Strangers

Guitarscapes

Master Lock

Fire Hydrant

I went for a walk around the neighborhood with my camera the other day to take a break from work. When I came upon this fire hydrant, I did the usual crouch down, shoot the subject at an "interesting" angle and move on. The "interesting" angle I shot this at was the same exact "interesting" angle I shoot a lot of my photos at, which really isn't interesting at all. I needed to try something new. I needed to break out of a creative rut.

After a few moments of thought, I decided to shoot this straight on with the road in the background. Ideally, I would have had a longer lens to achieve a narrower depth of field, but my 24-105 f/4.0 had to suffice. Though shooting a subject straight on like this isn't anything new, I rarely ever put that much thought into my composition. I wanted the lines of the road and the sidewalk to be perfectly parallel to the horizontal edges of the frame.

Colored Pencils

This is about the only use I have for colored pencils. Thankfully, my kids are much more creative in the drawing department than I am.

After several attempts with composing an image with more than one pencil in focus, I decided to use the other pencils in the can as the background instead. The pencils were lit by a single 580exII flash through a Flashpoint Q Series beauty dish with grid modifier front right.

Grapefruits

My Canon XTi finally gets to retire as it has been replaced by a Canon 6D. I had always hoped that when I upgraded I'd keep my XTi to use as a backup/secondary camera. Unfortunately, the quality of photos that I get from my 6D precludes me from desiring to ever use my XTi again.

That's not to say the XTi is a bad camera. It just happens to be very old technology. It's use will be limited to teaching my daughters photography.

Since I last posted, my family has relocated to Arizona. One of the benefits I enjoy living here is having citrus trees in my back yard. I love being able to pluck a juicy grapefruit from the tree on a whim and know it'll be better than any I've ever had from the produce section at the grocery store.

One of my intentions with this new camera is to be more deliberate in the photos I take. Rather than stop for a moment, crouch a little and snap away and hope something came out well composed and exposed as I was accustomed to do with my old camera, I'm taking my time to compose the scene. I'm paying much closer attention to what's going on around my subject, asking myself if my subject is even worth shooting and getting the exposure correct.

I shot this photo on manual using an ISO of 400 to ensure I was able to get a fast shutter speed of 1/200th of a second at f/4.0 and 105mm. I metered off the leaves and mistakenly over exposed by a stop which required me to compensate by -1 2/3 stops in Lightroom to get the image you see here.

Time For Change

///Update:
I never got around to finishing brainardphotography.com and it doesn't look like I will anytime soon. I'll continue to use this blog to share my photography as I learn and grow and will eventually use brainardphotography.com to host a gallery of my favorite images.
///End update

A few years ago, I wanted to create a blog and struggled to come up with an identity for myself. Everything I liked was taken, so I went with "Dorky". Well, the time has come to shed this identity and take on something more professional. After all, who wants to hire a "Dorky Photographer"? I'd be reluctant, that's for sure!

Over the last few weeks, I slowly put together a new website, coding all the fine details by hand. I even made sure to add an RSS feed so you could stay up to date with my latest photos and photo related musings.

Please bookmark my new site!
www.BrainardPhotography.com

And, if you're into the nerdier side of things, bookmark my personal site!
john.BrainardPhotography.com