Day 30

Title: Bright Night

One month down, eleven to go. I'm still excited, that's more photography in one month than I've ever done. I've been thinking a lot about the advantages of spontaneous versus premeditated shots. Sometimes I find myself sitting on a concept for a while before I actually shoot it, and it rarely turns out as well as I had envisioned. It's often the spontaneous shots that turn out the best. But you can't plan a spontaneous shot...I guess that's the point.

I think I'm waiting to take preplanned pictures until I get my new camera in working order (lenses should be coming soon). I've been really hurting myself, though, by not going out and taking pictures during the day. Lately, 4 o'clock will roll around before a single picture has been taken, and then I go to work until 11. When am I supposed to get a unique picture in? I've already taken several of the cafe, a million of crap around my house, and I'm getting bored with it. Maybe this will help motivate me to get out of my house for the summer and do some cool shit so I can make all of you a little happier by posting something easy on the eyes. This picture is the result of me putting off taking pictures today. I took my camera to work with me, and I was training someone (Miss Day 7), so i had some free time while she kept an eye on our tables. I took my camera out to the side patio, expecting to take some lame picture of the courthouse clock or something. Then I noticed that the nearly black sky (this was taken at about 8:50pm) had enough light that it turned a vibrant blue when I left the shutter open for a while. The composition isn't optimal, but I'm just amazed at how the dark dark sky transformed into this.

My current camera is kind of lame-o, and the sensor isn't great. It's a 4ish year old point-and-shoot, so I wouldn't expect much less. I do have to admit, though, that it's been great to me over the last several years. Regardless, the pictures it takes are usually dull with little saturation and contrast. Therefore, I tweak them just a little (typically just using Curves in Photoshop) until they look a little better. So far I've been doing the editing on my old laptop. I just recently acquired a new old computer, and my pictures look terrible on it. They look like they were drawn with a clown's facepaint. The screen colors are quite different from my laptop's, of that I'm sure (it's also an older CRT monitor). I'm not sure if my new monitor just has overly saturated colors, or if my laptop is just dull. If the latter is true, then I'm sorry to all of you that think my pictures look over-manipulated/mutilated.

They look good on this end, though.