just some fun

I can't believe it's been over a month since I updated the blog. Whoops. And, yes, I always say that. It's amazing how time just slips away. Anyway, here's just some shots for fun. This morning I was reading my friend's blog, Nicki's Thoughts, Art & Friends. She blogged about a photo prompt from Steve Gallow's blog, A Year in Photos. The photo prompt was to take a picture from inside your mailbox. Seeing as how I did a Project 366 last year and only blogged it four about four months, I think it's great that Steve is hanging in there. I grabbed my p&s, hit the self-timer and was in. So, thanks, Steve, for the inspiration to be posting again.

First attempt. The camera on auto, self-time for 10 seconds, and voila.



Tried it again, but didn't care for the neighbor's house. But I did like the off-center composition.




The girls saw what I was doing and wanted in on the action.



And thought I would try moving the camera to the front of the mailbox instead of the back of the mailbox. Yikes, that's a whole lot of my face!



I tried a few more but kept getting the neighbor's house in the background. It seemed that no matter how I angled the camera, it just kept popping up. It wasn't until I was looking at the pictures on my laptop that I realized the difference was where I was standing ... not the camera. The first snap was the only one where I was standing to the left side of the mailbox. After that I was always standing on the right. I thought about running back out and trying a few more from the left side but realized that since this was just for fun and I probably wasn't going to do anything else with these photos except post them here, decided it just wasn't worth the effort.

So, I went back to the first image, tried a square, off-center crop and ran an 'embossing' action in Photoshop to make it pop a bit more. Add a thin, black keyline and a white border and you get this:




Fuji FinePix F50fd
Shutter Speed: 1/530 s
Exposure Program: Normal Program
F-Stop: f 4.0
ISO: 200
Focal Length: 8.0 mm (35 mm)
Flash: Fired

You know, I suppose this didn't have to be a self-portrait. The two examples I saw were both self-portraits so that's what I had in my head. I suppose it could have just been a landscape but didn't think of that until this moment.