Not original I know, but I've seen enough people singing the praises of attempting to take and post a photo daily, to give it a go myself. I'm covering several groups, facebook, flickr, a blog on tumblr which I'll eventually link back to my photography site if it actually works, and here. Hopefully it'll get some interesting critiques and discussions going to help me improve my game, as well as others.


Daily Photo Project - Day 1: Cotton buds by Chris_Moody, on Flickr

The first photo in a project with the aims of taking and posting a photo, daily, for as long as I can, hopefully learning tips and techniques along the way.

Comments and critique are welcomed.

Subject:
Cotton Buds lit from behind.

Equipment:
Cotton buds (Q-tips)
Canon EOS 7D
Canon 100mm EF f2.8 Macro Lens
Manfrotto 190XPROB Tripod with 494RC2 Head
Fa&Mi Evo 50 LED Diving Torch
Generic 3rd party Radio control shutter release

Description:
A few days ago I decided to try a daily photo project, but it wasn't until today that I managed to kick it off.

I think a weakness of mine is an almost lazy attitude to actually get off my backside and take photos, so hopefully this'll help.

So today, whilst in the bathroom, I saw a box of cotton buds on the window, and wondered what they'd look like with some random lighting thrown into the mix, I didn't know whether they might have some kind of fibre-optic properties.

The first challenge was setting up the shot. I don't have a studio, or any cloth to use as a backing. The cotton buds were in a transparent box, but I wanted them out of the box.

I ended up taking the buds out of the box, and using a battery and a small box, wedged the buds in the gap created by the battery and box one by one, stacking them till I had enough to fill the frame.

This was done on my upstairs ballustrade, as the only alternative was carrying everything downstairs to the dining room (see, I'm lazy).

Next I set the camera up on the tripod. I used live view zoomed in 10x and manual focus to ensure I had what I wanted in focus.

I opted to angle the frame slightly, so the tips weren't quite parallel to the lens.

I used f8 in Av Priority mode for the shot. I took several with the lightsource (a handheld high-power dive torch) at various angles.

Post processing:
Another problem I have is a tendency to post process a bit too much. I'm trying to cut this out, but it's tough. The original unaltered image was ok on its own, but I decided to tweak the brightness, contrast, and blacks in Adobe Camera Raw 5.1. I also altered the White balance from the 5200 setting the camera chose (AWB) to 5000, which got rid of a slightly warm hue.

So that's it for today. This is my first post, hopefully in time I'll learn to write much more informative and interesting posts, so please, any feedback, comments, suggestions etc are more than welcome!

It's coming...I made the mistake of uploading all the photos I took on todays mission, and on my connection it's painfully slow...

Today I set out into the forest to try and find cool mushrooms, it's the right time of the year. I've yet to identify any of them, or have them identified in most cases, but I'm pretty sure I found at least 20 species, if not 25+ I opted for the below photo for todays entry.


E5 - Daily photo project. by Chris_Moody, on Flickr

Day 2 of a daily photo project.

Today I decided to try and hunt some mushrooms in the forest. These 2 beasts were on the side of the road of all places.

I decided to go for f8, I could have gone smaller to get a bigger Depth of focus to get both mushrooms in focus, but even with the tripod the breeze would have given less than sharp results. Instead f8 gave optimum sharpness, with nice semi-out of focus bokeh for the mushroom in the background.

I actually managed to avoid heavily post processing most of the photos I took today, with only very minor tweaks to blacks and contrast.

Any critiques and comments are as always welcome.

EDIT:
Oh, and there'll be a mushroom thread later with all the different species (once they've uploaded!)

I probably wouldn't have an issue with contributing to it in some way. Photo of the day would be tricky, would aim for photo of the week or month. Could do a weekly comp with an end of month face off. Then at the end of the year could have a face off of those winners too.

The whole site will never be able to compare for a long time your right. Not the goal. It will be...

- I got this camera, this is the pictures I took, this is my level of skill, this is the gripes I had of it, I like these things, this is what I thought, I will give it 4 bananas.

It will come through when people search google about that camera and they will read the review, hopefully want to leave a comment or ask a question, sign up etc.

Didn't keep up with this one for long

Maybe once a week is better, at least then it gives you some time to think about what to take a photo of.. rather than taking a lot of photos of stuff, just to take a photo, which is the way so many of the 365s end up going...