One of my favorite photos so far from this year's 366 Project

Four years have passed since I last did a photo-a-day-for-a-year project – often referred to as a 365 Project (many months have passed since I posted in here, too, I’m aware of that, but I’m ignoring that and jumping right into this topic). Because four years ago – 2008 – was a leap year, it was actually 366 Project for me. I’ve decided to make it a leap year tradition for me and do a 366 Project every four years. I know I’ve attempted projects of some sort every year since 2008, and have failed every one but the 52 photowalks I did in 2009, but I’m pretty confident I will succeed this year because:

1. I’m motivated by the fact that I will only get a chance once every four years to do a 366 project (I realize, technically, I could take 366 photos a day in whatever year-and-a-day I would like, but you know what I mean), and, related…
2. It’s been four years since I’ve done this so I’m not worn out from having just done this. I think breaks between projects are very important. Or maybe I’m just lazy?

Anyway. In 2008, I was doing 366 Self Portraits. What was I thinking? I have no idea! This was crazy-hard, but I was just learning my DSLR (in fact, I got my first one in February of that year), and I think having such a strict subject matter really helped me learn and be creative without being overwhelmed with also trying to figure out WHAT I was going to photograph.

This year, I have decided to really do a “Year in the Life of Iffles” idea. Each photo will represent just what I’m doing that day. Nothing will be staged (other than perhaps moving something around to help with lighting or composition), and at the end of the year it will be like I have a photo diary of 2012. It could turn out to be incredibly boring, but I don’t care!

I was talking about this with a friend and she asked me how I decided what to take a photo of each day, and I decided to let you all in on my strategy, which might also be considered some 366 Survival Tips for those of you also attempting this (somewhat insane) project this year!

Take a photo of SOMETHING at the start of your day

Technically, on work days, I don’t do this at the start of my day because I’m too busy getting ready for work, but as soon as I come home from work the first thing I do is change into pajama pants. The second thing I do is take a photo. Of something. Anything. Often it’s one of the cats, or maybe I’ll snap of photo of John’s work area as I go down to say “hi, I’m home from work, I love you.” This is key because it puts the stress off of me so I’m not scrambling around at 11PM thinking “OH NO! WHAT TO TAKE A PHOTO OF???”

This is one of the photos I took early in evening so I wouldn't forget later. Not the best photo ever, but hey, at least I have one for that day!

You have to eat every day, associate your photo-taking with eating

This doesn’t necessarily mean to take a photo of your food (though, I’m 30 days in, and I’d say at least 10 of my photos are of food or drinks), but if you eat three times a day, and you start associating eating with photo-taking, you’re less likely to forget to take a photo that day.

Besides, like I already mentioned, I’ve used a lot of photos of food. If you’re anything like me, you like food. A lot. I love to cook, I love to eat, and I especially love to make food for other people, so often the highlight of my day really does involve food. If I’m trying a new meal for the first time, I’m definitely taking a shot of it.

Sometimes food photos aren't so bad! I like this one! Hmmm... now I'm hungry.

If you’re doing something you don’t do every day, have your camera with you

I’m part of an organization called Young Professionals of Akron, and we only meet once a month, and even then, I can’t make a lot of meetings, but I was able to go in January, so I was sure to take my camera with me and took a picture while we all out eating dinner after the meeting. This might seem like an obvious tip for for a 366 project, but it’s easy to get swept up in the getting-ready process for something – especially big events – that you don’t think to grab your camera, too.

It doesn’t have to be a big event, either. I typically only go grocery shopping once every two weeks. I shop for clothes or shoes just a few times a year. And heck, with my Prius, I only get gas about once a month. Any of these things could be a photo for that day for me, especially if I keep this next tip in mind…

Look at daily events with a new perspective

Ok, we don’t play games in our house every day, but probably more than once a week, and I knew my flickr stream was going to get pretty inundated with photos of cards and meeples and the like, so instead just taking photos of the board itself, or all our friends sitting around our game table, I looked at the games from a new perspective. You can see the photo here where I got down on the same level as my Stone Age meeples, ready to be placed on the board for the round. I’ve also taken photos of my hand in Dominion (a card game) from my perspective, and another where my stuffed Yoshi was holding the cards instead of me. If you think the same thing is going to show up in your project a lot (like, for me, games), that’s ok! If you’re really trying to document your life, the things you do a lot should show up a lot, just try to make them creative and different each time so you don’t get bored. Or in my case, board. Get it? Ha! I’m hilarious.

Meeples from the game Stone Age

When all else fails…

Here are the things I take photos of when I just can’t think of anything else:

• My cats
• Whatever book I’m reading
• Whatever I’m eating
• Something I’m wearing that day
• A self-portrait
• The weather
• A macro of some ordinary object
• Things around the house that I can use as a texture in photos later (plaster walls, tile floors, woodwork, flour on my countertop, etc).
• The view from where I’m sitting (what my computer desk looks like, what I’m watching on TV, my feet propped up on the sofa, etc.)

Some of them might sound boring, but at least it’s all something!

First snow of the year!

Final Thoughts…

The key isn’t to take the Best Photo Ever every day. Really, the key is to pick up your camera every day. The more you pick it up, the more you start incorporating it into your everyday life, and you’ll be amazed at how, without even noticing or thinking about it, your photos improve and you feel more confident with your camera. After 4 years, I still know I have a long way to go to be an expert, and I’ll probably NEVER be an expert, there will always be something new for me to learn, some other skill I feel I haven’t mastered yet, and the more I use this amazing tool of mine, the more I’ll improve. And you can, too!

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by mothman0 (click on photo to see in flickr)

All Wordless Wednesday photos are not taken by me, but are photos submitted to the iffles.com Monthly Themes group on flickr. Join the group to see your photo featured! August’s theme is Sky!

(And yes, I promise a real post soon!)

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by Joe_R (click to photo to see in flickr)

All Wordless Wednesday photos are not taken by me, but are photos submitted to the iffles.com Monthly Themes group on flickr. Join the group to see your photo featured! July’s theme was Statues/Parks, and August’s theme is Sky!

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by Peter De Klerk (click to go to photo on flickr)

All Wordless Wednesday photos are not taken by me, but are photos submitted to the iffles.com Monthly Themes group on flickr. Join the group to see your photo featured! July’s theme is Statues/Parks

(sorry I’m a day late, yesterday was John’s birthday, and I guess I got distracted!)

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f/4.0; 1/13sec; 58mm; ISO 400

This is one of my quick tips that I haven’t mentioned before because I was afraid it was some sort of “fad” for me. I often find that I do some trick when editing that after a while I stop doing because I think it looks stupid. But I’ve been using this particular method for a quite a few months and I still try it on a lot of my portraits.

You guys know I usually like to describe what exactly is happening and why it works to produce a better photo. But to be honest? I don’t know the math behind this one or why it always seem to like how it looks on portraits. But… I do like it on portraits!

The first step is, if you don’t already have it, get the FX-Foundry suite of scripts for Gimp, as described in this post. Then open a photo to edit. I’m going to edit this photo of yours truly:

Me, unedited. I'm not very excited.

Most of the FX-Foundry scripts I use when editing photos are in (obviously) the Photos menu option, but there’s a Toolbox menu option as well:

Under Toolbox there is an option for Lasm’s Channel Extract. This is what I use almost exclusively for converting images to black and white because it gives you a bunch of different options, each as a new layer in your photo. But maybe I’ll talk about that some other time. For the purposes of this tip, all you have to do is deselect the “All Channels” option and select only the L channel. Then say OK. You’ll end up with a photo that looks like this:

Me: as a ghost!

Now just switch that layer to Overlay and play with the opacity. This is my photo at 75% Opacity:

Oh, now I'm excited. This looks better!

And that’s it! Here’s the original for comparison:

Still not so exciting, is it?

I’ve tried this on a lot of portraits and usually like it (no editing technique works for all photos, so yes, there are times it looks pretty horrible), but for a quick and easy edit of a photo, I think it adds something without a lot of work. For instance, this particular photo I was just uploading to show some friends my new hair cut, and I didn’t want to go to a lot of trouble, but I think this 2 second edit is much nicer than the Straight Out Of Camera shot!

Give it a shot and let me know what you think!

ps. don’t forget, there’s still time to submit photos to the iffles.com Monthly Themes group to be eligible for tomorrow’s Wordless Wednesday! July’s theme is Statues/Parks!

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by rachel_pics (click to view in flickr)

All Wordless Wednesday photos are not taken by me, but are photos submitted to the iffles.com Monthly Themes group on flickr. Join the group to see your photo featured! July’s theme is Statues/Parks

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A photo from the first wedding I shot

As you all know, I was a second shooter in my first wedding back in March. For those of you that don’t remember the background, I was asked to help out a friend. I was incredibly nervous about it, as I think anyone should be the first time they shoot a wedding – it’s a big deal! You only get one shot!

I’ve already written about what I was doing to prepare for the shoot, but of course on the day of the wedding, I learned a few more Dos and Don’ts, so if you’re wondering how it all went, please, read on!

My Dos and Don’ts

Ask the bride/groom what they want I realize this is kind of a “duh” statement here, but we didn’t have a chance to actually do that, but it would have been helpful. I went into the event hoping to get certain shots that I realized she was interested in, and then I also worried I wasn’t getting shots that she dreamed of. We did get a chance to ask for specific photos she wanted (the one you see below is a request of hers), but I think if we had time to actually sit down and talk with her before-hand, we would have been even more prepared. Once again, I know this sounds obvious, and I knew going into the day that we were going in a bit blind, but I didn’t really realize how uncomfortable this was going to be until the actual day of the ceremony.

The bride specifically requested this photo

It’s not enough just to bring the extra battery and memory card with you. You have to actually have them on you. This is such a classic rookie mistake that I just don’t even want to admit it happened to me! But, the truth is, moments before the first kiss, I looked down to see how many photos I had left on my memory card, and there were only 2. My backup memory card? It was in my bag, which was all the way on the other side of the church. MOMENT OF PANIC. I managed to get 3 shots of the first kiss (hooray for my camera mis-estimating), then literally RAN (in the church!) to my bag, threw the old memory card on the ground and fished out the new memory card, and put it in the camera while RUNNING back. I missed the bride and groom walking back down the aisle.

Luckily, I still managed to get a shot of the first kiss

The solution? First of all, I meant to switch out for the new memory card before the ceremony even started, but I forgot. My first suggestion is to NOT FORGET THINGS. Also, I didn’t wear pants with pockets, where I could have stored a back-up battery and memory card. My fellow photographer had a little fanny-pack type back that she could throw in stuff like her lens cap, and extra cards and batteries. Fantastic idea, so that’s probably the route I’ll go with next time.

Slideshows are a crowd-pleaser. After the short, dry reception, the couple had an after-party at a local bar. There were a few hours to kill between the two, so the other photographer came over to my house where we went through the photos we had so far and whipped up a slideshow, then I brought my laptop to the bar and put it on a table to run through the slideshows. Everyone really seemed to enjoy it (and I put the laptop away before too many beverages were consumed… just in case!).

A natural, candid moment.

Never put your camera down I didn’t take my camera out of my hands the entire day! I was so afraid I’d miss a sweet, candid moment. That photo above? Was just one of those moments. She didn’t know I was taking that photo, and it’s one of my favorite from the day.

Capture the Details. Anyone who knows me and my photographic style knows that I didn’t need any reminder to capture to the details. It’s what I do, it’s what I love to do. I think my favorite part of the day was when we took the rings and took a number of different photos with them (including the one you see below), but I also enjoyed the early part of the day when I walked around the church and reception location (they were in the same building), getting detail photos. I’m glad we had the time to do that before jumping into the actually wedding. It was like a nice little warm-up!

The rings and some rocks!

Would I do it again?

This is probably the question I’ve been asked most since the big day, and honestly? I can’t decide. The day of, I was really loving it. Despite the stress, it was also really exciting, and I loved just being there and doing what I do, and really felt that, even with the memory card fiasco, I was doing a pretty good job! Sure, I’d do it again! Then, the day after when I first started looking through my photos, I thought I was a complete failure and there was no way I’d ever do it again! (I think following jasmine star is a big mistake – I’ll never be as good as her!). Nope, never doing this again! Then, as I got into a groove with editing, I thought, ok, these aren’t too bad… So, I settled on a “maybe”. I still don’t think this is anything I’d ever seek out to do, but I don’t think I’d ever turn down a request to be a second shooter, either.

For a first wedding, I'm saying I did not too bad.

Also, don’t forget! I’m picking photos from the iffles.com Monthly Themes group on flickr to post on Wordless Wednesday. July’s theme is Statues/Parks!

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by bgottsab (click to view in flickr)

All Wordless Wednesday photos are not taken by me, but are photos submitted to the iffles.com Monthly Themes group on flickr. Join the group to see your photo featured! June’s theme is Doors/Windows. July’s theme is Statues/Parks

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f/4.0; 1/125sec; 105mm; ISO 800

In late 2009, I wrote a post about adding a vignette to a photo. I was never really happy with that post, and it has bothered me now for a year and half that I never wrote about a better option. Then, almost exactly a year later, I posted about the FIL Script (side note: I totally forgot about that script! I really liked it, too. I should use it more often), and I made a quick reference to the fact that if you wanted to use some of the grain options, you would have to download the G’MIC plug-in.

What I did not mention in that entry was that, after downloading that plug-in, I finally came full circle and was able to provide a way of creating vignettes that I’m much happier with. The concepts are the same as from my first post – either create a new layer with a black area set to overlay, or create a duplicate layer with a layer mask and make that layer darker somehow (don’t worry, if you’re confused, I’ll detail the concepts below).

The key that G’MIC provides is the ability to produce a radial gradient starting at the center of your photo without you having to eyeball. Now this seems to me that this is something that gimp really should provide for you out of the box, and I looked all over for it, and maybe I’m missing something obviously but I could never find it! Even if they do, and I am blind for missing it, there’s still a reason I’d use G’MIC, but I’ll get to that in a bit. First, let’s see this in action…

First, if you don’t already have it, you’ll need to install the G’MIC plugin. You can download it from here. I’m not sure how it works for Linux/Mac, but for Windows, you’re downloading an exe and you can just double-click to install it.

Next, of course, you need to open a photo in Gimp to edit it. Here’s the photo I’m using (for the record, this isn’t straight out of the camera, I did adjust levels):

Taken on a hike in a Metro Park near my house.

Option One: Vignette set to overlay

Remember, I said there were two ways to create a vignette effect. This is the one I do more often, but if I’m being completely honest, it’s just because I find it easier – not only to do, but to adjust the settings if I’m not completely happy with it.

So, to start, we bring up G’MIC, which is under the Filters menu. I’m going to pause here for a second and ask – how do you think that is pronounced? I’ve been pronoucing it as “Gee Mick”, but it sudddenly occured to me that, with the apostophe, they might intend for it to be pronounced more like “g’day, mate” is. Hmmm.

Anyway, sorry for that tangent. We bring up G’MIC and it looks like this:

Click to see full-size

G’MIC, like FX-Foundry is a suite of scripts, but instead of listing them all as individual scripts in the menus, you open G’MIC and select which script(s) you want to run from there. We want the Radial Gradient script, which is found under Colors:

Notice that you can select a starting color, ending color, fade start and end, and how centered you want the gradient. This is much nicer – in my opinion – than trying to center that gradient yourself!

In our first method for vignettes, we want a transparent-to-black gradient, so we change our starting color to transparent by click on the black box and then dropping the opacity to 0:

Then switch the Ending color to black (the “color name” for black is #000000, or you can just make sure the Hue, Saturation and Value boxes are all zeros).

Next, I prefer to have my fade Start at around 25 or 26 (this means more of the center of the gradient will be purely transparent), and my Fade end to be right at 100. So, my final settings look like this:

Now, while it’s not necessary, I suggest you save these settings as a favorite. That way, the next time you open up G’MIC you don’t have to select the colors and Fade start point again. To do this, all you have to do is click the blue Plus sign below the list of filters:

It will now show up as a Filter under Faves at the top of the list of Filters. If you want to, you can double click on it to rename it (you don’t have to do this, but I have mine named “Vignette (overlay)”):

Ok, before you hit OK there is one very important step – you need to set your Output Mode to “New Layer(s)”. You do this in the lower left of the dialog box:

Note: your favorite that you created won’t remember this, and if you’re anything like me, you’ll forget this step the first time you use G’MIC in a day of editing. Then you’ll grumble and have to undo the script and come back in here and run it again. As soon as you set this, though, it WILL remember the setting until you close the Gimp.

Ok, NOW you can hit ok! And now my image looks like this:

Not quite there yet...

And I have these layers:

Now, I select my G’MIC layer and set the Mode to Overlay. And now my image looks like this:

Now that looks good!

I happen to like this vignette just as it is, but that’s pretty rare for me. Usually I want to either decrease or increase the effect. To decrease the effect, just adjust the Opacity of the G’MIC layer down. To increase the effect, create a duplicate layer of the G’MIC layer and then adjust that one’s opacity until you’re happy with it. For instance, this is my photo with two G’MIC layers, with the second set to about 50% opacity:

Perhaps a bit too much for my taste, but still looking good.

Like I said, I prefer this particular image with just the one layer, but no two images are alike, of course!

Option two: Layer with a Mask

The idea with this method is that we’re going to create a duplicate layer of our photo with a layer mask on it, and then make that photo darker. I covered Layer Masks, and what exactly they do in the smoothing skin tutorial, but a quick recap: if you had a layer mask to a layer, you can then “paint” on that mask – if a layer mask is completely white, then you will see all of that layer. If a layer mask has some black on it, the layer becomes transparent there, so you see the layer below.

What we want to do is make the center of our layer mask black, so we see the (original photo) layer below in the middle, and for the outside of the photo we want our layer mask to be white so we can to see our duplicate layer, which we will make darker. So the outside is darker than the center!

…sometimes I feel I’m really not good at explaining things… seeing in it action should help!

First step is to create a duplicate layer of our photo (Layer –> Duplicate Layer), then right click on your new layer and select “Add Layer Mask”. It doesn’t matter what settings you use to initialize the layer mask, I usually stick with the default white.

Now open up G’MIC and go to the Radial Gradiant again (under Colors). This time keep black for the starting color and white for the ending color, and adjust the Fade start again. If you want, you can save this to your Faves as well (I have mine called “Vignette (Mask)”). Make sure your Output Mode is still New Layer(s) and then hit OK.

Now my photo looks like this. Which just isn’t right!

what I need to do is get this gradient into that layer mask I created. So I select the entire image and copy it. Then I paste it. This will make it show up as a floating layer:

Click on the layer mask in your layer dialog:

Then right click on your floating layer and select “Achor Layer”. Now you’ll have that gradient in your layer mask:

Now you can either delete or remove the visibility of the G’MIC layer. I deleted mine. You’ll notice after doing this that your image still looks exactly the same. Our layer mask is make the original photo show through in the center and our duplicate layer show on the outside, but the two layers are still exactly the same, so it doesn’t look any different.

The magic happens when we adjust the levels on our duplicate layer. So, make sure the duplicate layer (and now the mask) is selected and then go to Colors –> Levels. Now more the left-most slider under Input Levels over to the right some. I have mine set to this:

Then hit OK. Now my photo looks like this:

The final result!

As a reminder, here is the original:

Taken on a hike in a Metro Park near my house.

And here is the photo with the first method:

Using the first method.

Honestly, I the two methods result in a image that looks pretty much the same, and I still think the first one requires less work. That whole pasting into a layer mask thing on the second method can be annoying.

But both work, and the Radial Gradient script in G’MIC make both methods easier. Especially because you can save your settings as a favorite (which, btw, was the one reason I was mentioning above that I would still use G’MIC even if the Gimp could create those gradients out of the box without manually selecting your start and end point).

Honestly, I haven’t explored G’MIC much outside the radial gradient and – as you might have seen from one of my screenshots – the Old Movie Strips. My first impression that I mentioned back in December still holds true – I think it’s probably a much more useful tool for editing graphics instead of photos. My methods of editing usually result in my photo still looking like a photo, which is what I prefer. But if you want to play with reflections and making your photo look like a cube, and other crazy effects, G’MIC definitely offers a lot of different scripts with very customizable options to do these things, so check it out.

What do you think about the vignettes though? Do you think this was easier? I hope so, because that original vignette entry is one that has bothered me for quite some time!

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Window and door in Akron, Ohio

I’m sure you’ve heard of the Wordless Wednesday concept. The idea is on Wednesdays, you post one entry that has no text, just a photo. It’s an idea I’ve always enjoyed on other blogs and wanted to implement over here on iffles.com, too, but I’m always feeling like you must be tired of seeing my photos anyway. Plus I think I’ve duplicated on posts (in fact, I’m pretty sure you’ve seen the above photo before… but I’ll get to why I posted that one in a second).

I’ve also, as mentioned in the last entry, wanted to change some stuff around here so I’m not as stressed about posting, and one post that always took me a while to create, and was constantly stressing over both the content and how fast I was able to get it up, was the recaps of the photos posted to the iffles.com Monthly Themes group on flickr.

And so, I’m merging the two ideas into one. Instead of picking out a number of my favorite photos in the group at the end of the month, I’m going to pick just one a week to showcase in Wordless Wednesday. I will still, of course, give the photographer all the credit and link back to his or her photo on flickr.

Because June’s theme is Doors/Windows, I decided to post the photo you see above to kick this whole thing off in a Worded Wednesday entry. It’s one I took, and not this month, either, so it’s all-around cheating, I suppose. But from here on out – YOUR photos!

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