Here are some of my favorites from the set.

It’s something that I try to strive for in my photography, but I imagine that I often fail. Too often modern architecture or fashion steal the focus of an image.

The photo-a-day project does continue, even though I’ve not updated it recently. Let’s call it performance anxiety after my photos were featured on DCist a few weeks back.

This photo was originally (or most recently) published on burst sausages

He Shoots, He Scores!

On Canal Road, out of Georgetown, we went drove by a car park that was mostly full. Interested to see what had drawn folks to this particular spot, we parked. Looking to the C&O canal nearby, the whole thing was frozen.

We walked down the bank to the canal, and slowly walked out onto it, nervous as to whether it would hold our weight.

As we made our way onto the ice, we saw a winter wonderland. Families out ice skating on the frozen canal, the snow shoveled aside, and a hockey game here and there.

There were two games going on as we arrived, one with nets, and one with 2″ x 4″s for goals.

All these folks out on the winter ice, enjoying the day, just doing what they could to forget just how cold it was was quite the sight.

Though we were tempted to go back to the house and get skates of our own, we were quite happy to just walk along the canal, enjoying the day, just like everyone else.

Snow Dogs

Today was a great opportunity to get out and take some photos. The difficulty today was finding just one picture to go in my Picture a Day set. I found one eventually, but I did upload quite a few of them to my flickr account.

I’d love to hear what any and all of you might think of the photos in the sets, and hear if any of you got out on the ice today.

Photo a Day #4

The photo today was a challenge. It got to be about 6pm before I even remembered that I needed to take one today. Luckily, I wasn’t completely spaced and did have the camera with me.

Looking for a good while on my walk home, I ended up with this shot of K St NW at Connecticut Ave NW. I like the way that the lights work with the 4″ exposure, and I think that sometime soon I’ll have to give a try to getting a similar shot down Pennsylvania Ave. I know that it’s a kinda overdone shot, but I’d like to have one of my own!

A tripod would have been nice to have with for this long exposure, but I was able to use a traffic lamp as a stand-in.

I’m interested to see where this project ends up taking me this week, and into next weekend.

Until tomorrow.

Frozen River

For the third day of the photo project, I ended up with a photo of the partially frozen Severn River, in Sherwood Forest.

To get this shot, I had to climb out onto the jetty in front of the house, in the bitter cold and wind. I’m not fully happy with most of the photos that I took today. I would have certainly taken more, but my fingers were about 30s from freezing and falling off when I did come inside. Well, that’s not completely true, they were already frozen, but hadn’t yet fallen off.

There wasn’t much color in the late afternoon sun, so this ended up being another good candidate for a black & white photo. I do want to make sure that I don’t end up with nothing but B&W photos in the photoset.

I generally enjoy black and white photos, but wish that there were an easier way to work in black & white on my Nikon D90. It would be useful if it had a feature whereby one could see shots in B&W, but still have them be recorded as full RAW format images. Not that that’s a complaint mind, just a nice to have.

Today it’s back to the office and the start of the real challenges with keeping the photo project going.

All is Quiet

Although it’s taken me a little while to get around to posting these, I did start taking them yesterday, as was planned. It’s been an interesting exercise so far, and one that I’ve seen a number of others do. I just hope that I can keep with it.

The first image is of Eastern Market in Southeast DC (near the Eastern Market Metro – natch). I took it relatively early on the morning of New Years Day. Well, not relatively early in an absolute sense, but in a it’s early if everyone is hungover sense. I had to lay in the middle of the street in order to get it, but I really like the way that the brickwork comes out and how you can even see the random little specks of snow.

It also wasn’t as quiet as it appears in the photo, there were people around, but a careful angle selection, a little bit of patience, and a little bit of luck made it happen. I think that it works. It’s not exactly worthy of the met, but, for a first day’s effort, it’s not too bad.

Sleeping Beauty

The second photo is of my wife, Christina, sound asleep. She had had a late night the previous night (hound related), and was catching up. Our bedroom doesn’t get a ton of light, but there is almost always great early morning light. She hates it when I take pictures of her, but she’s actually quite photogenic, despite what she may think.

Of course, the issue now is that I’m fresh out of ideas. Tomorrow being Sunday, I’m sure that I’ll be able to come up with something. But Monday frightens me. First day back working in almost two weeks (yay Christmas vacation) but also a much, much busier one. I’m kinda wondering where I’ll be able to find take to take the photo(s), or of what I’ll take them. There will certainly be plenty of fodder around town as people go about their daily business, but I fear it will be cumbersome to lug the camera everywhere I go.

I’ll make it work. That’s why it takes effort.