Kristin’s Playground

Ah, it’s a beautiful morning outside; the first hints of spring are in the air. A balmy 45 degrees (Farenheit), the sun is shining, the snow is melting en masse. I didn’t even zip up my jacket while waiting for the bus! There’s still a slight chill in the wind and when the sun ducks behind the clouds, but the forecast for today is rain instead of snow, and that’s a good start. I’m sure the weather is just teasing me, and I know we’ll have a couple of good freezing days before spring actually is here, but it’s a good start to my day.

28 Feb. 2008 -

I think Nickels Arcade is going to be a good place to find and photograph strangers, so I was playing around with my camera (and my flash - held by hand off-camera) looking for my shot. Mike walked by, clearly curious as to what I was doing on this cold day, so I asked if he would help me out for a few minutes and pose for me. He agreed, but he said he wouldn’t take off his clothes for me. I laughed a little, assured him this wasn’t that kind of photography project, and I took a few shots from a low angle. I tried a few holding my flash off to one side, but they came out blurry - I think I needed both hands to steady the camera. Anyway, I ended up with a reasonable shot on the one shot I didn’t use the flash for.

For more information about the 100 strangers project, check out www.100strangers.com or the 100 Strangers Flickr group.

Since I recently joined Flickr to participate in the Strobist assignments, I’d been poking around when I found the 100 Strangers Flickr group. The idea intrigued me; I’d love to be able to take better portraits, and I’m not terribly good at initiating conversations with people I don’t know (or even people I do know), so I thought this would be good practice for me on both counts. I joined, and have started the project - you’ll see my entries as I go through this project. Here’s my first stranger from last Tuesday, with my journal entry under the cut.

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A couple of weeks ago, we had the pleasure of seeing a total lunar eclipse in North America. It happened at a reasonable time of night, and the sky was mostly clear, so I decided that I had to take the opportunity to photograph it. At first I had thought about doing one of those exposures where the foreground stays the same, and you can overlap all the images you take so you can see the progression of the moon all in one image (a la this image), but I realized that it was too cold to leave my camera outside for too long, and my timing between each image would inevitably be off, and in short, wouldn’t really work for me. It’s a good thing too, as the spot I had originally chosen for my tripod didn’t work for all of the exposures throughout the night. There were some tree branches I had to avoid and for the last exposures of the night, I had to shoot nearly straight up, which can’t really be done with my tripod. Anyway, I got out my telephoto and had some fun. I’m really hoping the next time I get the opportunity to do this, however, is in a much warmer location/season. Here’s a sneak preview of some of the shots, and the full series (20 images) is behind the cut.



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