Embracing the Grain

In digital photography “noise” is NOT a good thing…but in film photography it can be (but they lovely refer to it as “grain”). I often add some grain back into digital shots, just ’cause I like the gritty, toothsome feel to it. B&W coming from a digicam can sometimes be so sleek and smooth it loses some of its omph. I wanted to test out some seriously grainy film so ran a roll of Ilford 3200 through my 35mm camera a few weeks ago. These shots might be pushing my grain tolerance even for me! But they are kind of arty. Next time I think I will try it with my medium format camera…I think that might be a better combination!

Food Photography Challenge ~ January

Recently I joined a great group of photographers who are cultivating their food styling and photography skills. The idea is that we will challenge ourselves each month with a specific assignment dealing with food photography and then share our final images on our blogs (scroll down for the link to the next photographer in our circle). SO FUN! I have already learned a ton from our Facebook group and it’s awesome to be amongst such talented and supportive photographers!

January’s challenge was “fruit on white”, no props, just one kind of fruit on a white backdrop. Sounds pretty simple but it was hard! Mainly because anything you do wrong will be SO obvious…since you are pretty much just working with light and fruit…nothing else to distract! I’ll admit I’m not really a “white background” kind of photographer…but this was a fun challenge!

So here it is!

We also decided we could play a little with some props after the challenge was complete so I used my back-up fruit…

I am so used to photographing people that I was really laughing at the fact that I would click the shutter and then wait for a different moment, then “nope nothing has changed…that pear is still there in the same spot”, lol. But seriously, next time we do a fruit shoot, it’d better be in the Summer…kinda hard to find fresh looking fruit mid-winter!!

Head over to Jennifer Grant’s Lifestyle Photo Blog | Michigan + Beyond to see her take on the challenge! (The blog circle will go around about 14 different photographers before leading back to me).

Blake

Silly boy…more film from the snow day roll…desaturated.

Snow Day on Film

All images taken with Nikon F100 and Portra 400

Museum of Flight

Reworked

A few days ago I went through my 2011 pictures to print some (42!) photos from the year and came across this one taken awhile ago with my 17-year-old manual focus film camera…I hadn’t liked the colors rendered in the film so much and thought “duh! De-saturate!”

This year I am keeping a folder called “yet to print” on my desktop that I will just copy selects into until I have enough that I want to send out…going through an entire year of photos takes forever!

Mr. Geyer

I stole Dave this morning for a little photo shoot so I could test out some film…these are some I caught on digital to hold me over until I get the scans back. It is surprisingly difficult to take cool/not JCPenney catalog-esq photos of a single person, especially a male. We had fun though and I think he did awesome! Can’t wait to see the film versions.

Eats

We eat out probably (way!!) more than we should but we like our good food and pretty spaces – no big chain restaurants for us! (well, sometimes the spaghetti factory slips in there!). Luckily we never stopped eating out after the kids were born so they don’t think anything of spending a couple of hours sitting in a restaurant, phew!

My sister

My sister and her fellow came for the holidays!! We tried to do a little shoot but the rain (and mud!) got the better of us…

Our tree

We cut our own tree this year…check out Coen haulin’ that thing around! He doesn’t get his super strength from me!!!