Lightning

 

I took this last night during the lightning before the rain. Photographed with a tripod and 5-second shutter speed and just did it over and over again until the lightning flashed while the shutter was open. Post processed with some highlighting and blue tinting as the original was pretty gray.

Here's the original without any processing:

This is the only other lightning streak I captured:

And most of the photos looked like this (with lightning behind the clouds, which is still kind of pretty!) or completely dark:

Sunsets

I've fiddled around some with the Sunset challenge. I don't have anything earth-shattering yet, but I do have a few to review.

This one is my favorite so far - my neighbor's flying pig! I think it's cheeky! (And I like the moon up in the corner.)

Since I live in the city, it's difficult to get an unobstructed view. I did get a few nice shots out at the farm over Christmas with my brother's iPhone.

Tonight I experimented with taking some abstract style shots through the trees. First off, though, colors were gorgeous tonight!

I got one abstract that I like:

Then I took one of these and inverted colors, and I like the texture of it.

Challenge card:

Door Knob

Photo Challenge: Photograph a Door (Knob)

I took this one in 2010 while on the Artist Studio Tour.

Texture

Photograph Texture: This is the bucket of my wheelbarrow after rain stood in it for a while and then rust spots (or something!) started to form. I've always like this picture.  2010

 

The "before" picture - ha ha!

Lone Tree

Shuffling through the Lightbox Photograph Cards deck, there were several topics which made me recall previous photos I've taken, so I'm going to upload some of them even though I wasn't deliberately doing the challenge, lol...

I took this one at the farm with my brother's phone.

"Sharpness is a bourgeois concept."

“Sharpness is a bourgeois concept.”                                 

                                                      ~ Henri Cartier-Bresson

 Jump to 25:16 for Michael Goodlet's thoughts on this...

 

"When we come at an art from that [technical] perspective, it's very easy to get sucked into this vortex where we think that everything has an answer - and everything has a technical answer - where in fact, with photography, a lot of that answer is in how we are and what we feel. 

"And when we look at a photograph, at least 50% of it, probably more, is us. When we look at it, we are seeing what we feel, not what the photographer took. He just gave us that foundation, and then we applied all the feeling, all the emotion, we dragged it up out of our past and applied it to that image. And that is such an important factor in how we take our photography forward. It cannot, and it never should be, all about technical pursuits. They're merely the starting place for great photography."

    ~ Michael Goodlet