Thursday, February 24, 2011

50/50/50


50 on day 50 with 50mm --- I will upload them about 5 at a time to not overwhelm my photostream

On February 19th the 50th day of the year was upon us.  Last year I read a blogpost about 50 photos on the 50th day of the year with a 50mm lens on iffles.com.  Last year I was planning on doing this project and I ended up being sick for a week.  This year I was ready and I got out there and shot away.



It was a nice day out for a walk but the wind was kicking. It made it rather difficult to keep some of the shots steady. I started out knowing that I have two 50mm om lenses. I figured I would have one with an extension tube attached and one without. This would allow for a lot more flexibility in my shooting. On a photowalk through the woods you just never know what you will come across and considering my focal length was already limited by using one focal length i figured I needed a much flexibility as I could get. I also knew that I probably wouldn't get all the needed shots on this walk so I had planned for some other shots later in the day. My plans for later in the day fell through but I still ended up shooting some shots around the house later that day. Some of which are of family and some of which I use my home made lightbox.

I ended up taking 179 exposures that day, some of which were duplicates to adjust settings, focus, or composition. After I downloaded them to my computer I went through them and rated them. I had some specific ideas for some of them and some of them were obvious winners. Out of all of the shots I quickly pared them down to about 20 or so that I felt proud of. Well there was a problem, I needed to be able to post 50, no more no less. I went through again and found about 15 more that I could work with. Wow, at this point I'm starting to worry that I may not be able to pull this off. I mean I really want to post my best work and show that I'm growing as a photographer. After thinking about it for a bit I decided some might not be my best but they are part of the project as well. I got creative with a few shots and then found a few more that I wouldn't normally post but in the name of the project they were shots taken on the 50th day of the year with my 50mm.

This project was supposed top be a quick but fun project and it was but it was a little hard than I thought.
Now I had my 50 shots but I seldom post any of my work without at least some minor post processing. Off to the gimp I go... gimp is my photo editor. Some of my shots I had earmarked for HDR (which from what I understand would actually be LDR due to it being processed from one RAW file), some were panoramics. I had more than one ideas for some of the photos and I figured that still works for my purposes of the project. For one of my panoramics I took 21 photos (3 high and 7 across), then I used hugin in order to stitch them together, it did a very nice job. Then some minor edits in gimp to finish it off. Then I had a really cool idea! I figured why not take all the RAW files for those 21 photos and create multiple exposures (7 exposures) of each to create a pano for each exposure. Then I used qtpfsgui to create a very big hdr panoramic hybrid. I went to bed about 4 hours into the process so I can't tell you how long it took but it wasn't quick. All in all I think it was a successful project, I got some good images and another learning experience. I will be uploading them about 5 at a time so keep checking back. I hope you like my photos and as always constructive criticism is always nice.

You can see all of the images that I have uploaded in my 50/50/50 set on flickr.

If you did a 50/50/50 project or have any other cool project ideas let me know in the comments.
DM|ZE Check out my flickr
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2 comments:

  1. I found the 50@50 project a lot harder than I expected, too. It makes me excited for next year, though.

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  2. I really enjoyed it though, a nice quick project that really pushes you. Can't wait to try again next year. Remember to keep checking back, I'm uploading 5 a day.

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