Summer 06

Fire

Andrew and I thought it would be a good idea to pour gasoline on the driveway and take pictures of fire, and it was. Fire's a very interesting light source that I really want to experiment with. You really don't realize how bright it is until you take a picture of it with long exposure time. Or... until you look at it... It's bright. Both of these pictures were taken when the fire was almost out, after we had already overexposed the picture we were trying to take. I type too much.

Air

I went flying with Ted. It was pretty cool, despite the fact that I didn't know that I am getting old and now I apparently get motion sickness. I feel really stupid and weak. Who gets motion sickness? I didn't want to admit it until it was later that night and I still sort of felt like vomiting. Oh well. I heard there's some kind of pill you can take to make it all better.

This is Yerkes Observatory. It's on Lake Geneva. There's probably a million pictures like this.

This is downtown Elgin, my hometown. I kind of like this picture. The shadowing from the cloud gives it depth and makes the tower stand out.

Balloon

There was a balloon thing/festival at ECC. I took a bunch of pictures, but many of them aren't good because there was no light because they wanted to do it at night and have a light show thing which ended up not happening. It was still pretty cool.

The coloring's awesome in this picture. The balloons lit up when the fire thing lit and made everything red. That's my brother and KJ, btw.

Day Shots

Ironic that I make a category for "Day shots" and it's only 3 pictures.

I was babysitting my niece and nephew. I never knew how relaxing bubbles can be. You only have to sit there, exhaling, and they go nuts.

We found a crayfish. That's Andrew. I think it's an interesting perspective... Day photography is so boring.

This isn't a great picture, but I only had one shot left on my memory card, so I'm glad I got something decent. I think I'm going to try to re-take this when I get the opportunity again. My hand is whited-out, but it was on a 1/800 shutter speed. ... interesting...

Night Shots

This was a funny picture to take. My cousin thought it'd be fun to moon me as I have to sit there and wait for 8 seconds. That's why I'm looking down. But do you see how there's some light hitting the top part of my face? That's why I'm sort of kneeling, although you can't tell.

I like this. The light is so orange, and the mirror in the room reflects it, too. The lens flare by my neck is exactly what I wanted, too, which is cool.

This isn't really the effect I was going for with this, but I really like the way it turned out. I just took lots of little steps, moving my head up towards the light as the time went on.

That's my cousin. I really like that he's pointing the flashlight in the same direction as the flare from the street light. Also, all the nasty stuff on the surface of the water shines, which is cool.

This is one of my favorites, although I should post the one where I edited out the graphic design on my shirt, even though then the picture would have been touched by photoshop and it's kind of cool that it hasn't been touched yet. The green light really isn't as bright as it looks, but with the long exposure time it really brought out the color. Also, "Buena Vista Club" gives it a really local feel, which is neat. Also, the little post in the ground on the left-bottom side looks like a cross.

Late Add-Ons

These were taken later in the Summer. I'm posting them on December 9th, several months later.

This is a shot of a boat party, taking off from the pier. We weren't invited to it because the lane hates us. It was sort of awkward, too. Pretty much the whole lane was invited except for us. I didn't really want to go on their fancy boat party anyway.

Does this look cool? I can't figure out if it's just me that thinks this is cool. That's water in the background, by the way. And it's not altered with photoshop. It was a really steep hill with flowers on it and the lake at the bottom.

Haha... Yeah, that's me... without a shirt on. My sister was a little alarmed when I was taking this picture, but I was wearing a shirt that really didn't go with the picture. I'm actually looking at several giant spiders that were ... roosting?... under the light. It was really creepy. This doesn't enlarge because, at the time, my camera was broken so I had to use Rachel's and she didn't send me any of the files so I had to get it off snapfish.com, which she uses to print stuff, which also charges you to download high-res of your own pictures that you uploaded. What kind of ridiculous method is that? I refuse to pay a dollar for a digital picture that I took. That's crazy. Oh well. I'll get it someday.