365 Day Photo Challenge - August 2011

Taking a picture a day - every day - for a whole year. Are you up to it? Not just any picture, but one that has actual meaning to you and is hopefully nice to look at - no pictures just for the sake of saying you took a picture? Are you still up to it? Oh, and not just taking a picture a day, but posting it on the internet - and no cheating - no taking 20 pictures in 1 day then posting them over the next 20 days... are you still up to it?. I don't know if I am but it sounds like fun so I'm going to give it a shot. August is a good month for taking pictures where I live, and to start I was treated to an awesome sunrise over the hills east of my house. Whether or not you start your own 365 photo project, I hope you enjoy mine...

Well, I finally got started on my 365 photo project - one photo a day for a whole year. For August I'm shooting most of the pictures with my Droid phone or my Canon ELPH 100. I also have a Pentax K200 and a Holga that I hope to start using soon, and lots of other things i want to experiment with too. I think my biggest challenge will be coming up with new ideas so all my pictures don't start looking the same. Luckily I have a few books to help with that. Hope you enjoy the pictures.

When I got to work I was treated to this awesome sunrise. I didn't have a real camera with me but thankfully my Droid has a built in camera so I was able to snap a few pictures. I think this one came out the best. Not too bad for a cell phone camera...

I took this with my ELPH 100 set to monochrome. Nothing spectacular but it sums up exactly how I feel today.

This is my 62 Buick daily driver, shot with my Canon Powershot ELPH 100 set to Fisheye. I really love this little camera. Auto focus works great, it does a great job of balancing the light and dark areas of pictures, and the built-in shooting modes are a lot of fun.

I went shooting with my old CoolPix 4800 today... should have known better. Not good in low light, lens isn't "quite" wide enough. Came home with a bunch of pictures that were slightly blurry and otherwise bad, even by my low standards. So while I was gone, my wife had taken my son to Lowe's for Build and Learn and bought him a tool set. Here he is working on his Build and Learn kit with his new tools...

I wanted to play around a little with low light and try to get something that captures motion. I got this shot with my Canon ELPH 100 and I think it came out pretty good (I know it's blurry - it's supposed to be...). I set the camera to Low Light. This gave a shutter speed of 1/4 second, giving the lights enough time to make a nice glowing effect and giving me a nice blur from a passing car.

Today was a disappointment - I got to work nice and early. The place I work is on a hill overlooking the city of Reno, and I thought a picture of downtown taken during the Golden Hour would look really nice. So I finished my morning maintenance duties, went outside, got the shot nicely framed... and the camera shut itself off. Doh!!! I forgot to charge the batteries! I went home and got the charger at lunch, hoping to find something - anything - interesting to take. I got lucky and found this guy in pine tree by the parking lot. He wouldn't let me get close for the shot so I had to use full optical and full digital zoom. Not the clearest picture ever taken but it demonstrates the limitations of digital zoom...

Another picture from my CoolPix 4800. My son doesn't like having his picture taken, so I take what I can get. I really need to work on his camera shyness...

This is the view from the upper south parking lot at work - gorgeous. I shot this with my ELPH 100 at about 7:15 am - already late enough to show a lot of glare or whatever you call it. Probably would have turned out better if I'd shot it 30 minutes earlier or used a polarizing filter - but the ELPH 100 doesn't have provisions for mounting a filter.

All my pictures this month were shot with my Canon Powershot ELPH 100 HS, an ancient Coolpix 4800, and my Droid phone, with the ELPH 100 getting the most use. It really is a nice little camera and I think it's the nicest sub-compact point and shoot camera available. Very small, very light, very easy to take with you everywhere. It also takes reasonably good pictures and you can even coax it into taking some creative low light shots. It also has some fun built-in shooting modes (I really like the Super Vivid mode for livening up shots). So far it has proven well worth the money. The only other digital camera I own is a Pentax K200, but it's pretty time consuming to shoot RAW pictures, put them into Lightroom, export to JPEG... so I didn't get the chance to use it this month.

I started this month kind of by accident, with no idea of what to shoot. I'm not even sure I'll be able to come up with enough ideas to last the whole year, and I don't want to post a bunch of boring pictures just for the sake of saying I did a picture a day for a whole year. Since my first picture was a sunrise taken with my Droid camera I decided to focus on using cheap cameras... so bedsides the Droid I used my Canon ELPH 100 and an ancient Nikon Coolpix 4800. I really like night and low light photography so I took lots of night pics. Lots of them came out great (I'm especially proud of this one) but I only posted a couple because they're all so similar. I also bought a book called Photo Idea Index that I really like. I can't wait to try out some of the cool photography ideas in this book...

First month of my 365 photo project...

I learned a couple of things this month. First, you don't need an expensive camera to get some pretty cool pictures. My best picture this month was taken with the cheap built-in camera on my cell phone. Second, it's kind of frustrating to take "creative" shots with a point and shoot because they don't let you control aperture and shutter speed. It is possible though - you just need to play with the shooting modes until you get the camera to act like you want it to. I also found out it's hard (for me at least) to come up with new ideas so I don't keep taking the same kinds of pictures over and over.