Things to Check Out While You’re Waiting For Me To Post Something!

*blows dust off blog*

Whew, it’s been a while! Despite being off college for the season, I’ve had plenty to keep me busy. Including an internship which has been kicking my ass for the past couple of months. But I’m pleased to tell you that it’s almost over… and (hopefully) I’ll be able to get back to normal postings around here!

But for now, I encourage you to check out some of my colleague’s blogs. You see, a lot of these pictures you see on this blog where assignment for a class I was taking. Other people in the class had blogs and posted up their pictures. So, chances are if you liked my pictures, you’ll like theirs too!

My Classmates’ Blogs

• Lynn Pictures
• Marcus Bowen’s Photo Blog (creative title, no?)
• Visual Voice: Perceptions of the Outside World
• far out, man… far out
• Lucas Wright Photography
• Mequi Zhang (in Chinese, but still some good stuff)

Hopefully that will hold you until we get back to a (slightly more) regular posting schedule. If that’s not enough, I’ve got some new stuff on my Soundcloud since my last post.

Also, I recently discovered turntable.fm recently, and it’s freakin’ awesome! You’ll probably see me lurking around, playing exclusive unreleased stuff I’m trying to crowd test, and other fun stuff. It’s currently Beta invite-only (ala Google+ with a twist) and you need a Facebook friend who’s has an account there to get access. But I’d try even if you think you don’t have one, you never know. I sure didn’t, and look at me!

Subject in Motion

Hey guys. Sorry for the loooooong hiatus. It’s not that I’ve run out of things to post about. (If you’ve been watching my Soundcloud or YouTube Channel, you’ll know that’s definitely not the case.) I just haven’t had time to post about them. It’s that point in a college semester when everything, and I do mean everything, starts coming to a head. Good news is summer is almost here…

While I get caught up on everything, (read: sleep) here’s a few pictures I took on one of my late night Whataburger Runs. A lot of these were my attempts to shoot cars with a slow shutter speed to get that cool light streak effect that’s sooooo cliche’ now, but I wanted to try and take some of my own.

Natural Light Portraits… eat it Edison!

I don’t take portraits often. I find that humans are less likely to want to have pictures taken of them than animals or inanimate landscapes. But I tried it this time, and I think they came out pretty good!

This is Julie Coppedge. She’s my co-host on the News at Noon on KACU-FM. She also didn’t mind taking a half hour out of her afternoon to let me shoot these pictures of her.  She’s a photographer herself, so maybe I’ll be able to return the favor one day… 😉

HDR To-Go

High Dynamic Range… isn’t it awesome? Maybe to look at, but it certainly takes a lot of work to pull off just right. Even now I see where I could meticulously edit this image pixel by pixel. But there comes a time when if you edit something further, you just end up making it look worse, I think I may have hit that here.

A New Way To View Photos on SMREOHC!

Holy blogosphere, Batman! It’s my 10th post! Sure this might not seem like a milestone, but when you consider that most blogs die out before their 10th post, you realize how glad I am to jump this hurdle. We’ve had our ups and downs, but overall it’s been quite a trip so far, with many great memories made and many still to come!

I’ve gotten a lot of feedback throughout these first couple of months running Sma Man’s Rambling Expirations of his Conscience. Luckily, none about the crazy name, which I’ll discuss in a later post, but instead, photo viewing.

Up until now, you either had to view the thumbnail with a magnifying glass, or click on it to enlarge it to it’s original size… at 4752 × 3168, which is still huge even in today’s hi-speed internet world. (Imagine trying to do that on a 28.8 modem… it would be an all-day event!)

Tilt-Shifting Up on the Roof

Sorry, this post has nothing to do with the James Taylor song “Up on the Roof.” The name only refers to the place where I took these pictures.

It seems as though I’ve stumbled into the wonderful world of tilt-shift, where anything can look kinda fake-ish or like some kind of concept architectural model… but that’s what’s cool about it!

The real cool thing about tilt-shift photo taking is that it gives you an excuse to get to the top of something, since you need a good high-angle. This time, that something was the roof of the Don Morris building at Abilene Christian University. My whole photography class was there with me. So, these aren’t just high angle photos in the gallery after the jump. They’re also photos of what happens when you put a small army of JMC majors on top of a roof… Enjoy!

Blu-o-tone

"We live in the city of dreams...."

Oh the photos you can shop… and the things you can do with them in said program! This demonstrates the fun that can be had with grayscaling and duotones. The best/worst part is there are soooo many ways you can tweak this to change the image coloring. Even now I’m thinking ways I could tweak this image…

This and the other images after the jump were taken on a scenic photoshoot just off E. Overland Trail here in Abilene, TX. It’s near the U.S. Postal Service’s sorting center for this area, and a Coca-Cola distribution plant. (Hence why you see a mail truck off to the left-ish.) I’d like to go back and shoot up the center itself, since it kind of has that cool abandoned secret base look to it, even though it’s not abandoned and only slightly secret.

Until then, here’s some of the other images I took. Many of these are at various steps in the duotone process, and some not edited at all. Enjoy!

Snowpocalypse Now! or Mother Nature’s Dandruff Problem

Like much of the rest of the country, Abilene, my hometown, was covered in a thick, messy layer of ice and snow last week. It was fun for the first day or so, but as the days dragged on and classes kept getting cancelled, many people began to hate it, a lot.

A Trip to Louisiana

Now that I’ve had this blog for about a week, I feel it’s about time I use it!

I'm in your mirror, taking your picture

Here’s the first batch of photos from my new Canon Rebel T1. (read: Christmas present) Please forgive any noob mistakes, as I’m still learning all ofits fun bells and whistles, and wells and bistles…