Project 365: Vintage week

The good thing is: I’m really not stressing over the 365 project this time around. The bad things is: I’m “settling” for a picture of the day a lot more.

Like this shot of the boys. It was 6:25 am when I shot it, and I was just on my way out the door to go to work when I noticed they were cuddled up together on the love seat watching TV. Lucas and Simon are like oil and water more often than not, so I grabbed my camera and clicked off one shot. It was adorable when I looked in the LED, and I didn’t take another picture all day, safe in the knowledge that I had a worthy picture of the day.

Then at the very end of the day I pulled the memory card out of my camera and got a good look at the picture in Lightroom and realized it’s horribly noisy because I was shooting at 1600 ISO to compensate for the fact that the sun hadn’t come up yet, and Lucas is just in front of the plane of focus, and the highlights on his hair are completely blown out. Oh well. It still makes me happy when I look at it.

From a technical standpoint, this is a much better picture. It also makes me happy! This is Family Day, in the driveway.

More Family Day fun – Lucas thinks he’s a zamboni on his tricycle!

And Simon the future NHL star:

I kept hearing people rave about the iPhone camera app Hipstamatic, so I ponied up $1.99 to try it out. The lenses and effects are alright, similar to what I have in my other apps, but for this one you have to set your lens and film before you take the shot rather than in post-processing. And the viewfinder makes me a little crazy because it’s not like an SLR where you get an accurate picture, it’s like a point and shoot and they really exaggerate the effect. Meh, I’m not sure about this one. I tested it out on my old favourite, the Underwood typewriter.

Speaking of vintage and cameras, Lara and Angela have inspired me to take a few more self-portraits. Here’s vintage me with my Duaflex:

This was a TtV self-portrait, but I almost deleted it. I really didn’t like the original composition, but with TtV you’re very much bound by what’s inside the viewfinder frame (unless you’re much better with photoshop than I am!) I cropped out the viewfinder and the right half of the frame and ended up loving how this one came out with a bit of a vintage vibe and those crazy roses that are now two weeks old and holding! (Note to self: time to clean the dust off the viewfinder. I know some people like their TtV gritty, but I prefer it clean.)

And more vintage: this is one of the beauties from my camera collection. It’s a Kodak Brownie Starflex, and was manufactured some time between 1957 and 1964. I’d bought it for $20, hoping to use it for TtV, but I’m more partial to the Duaflex viewfinder. It’s still a lovely little camera, though! I ended up using this shot in the banner for my new photography site on a whim, and I think it works well with the typewriter font.

See, even my photography is fixated on photography this week. I am truly an obsessive creature.