean

Day 5: The lonely tractor – along a canal leading into Tonle Sap Lake through the Submerged Forest

Day 6: Early morning sun and clouds over marshes near Tonle Sap Lake

Annyeong!

I wish I was shooting C this week, because my flight leaves for Cambodia in less than 12 hours. Unfortunately, I left right after work for Ting’s house, and that means I don’t get to post a picture.

So, when I return on Monday the 27th, I will do one giant post with 7 pictures. I will attempt to stick to B suggestions throughout the trip, but I sure as hell am not going to exclusively take pictures for this blog. I will, though, be thinking of my own B prompts to shoot.

I’ve brought a flimsy, 10,000KRW tripod, my 17-50 f/2.8 (which I imagine most of my shots will be taken with), my 11-16 f/2.8, and my 85 f/1.4.

Anyway, please don’t forget about my little blog while I’m away. I promise to come back with something interesting.

To those in Korea, happy Chuseok! To those elsewhere… have a nice week!

Brobdingnagian

Letter B, day 6/14, 20/365

When Gulliver found himself in the Brobdingnagians’ homeland, he found two things: civilized folks, and giant, killer pests. He put the latter to the sword and gave the former conversation.

I imagine a Brobdingnagian would see our cities as something like this: mere models, waiting to be crushed underfoot. Supposedly, though, the Brobdingnagians were a civil bunch.

Tonight I’ve been prepping for my trip to Cambodia. Ting and I leave in less than 36 hours. As it’s been raining all day, this was the only thing I could think of amongst the prompts I have available.

This technique is called tilt-shift photography, although this effect is faked in Photoshop. The real deal requires a technologically advanced and kind of crazy looking lens. I can’t tell the difference between the fakes and the real deal, so who cares, right?

If you’d like to try your hand at tilt-shift photography, follow this tutorial. For some reason, the author of the tutorial suggests finding pictures on Flickr to use, but I suggest taking your own. If you do use someone else’s photograph to try this technique out on, don’t post it, or if you do, don’t forget attribution.

Now, to bed!

Baseball

Letter B, day 5/14, 19/365

Baseball. As American as apple pie, talk radio, and light beer. Baseball in Korea, though… It’s a different beast altogether.

Korean baseball is fun. There are scantily-clad cheerleaders, men walking through the crowd with tanks of beer strapped to their backs, and squid snacks.

I took a lot of pictures today at the Kia Tigers vs. LG Twins game. Yes, teams are sponsored by huge, multinational corporations. (One fight song goes like this: “기아 없어는 못 살아,” reapeated. It means “(I) Can’t live without Kia.” People lovingly chant it to a tune.) I didn’t know which picture to use, so I chose this one, simply because I was the tiniest bit tricky with it.

Let’s say you have a brightly lit scene for a background, and something much less well-lit in the foreground (your subject). How do you get them both exposed properly?

Your first step should be to manually expose for the ambient background light. Then, whether you are using your onboard flash or a unit attached to the hotshoe, dial the flash’s power down and take some shots, adjusting the flash’s power until you get something that looks about right. Your camera’s shutter speed and aperture should be exposing your brightly-lit background in a way that would normally leave your subject dark, but the flash should take care of that.

And there you go!

It’s a delicious idea.

Strobist:

SB-600 on camera, powered down about a stop and a third.

p.s. Here’s a picture of the Kia Tigers’ noisemaking slappy-balloon-things.

Blurg

Letter B, day 4/14, 18/365

This one is all about processing.

Take a shakeyface photo with a flash. I used a ring flash. I took the photo up on my roof where the sky still looked a little neat.

Tweak the colors in Lightroom. Depending on the shot’s lighting, boost orange-y tones a bit, and lavender tones a bit more. Reduce the vibrance a lot and boost the saturation abit. Add grain – chunky grain. Slap on a gnarly vignette.  Finally, square crop it.

Open Photoshop and throw down a rectangular, rounded-corner rectangle. Add a drop shadow, fairly tight, and an inner shadow, fairly massive and transparent. Also give it a brownish and mostly transparent inner glow to give it that dirty, faded look. Write something on the label part of the polaroid. Use a huge eraser with a hardness of 0 to fade the ink of your text a bit.

Throw on your photo. Resize to fit. If you like, add some grime with a faux-finish brush of some sort, high transparency, brown.

Done.

When Jim Haendiges sent in the word “blurg” as his suggestion, I immediately envisioned a shakeyface shot. Since I had relatively little time and not very many interesting shots possible tonight, I went for it. I felt simply throwing up a shakeyface was kind of a cop out, so I decided to do it up quickly in Photoshop to resemble a polaroid.

Happy Friday out there, and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.

Time for some beers.

Strobist:

SB-600 TTL’d through a cheapo tack-on ring flash.

Balloons

Letter B, day 3/14, 17/365

I thought taking an interesting picture of balloons would be easy. Turns out, no photograph is easy when your window is a few minutes after work.

I had some help on this with my coworker, Elyse Canfield. She is also a photographer from the northwestern U.S.

My original idea was to blow up a ton of balloons and layer the roof of my building with them, with a string of christmas lights underneath, lighting them. Of course, I didn’t have enough balloons. I didn’t have an available outlet for the lights. Wind was blowing, threatening to carry off my balloons or pop them. Sigh.

So I piled all of the balloons in the corner over a Flashwaves’d SB-600 while Elyse held an SB-26 over my head. I snapped off a couple of shots before the sunset completely died over Gangdong-gu, Seoul.

A little color-boosting processing and cropping later, and you have this. A… pile… of balloons… on a rooftop.

I really don’t know.

Strobist:

SB-26 high camera right, bare. SB-600 under the balloon pile, bare.

Bubbles – Success!

These are two redos from the bubbles prompt. This time, instead of thinking so hard about lights, new techniques, blah blah blah… I just went out on a sunny lunch break, spent 3,000KRW on bubble stuff, and took some pictures in the park.

I enlisted the help of my female coworkers who really enjoyed the idea of playing with bubbles. All of them enjoyed themselves, but Elyse’s photos turned out the best. I went a little crazy with the processing, especially on the second shot.

For the first frame, I stuck with the always useful Tamron 17-50 f/2.8, and got right up in the bubble’s grill. Processing with some greenish-blue highlights and orangey shadows while reducing saturation and upping vibrance gave the frame a slightly aged look. I also cranked it wide open and let the bokeh from the sunlight through leaves heighten the bubble idea.

For the second frame, I was using the 85mm f/1.4D Cream Machine. The bokeh produced by this beast is incredible, so I felt creamy, cold tones were appropriate.