Weekly Photo Challenge: Today

When I saw the email about this week’s WordPress Photo Challenge, I thought the write-up about it makes a great point on photo challenge submissions. I have a pet peeve about that, which I will most likely elaborate on in future post. But for now, I’ll share the photo I shot and am submitting to the photo challenge.

060112 Today photo challenge

I was in a meeting and didn’t have my camera on me when I saw the post. Then it was one of those CrAzY Fridays at work where you’re frantically trying to get stuff done so you don’t have to bring work home with you over the weekend. (Which probably means I shouldn’t be taking the time to write this blog post, but I was eager to get my photo up).

At about 1:30, when I finally decided that I better grab some lunch, since I skipped breakfast and didn’t want to get sick before dinner, I headed out to grab some food. I decided to bring my trusty GoPro along to get a shot that I’ve been thinking of taking for a few weeks now. Carpe Diem!

I put back the sunroof, set the camera to take one photo every .5 seconds, and held it outside of the car. I didn’t expect to get so much of a reflection in the windshield, but I liked the final result. One that I really liked was of a cross walk directly in frontĀ of the car, and perfectly reflected in the windshield, but the camera was off-kilter (that’s what happens when you’re driving and photographing at the same time).

So that’s my shot. I’ll rant about my photo challenge submission pet peeves later!

~signed, Carltonaut

CTE Weekly Photo Challenge: I is for Ice

I have a 40-minute commute to work. Yesterday, I was sweating bullets on my drive in. Not because of traffic or the icy roads, but because there was a little piece of ice on my windshield that I wanted to photograph, but didn’t dare while traveling 60 mph on the freeway – and I was running a little late and didn’t have time to pull over.

The piece of ice was about the size of a quarter, but it was in the shape of a falcon. I kept imagining what the finished photo would like like, and what camera settings would be required to achieve those results. But why was this causing me to sweat bullets? Because as we all know, ice melts. I was determined to not use the windshield wipers for fear of killing my photo idea.

But if you’ve scrolled down to see the photo, you’ll notice there is no ice falcon there. While driving near a semi, the mist churned up by its tires covered my windshield, forcing me to use the wipers and destroying my masterpiece (dramatic, I know). I was only 10 minutes away from my destination, so I started looking at other parts of my car to capture a photo of ice for this week’s CTE photo challenge on the letter I.

When I finally arrived at work, I crawled into the back seat of the car, switched to my 50mm lens, played with the aperture, testing a few settings from f/1.8 to f/3.5. I was fairly pleased with the final outcome, but I really wanted that ice falcon from my windshield.

030212 CTE Ice Photo

Canon 60D | 50mm lens | 1/800 | f/3.5 | ISO 100

~signed, Carltonaut