I just thoght I would make a quick post to explain my absence. Well actually the ‘creative juices’ weren’t really flowing before this anyway. So taking another of my frquent breaks. I’m sure I will be back though 
hope everyone is having happy holidays.
I said when I started this there would be days I wouldn’t post a photo. Today is one of them. Happy Friday.
Click Image to Enlarge | Flickr
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
I spent the evening over at my parents place. My dad was putting new brakes on my car. These wrenches looked like a cool subject for a quick photo today. Thanks for helping me out Dad
I am excited to get started, again. As most anyone who will read this post knows, I completed a photo a day project in 2009. In 2010 I haven’t done much with my photography and I think it is, at least in part, due to the lack of structure. So I have decided to start the photo a day project back up again. With a few minor differences this time.
Also you may be wondering, where have all of the blog posts from the past ? They are still around, but I decided to start fresh with wordpress. I could have migrated the old posts into this new blog but doing that would have made me have to take that into consideration when selecting a theme. A task which is already enough of a hassle without having to think of what image sizes I have already posted and how they will interact with my new theme. So, that said, if you would still like to visit the old blog you can do so at oldblog.jeffgoldenphoto.com. I won’t be doing any new posts over there and I have turned off comments. It is just an archive. Additionally I plan to remove the main www.jeffgoldenphoto.com site and will consolidate everything here at blog.jeffgoldenphoto.
EDIT: I went ahead and moved the old posts over . You can see everything I have ever posted here on this blog.
I just took a look back to see when my first post on this blog was; it was December 19th 2008. I am a bit late for a birthday blog post but oh well I really didn’t get things rolling in earnest until the first of the year anyway with the photo a day project. But I thought this was as good of time as any to talk about my experiences with the project, the blog, photography and my plans for next year.
The photo a day project has been really great for me. I am sure, if you have been following me throughout the year, you have seen my excitement at the stuff I really liked, my struggles on days when I just didn’t feel it and everything in between. All in all, however, I have learned a tremendous amount about photography and all things related to it this year. I have made some great friends on flickr which I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to find otherwise and I have enjoyed the project a lot.
The project itself has ups and downs, as I am sure most endeavors like this do. The rules I imposed on myself were that I had to shoot, edit and upload the image on the same day each and every day of the year. This resulted in a lot of days, when I wasn’t super motivated, uploading images I wasn’t very proud of. But, other days, it resulted in me uploading some of what I consider my most creative work of the year because I looked, thought and tried until I got something interesting. Without the project I would have never done that.
That said, a year of this project is enough for me. I have developed a habit of taking photos with my camera. I have also developed a habit of mentally framing photos without it. These are good habits to have and will serve me well in 2010. My photography projects for 2010, one of which I have already talked about here, are: Holiday/This Day In History Photos and Seven A Week.
The Holiday/This Day In History project is a simple concept. On many or most days I will be posting a photograph that depicts, represents or otherwise is associated with events for that day in history or the Holiday associated with that day. The idea is that there isn’t a calendar day that doesn’t have a Holiday or some interesting event/fact associated with it. My project is to find those tidbits and make a photograph telling the story. My thoughts at this point are to find the obscure stuff; as I think it will be more fun and interesting. At this point though I don’t have any idea how I am going to setup these scenes or what I am going to do. Stay tuned and I hope you enjoy it. Also, feel free to join in the fun, I have setup a flickr group so that others who want to participate with me may do so. There is no obligation to do a photo on this theme each day or anything — just as often as you feel motivated to do it and it doesn’t require any special equipment. A point and shoot camera will be fine or even a cell phone cam. The point is to be creative not to make perfect photos.
The next project is a seven a week project. This group is really just an extension of my photo a day group from 2009. Many of the more active members of that group are participating in this one. I am excited that my friends from last year will be working on a project together again this year. I had sworn I wouldn’t do another 365 this year but the rules of this one are a little more palatable. Essentially I will need to take seven photos in a week. It doesn’t matter if they are all taken on Monday or if they are taken one a day or whatever. Just seven a week. I don’t intend to be as obsessive about this project. I will be posting them to the blog, of course, but I will not be numbering them and absolutely keeping track of the number posted or anything.
I also hope to be able to do a bit more work with portraits and maybe even second shooting a wedding or two. I would really like to get more experience with the wedding thing to see if it is something I would enjoy marketing and doing myself at some point. The portrait sessions I have done thus far have been a lot of fun. I find myself gaining a lot of confidence and I really enjoy the reactions of the ‘clients’ when they see what we were able to create together. To that end I have setup a proper website and pricing list. We shall see what 2010 brings on this front. I am under no delusion that I will be a full time professional photographer by the end of 2010 or anything. But I would really like the opportunity to explore this a little more.
Beyond the photography projects I intend to become more active and involved in social media. I have a twitter account that I actively post links to my photos, I do the same for facebook and I have this blog, obviously. But I don’t do much more than lurk beyond this. I am planning to pick out several relatively active blogs and become involved in the community on each of them. I am also planning to take my twittering to a new level and dedicate some time each day to reading, responding and re-tweeting. My objective here is to not just lurk and not just promote my own stuff but actually get involved with the communities.
I hope all of you who see this have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year . Please continue to follow my posts after the photo a day project is complete. I expect you will find I post slightly less often, still several times a week though, but I hope I make up for the less frequent posts with higher quality ones. Thanks again for reading this and for following me throughout the year it really helped to motivate me that people were looking at what I was doing even if many of you I didn’t know your name or anything about you.
Camera Model: Canon EOS 40D
Exposure: 0.001 sec (1/1000)
Aperture: f/4.0
Focal Length: 200 mm
ISO: 400
Another shot from the hayride with my wife’s side of the family last night.
Camera Model: Canon EOS 40D
Exposure: 0.004 sec (1/250)
Aperture: f/11.0
Focal Length: 50 mm
ISO: 100
Still on my random macro kick it seems. This is kind of silly, I know, but I have been thinking of photographing these since my kids got them. They are part of a toy bowling set. The pins stand about 1" high.
Lighting: Canon 580exii 1/16 – 0.7 through Opteka Inflatable Soft Box (yes, really) Triggered by Cybersync.
Large On Black (if you dare lol)
Getting the technical stuff out of the way first
Lighting: 580EXII camera right 1/128th power a about 3 feet from subject zoomed tight
Processing: Followed this guide and backed down the final result a bit.
Flickr has this ‘game’ that people play, actually I think version of it are played in tons of other social networks as well. Essentially the rules of the game are that, if you are tagged, you are to post a self portrait, list 15 things about yourself and tag three of your own contacts to do the same. adebⓞnd tagged me today with his self portrait. I am in turn tagging: wikenden, fleabo and Sue’s Stuff.
Without further ado… my 15 things….
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
1) I was tagged once before but blew it off like a fuddy duddy. Decided to give it a whirl this time.
2) I have been married since I was 21 to my wife who was only 18 at the time for 16 years. We have two children. Trevor is eight years old and stars in many of my photographs. Jeffrey is 12 and has been in a few photos as well; Jeffrey is autistic so his appearances in my photos are less frequent as he doesn’t like to cooperate.
3) I live within an approximately five minute drive of my parents.
4) I started with photography a little more than a year ago.
5) I have agreed to photograph a wedding in October of this year. I am very nervous about this.
6) I played MMORPG (Everquest, Dark Ages of Camelot & WOW) role playing games pretty consistently for approximately 6 years. I wish I had calculated all of the played time but it would probably just be scary to know that number; suffice it to say I played for an average of no less than 5 or 6 hours daily with times where I would literally be logged in for more than 24 hours at a time. I have found though that Flickr has cured me of this but I don’t spend much less time on here than I did on these games 
.
7) I am the biggest Apple ‘fanboi’ you will ever find.
Other than when I was a baby, and my father was stationed in Germany with the US Army, I have never traveled outside of the United States.
9) I watch entirely too much television. My current favorites are Dexter, on Showtime and True Blood on HBO. I also watch a lot of prime time drama style shows on network TV. It’s sad really.
10) I need to lose *A LOT* of weight, this is probably my biggest challenge. It is definitely something that is beyond ridiculous and why you will not see a self portrait of me that isn’t very creatively posed, cropped or framed to hide as much as I can.
11) I drink more Diet Coke & Diet Pepsi than any human being should. I suspect that if I were to stop the companies would feel the economic impact. So it is really for the good of the economy in general that I must press on
12) I never half do anything I care about. I am very binary in my thinking. I am either completely committed or do just enough to get by.
13) I hate — meaning can’t stand and it bugs me to death — any indication of unread status, email, etc… I literally have to stop what I am doing and check my email if there is a little number beside it indicating any unread messages. I am the same way with facebook notices or anything like it. If I see other people who have things in an unread state it really bothers me .
14) I love audio books and podcasts. I listen to them on my daily commute of 30 to 40 minutes each way to work.
15) I think of myself as a funny guy, though I know I am usually not very funny
This is another from our Deanna Rose Farm trip yesterday.
This is another set of these flowers, which I am told are called Cone Flowers, in a different area of Deanna Rose Farmstead. I posted another set of these earlier today.
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