AaronSpruit

We’re heading back in three weeks to the windy city. I’ve also been going through a lot of various images as I’ve been cleaning up my Lightroom catalog. I had totally forgotten I had taken these 7 pictures to create a panorama.

Actually, I think I tried to create this panorama using photoshop back in the day, but wasn’t ever able to make something worth keeping.  Oh well, I’m glad I still have them!  This is the complement to the long-ago posted Chicago Daytime.

*Update*  As per the usual, you can view the large image.  However, I’ve made a site-wide change to enable this on all images.  Simply click on the image above, and you’ll get the full-sized image in a lightbox pop-up.  However, you can then do what you will with it, provided you follow the copyright on each of them.

As a pre-caution, most of the images are  quite large in nature.  While I have plenty of bandwidth for the site, you have been warned for the client-side costs 🙂

More fun with the remote flash.  This time in the closet.

It’s amazing how difficult it is to have the camera be out of focus when I’ve been so determined to have it take pictures in focus for so long.

It’s been pretty crappy out this weekend, so I decided to play a little with the flash.  The wireless remote capabilities of it are quite fun as you’ll see from a few of the pictures this week.

After repositioning the camera and tripod a few times I finally got this shot, which was the one originally in my mind.  Sadly, I think I like the first one better though, the mistake one.  Funny how that works.  After getting this, I packed up and went back home.  I was so upset that I didn’t take the time to get any shots of the night sky like I wanted to.

I’ve been having these feelings that the quality of stuff on the website is slowly going down.  I think the next round of images I have planned will help somewhat, but it makes me wonder if I’m trying to hard too do the everyday thing.  Should I slow down and try to put images up that I care more about?  I keep looking at the thumbnails and thinking that the original images were definitely some of the best.  However, those were also taken over a 6 month period.

I have this problem, that everything has to be perfect, or as damn close as I can get it to be.  That’s why this is starting to drive me mad (and I imagine why the whole art side never really panned out to begin with).  A part of me feels that if I don’t think I’d frame it and hang it up, why am I putting it on the site?  However, another part of me says that this is how you get better.  Sadly, since I’ve been back from AZ, I haven’t taken my camera out once, except to get it fixed.  I hope the “photography” funk relieves me soon, because I really love doing doing it (and hell, I’ve spent way too much money).

As promised, I would start posting images of my AZ trip.  I figured I’d get these traumatic images out of the way first, just because.  Anyways, this was the first image right after I had broken the information LCD on my camera.  I was trying to remove the tripod center column when the top, with the tripod head on it, fell onto my camera.  What was funny is that I didn’t even realize it at the time.  It wasn’t until I was trying to setup this shot that I noticed it was broken.

For setting up the camera by hand, without actually being able to look through the viewfinder, since it was so close to the ground, I was pleasantly suprised.  The lighting is actually not done by me at all, but from the outdoor lighting the neighborhood has setup lighting each of these saguaro catci.