Another Trip to Chinatown

8/365

My friend, Jackie, and I decided to make another trip to Chinatown today.  We got there pretty early while it was still cool and not too crowded.  We both did a lot of random shooting.  It surprises me that every time we go there, we manage to find something interesting to shoot, but I think that's pretty true of any street photography--things are different minute by minute and all you have to do is keep your eyes open and be aware of what's going on around you.  

We found a couple of very colorful doors.  We just stood on the street across from the doors and waited for people to walk by.  I've only posted a selection of the ones I took of this green doorway because I didn't want to overload you with such similar images.

After making our usual stop at our favorite Starbucks we drove over Magic Island just to see if there would be anything interesting.  Usually there isn't in the middle of the day, but we took a chance.  There were 4 different bride/groom couples having their photos taken.  This couple was really fun, but I think it was partly to do with the photographer--he kept giving them suggestions for fun things to do.  

Some More Photoshop Playing

6/365

I mentioned that I was taking an online photoshop elements course for digital scrapbooking.    This is one of the composites I created using one of my images of the Pow! Wow! event, gradients, frames, layers, and the different text functions.

Very fun.

Waikiki in Black & White

5/365

The other day my friend and I went to Waikiki with the intention of doing some street photography only in black & white.  We both LOVE black & white and I remember back in the day when the only  way to shoot b&w was to insert an entire roll of b&w film into the camera.

If you decided you wanted to switch to color halfway through the roll, you either had to stick it out and finish the roll or remove it which was pretty tricky to do.

Now....with digital, it's just a matter of switching functions. 

But shooting b&w is a different animal than shooting color.  You have to "see" differently and anticipate what will look good and what won't.  Sometimes it's easier to shoot in color and then convert to b&w on the computer.  Part of me thinks that's cheating.  Part of me thinks that's cool.

Shooting in a b&w function forces you to be more discerning--you know that the image has to stand on the merits of composition and contrast without the impact of beautiful color to grab the viewer's attention.  Of course, the digital darkroom can really enhance any image, as did the wet darkroom, so some images can be salvaged.

So we set our cameras on b&w and began shooting.

After we finished at the beach, we headed over to our favorite Starbucks.  We did a little practice with panning and slow shutter speed.  I didn't have my tripod and I was just trying to teach my friend how to do these techniques, so I really didn't anticipate having any keepers.  Most of the images I shot were deleted, but these next three appealed to me.  

(Although the camera was hand-held, I was resting the camera on a newspaper box)

POW!  WOW!

3/365

"Centered around a week-long event in Hawaii, POW! WOW! has grown into a global network of artists and organizes gallery shows, lecture series, schools for art and music, mural projects, a large creative space named Lana Lane Studios, concerts, and live art installation across the globe.  The central event takes place during Valentine's Day week in February in the Kaka'ako district of Honolulu, and brings over a hundred international and local artists together to create murals and other forms of art." (copied from the website)

Today I took a walk around downtown to find some of these artists.  It was a very cool experience.  Most of them began painting on Monday, and since it is only Wednesday, they were only part-way through their projects.  It was interesting to see how they were creating works of this size.  Many of them were using pictures on their phones as reference. 

Ain't Technology Grand? (late post for Sunday)

Several weeks ago, the daughter of a friend of mine got married. The photographer was some relative of the groom, so I didn't really have a "job" that day. Until....the bride's mom called me about a week before the wedding to see if I knew anyone who had a camcorder.

We had just gotten a new one at Christmas, so I offered to do the video. Never having done video for something so important, I was pretty nervous, especially since I had also never used the camcorder since it's purchase.

Well, I won't brag about my abilities as a videographer, but I did it and at least they'll have something to look at as the years go by. This is definitely a job I don't ever want to do again!

Last night I finally got around to transferring the video to the computer and then burning it to a dvd. Of course, nothing is ever easy. My computer doesn't burn dvds, only cds. But, my son to the rescue. He has an external gadget that can burn dvds. We got it all hooked up only to find out that my laptop is missing something else, so it wouldn't read his gadget.

So, plan B. Put the video on the external hard drive, go connect it to his laptop, along with the external dvd burner, and eventually, voila!! dvds of the wedding. Hooray!

Then the icing on the cake (no pun intended when you see the image on the cd) is that my son has another gadget to put an image and text on the face of the dvd. Very cool. Ain't technology grand?

So the job is done.

Now I just have to get busy with all the other jobs I have to do that I've been procrastinating doing...