Category Archives: WordPress Photo Challenge

Macro, WordPress Photo Challenge

Weekly Photo Challenge: Unique

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I bought a 24-pack of Crayola crayons a while back with the intent of taking a photo set up something like the photo below. But life tends to get away from me often and I don’t have time to really setup as many shots as I have planned. So when I saw the Daily Post at WordPress.com’s Weekly Photo Challenge, I figured I could alter my initial idea to make something… unique.

Crayola Colors

Canon 60D | 100mm Macro | 1/40 | f/5.0 | ISO 400 | RAW

I felt that keeping one crayon away from the crowd would be more unique than the uniformity of a circle. But I captured a photo of the circle, too, if you want to check it out.

The colors of Crayola, combined with the colors Canon can capture made for a great photo. Your thoughts?

~signed, Carltonaut

WordPress Photo Challenge

Weekly Photo Challenge: Love (Wedding Band)

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With Valentines Day just around the corner, it was pretty fitting for The Daily Post at WordPress.com to make the Weekly Photo Challenge topic Love. I would have enjoyed capturing some photos of my wife and I together for love, but she’s gonna be in Houston for a few more weeks so that wasn’t an option.

As a Pinner, I have seen a few variations on this photo and thought I could capture it using my wedding band and one of my favorite scriptures about love.

Wedding Band Shadow Heart

Ephesians 5: 25 Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it;

My biggest challenge in taking the photo was fighting with the light glare off of the page. There was no angle that would offer me the heart shadow the way I wanted it without making a bad glare that was pretty distracting in the photo.

My wife will probably never read this, but I couldn’t end without saying that she is the love of my life, and I hope this photo conveys the love I have for her.

~signed, Carltonaut

People, Travel, WordPress Photo Challenge

Weekly Photo Challenge: Beyond (the lollipop)

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I learned about this week’s The Daily Post at WordPress.com’s Weekly Photo Challenge before I packed my kids and I up for a trip to Houston, Texas. So as we spent the weekend with my wife checking out parts of Houston, I was looking for a fun capture for BEYOND.

The moment came when my daughter was enthralled with the size of her lollipop. I think it’s every kids dream to get a lollipop this big – and it makes it difficult to look BEYOND the lollipop to see what else is going on around you.

Big eyes and a big lollipop

Canon 60D | 18-135mm lens | 1/640 | f/16 | ISO 2000

(NOTE: I am not sure why my camera was set at ISO 2000. I guess that explains some of the graininess I’m seeing in the photo.)

After some fun checking out the Downtown Aquarium in Houston (including two rides on the Shark Voyage Train), we took a breather to grab a snack. This was her snack. I wish I would have been that excited about the large pretzel my wife and I got to share.

~signed, Carltonaut

WordPress Photo Challenge

Weekly Photo Challenge: Illumination

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I had thought about doing a photo like this a week ago as my now 10-year-old son was putting together the 3D puzzle he received from Santa last month. But it was the Daily Post at WordPress.com’s weekly photo challenge topic – Illumination – that drove me that final step of making it happen.

Illuminated Globe Puzzle

Canon 60D | 18-135mm lens | 1/6 | f/4.5 | ISO 200 | RAW

I was nervous taking my son’s puzzle apart just enough to fit in my LED Flashmate with it set to full power. I wasn’t really sure how much the light would make it through the seams of the puzzle, but I was pleasantly surprised. My kids even thought it was pretty cool to look it and made for some great photos.

And just like my tag line says, “Photos of – and out of – this world!”

~signed, Carltonaut

Just for fun, WordPress Photo Challenge

Weekly Photo Challenge: Green-Part II

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You know what they say about the green ones? Well, without getting into that in this blog post, I’ll leave it at that and share the photo of some deliciously green M&Ms… (yummy)! Oh….and camera settings, too.

111912 Green MMs

Canon 60D | 50mm lens | 1/25 | f/1.8 | ISO 400 | Flashmate F-198 LED Light | RAW

I was excited to try out my new LED light in a photo tonight, so I gave some M&Ms a go since the WordPress Daily Post Weekly Photo Challenge was green. I should have bought the holiday M&Ms because then it would have been simple to sort out the green ones. Instead, I bought a large Costco-sized bag and then spent 20 minutes sorting out the green ones.

I piled the M&Ms on a black cloth and set my new LED light, pointing it to the ceiling so I didn’t have too much of a glare on the candy itself. I shot in RAW so I could make some adjustments afterward. After taking two dozen shots from different angles, using different exposures, apertures and light intensities, I settled on the last shot I shared above.

I look forward to shooting many more photos with my new LED light. One I am really looking forward to is one of my six-year-old daughter in my wife’s wedding dress. I’m hoping to get that this weekend. Any pointers on how to make that a shot to remember?

~signed, Carltonaut

Black & White, HDR, WordPress Photo Challenge

Weekly Photo Challenge: Green

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Moments after learning about this week’s Weekly Photo Challenge, I was in my car heading to a meeting in downtown Salt Lake City. As usual, I had my camera bag in the back seat, so once my meeting concluded, I took a short walk around Temple Square, shooting things that were green.

My initial idea was to get a great shot of a traffic light sporting some green, but I saw so many other cool shots of green, that I ended up with more than just traffic lights.

111812 WPC-Green

During my quick excursion, I had my 55-200mm lens hooked up so I could get close enough to objects without standing in the middle of the road. I put my camera on AV (aperture priority) so I could have better say in the depth of field.

For a couple of the shots, I tried bracketing a series of three photos so I could merge them together using Photomatix and capture a better dynamic range. Of the four photos above, can you guess which two are HDR? The traffic light, along with the white snow melting in patches to reveal the green grass below.

For the traffic light photo, I converted the three bracketed photos to a single HDR photo, converted it to Black and White using photo shop, then imported the photo in color and used that to make the green light green. I felt that offered more contrast to help the green light pop out a little better.

Green lent itself to so many options, and I still have another idea up my sleeve, which I will probably photograph later today and share tomorrow. Stay tuned for that one.

~signed, Carltonaut

People, Travel, WordPress Photo Challenge

Weekly Photo Challenge: Silhouette

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Earlier today, my family and I returned home following one of the best family vacations we have had in a long time. Tomorrow morning I get to go back to work and play catch up on the six business days I missed while playing in San Francisco, Disneyland, Cars Land, California Adventure, LegoLand, San Diego and St. George.

As expected, I carried my camera with me everywhere I went. Okay. I’ll be honest. I carried as many as three cameras with me – my Canon 60D, my GoPro HD Hero 2, and my iPhone. What made this vacation so different from all the others we’ve taken, is that when we got home, my kids and gorgeous wife were in 90% of the photos I shot. Usually I have a bazillion “artistic” shots on my SD cards, but not this time. And you know what? I was okay with this.

Wifi at the hotels was pretty hit and miss. I didn’t want to have to pay for it. This prevented me from sharing many of my hi-res photos during the trip, but allowed me to focus on having a great time with my family. With my iPhone, I was able to check my email and saw the Daily Post at WordPress.com’s weekly photo challenge topic – Silhouette. A trip to a San Franciscan beach gave me the perfect opportunity to meet this challenge, and I am very excited with the final outcome.

E-Beach-Silhouette-5x7

Canon 60D | 18-135mm lens | 1/1000 | f/11 | ISO 200

I am strongly considering printing this as a 16×20 canvas printing and hanging it in my daughter’s bedroom. I think this simple photo highlights the innocence and freeness of childhood, with the beauty and splendor of the beach. My daughter loves the beach and collecting shells. This beach yielded a few dozen sand dollars – perfect and unbroken. I have another photo to share in a subsequent blog post, but for now, I share this for silhouette.

~signed, Carltonaut

GoPro, WordPress Photo Challenge

Weekly Photo Challenge: Everyday Life

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How many days do you hop in the car and drive somewhere? Is it to or from work? The grocery store? The gas station? The movie theater? School? Chances are, most people’s lives involve driving, either directly or indirectly.

With those thoughts in mind, I share this photo with you as part of the Daily Post at WordPress.com Weekly Photo Challenge – Everyday Life.

091812 Everyday Life

I really don’t have any specs to share on the photo (aperture, shutter speed, focal length, etc.) because I simply opened up my sun roof, held my GoPro above the car and let it snap a few dozen photos. Yes, I was driving on a one-way street in downtown Salt Lake City at the time and was convinced that drivers around me were giving me weird looks. But I promise I stayed in my lane, used my blinkers as needed, and made it safely to my destination. Oh, I hope I didn’t jinx myself for my next drive in the car!

~signed, Carltonaut

Just for fun, WordPress Photo Challenge

Weekly Photo Challenge: Near and Far

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The concept Near and Far in photography easily lends itself to using a low depth of field in order to distinguish between the near and the far. So when I set out to meet the Daily Post at WordPress.com’s Weekly Photo Challenge head on, I slapped on my Canon 50mm 1:1.8 II lens, set the camera to aperture priority (AV), and headed outside just before the sun peaked out from behind the Rocky Mountains.

091012 Red Hydrant

Canon 60D | 50mm lens | 1/100 | f/1.8 | ISO 200 (adjusted levels and cropped to 5×7)

Near to the camera is the bright red fire hydrant. Far from the camera is the house that this little hydrant has sworn to protect. If the house caught on fire, these two objects would become fast friends, and the fire fighters would be the glue that would hook them together.

I also chose the red fire hydrant because it’s rivalry week here in Utah and I wanted to express my true color - Crimson. If you follow college football in Utah, you’ll understand the reference. Go UTES! :-)

~signed, Carltonaut

GoPro, WordPress Photo Challenge

Weekly Photo Challenge: Free Spirit

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I must confess that the idea for this photo came from my wife. When I read the challenge on Friday, I wasn’t sure what I could do and thought I would end up spending a lot of time thinking, or even over-thinking, the challenge. But when I mentioned it to my lovely wife, she pointed out that we were going kayaking the next day, which could be a great representation of the Free Spirit photo challenge.

090112 Free Spirit Kayaking

Although I would have loved to take my Canon 60D out on the kayak with me, my nightmare of losing the camera into the water got the better of me. But, I had my GoPro, dive housing and a 16 GB SD card, so I headed out on the lake.

After getting out into the water, I took a few shots from under the water – but worried that the green, murky water didn’t bode well for a great photo, so I took some shots from the surface, capturing the kayak on the water, with the stark contrast of the white clouds and blue sky above. I wish I had a floating contraption that would have allowed me to not stretch out my arm and have it be that awkward part of the photo, but I made do with what I had.

Once I got home and surveyed the photos, I found the one above and brought it into Photoshop. I made some minor adjustments to the levels, and thought I would also make some adjustments to the saturation – just to give it a slightly different look. I thought a lens flare would look good on the photo, but then my purist thoughts got the better of me. I didn’t want to doctor the photo and add elements I hadn’t captured in the shot.

As for the free spirit part of the photo… I love kayaking. I love paddling my way out onto a lake, setting the paddle across the cockpit and floating there on the water. It is a great way to escape from the hussle and bussle of life and simply enjoy nature. Regardless of how rough the lake water is, I enjoy getting away from shore.

With Labor Day marking the unofficial end of summer, I am not sure how many more kayaing trips my family and I will be able to get in before things start to get a little chilly and eventually ice over, but for a Labor Day weekend, it was a great end to the summer vacations!

~signed, Carltonaut