Photography Friday

This week’s pictures are from my trip to Dallas for a conference. I chose to go to a conference that was a broad overview of the field of bioinformatics and as I, and the rest of the students who went, discovered what this really meant was two and a half days of talks most of which weren’t directly related to what we were doing.  That’s a lot of talks to sit through when they’re not topics relevant to you!  And while there are some legendary conferences where half the point is for professors to have fun traveling and get drunk after the conference, this was not one of those conferences. So these pictures are from what ended up being my favorite part of the trip – a visit to an art museum and a statuary garden with my roommate, who was wonderfully patient while I took forever taking pictures of ducks 🙂

Photography Friday

You know it’s been a busy week when you’re spending your Friday night taking pictures of your shower curtain because that’s really just all the excitement you can handle.  Well, that and the fact that this is the first chance I’ve had all week to even think about pictures.  Another busy week in the lab, the sort of week which has caused the boy to start telling his family that I’m doing “mad scientist stuff” and possibly “making zombie e. coli” (the second part, at least, is provably untrue, while the first part is… subjective).  Anyway, back to the shower curtain.  A while back, I took a picture of my shower curtain as part of my first few fumbling attempts at abstracts for the Ames Camera Club competition.  But the lighting was all wrong, so today I decided to move my own lighting in.  Unfortunately, it seems like there may be one interesting way to take a picture of a shower curtain and I just couldn’t find it again tonight.

Fortunately, I also have an awesome picture of my cat Maggie to share or I might feel pretty sad about my picture selection this week!  She thought I was paying way too much attention to the shower curtain and wanted to play, so I decided to try to take pictures of her while playing with her. Easier said than done! First, she would grab the yarn and sit up and look fierce – until the moment I got my camera oriented for a portrait shot, when she would roll on her back and look adorable and very horizontal.  She also did her absolute best to look at the string (and therefore the camera) for the minimum amount of time possible while still holding the string.  I swear, she was laughing on the inside.  In fact, the one non-motion blurred face shot I managed to get is the one you see here, and I’m pretty sure she’s singularly unimpressed with my picture taking speed.  If she could talk, I think she’d tell me that if I was trying to catch mice, I would be utterly hopeless 🙂

Photography Friday

This week I stayed a little closer to home for my photography and finally got the perfect lighting to take a picture of this interesting shadow created by my balcony rail.  The Ames Camera Club abstract photography competition is coming up next week and I think I may enter this picture as well (everyone may enter up to 3), so wish me luck!  I hope everyone is having a great weekend 🙂

Photography Friday

This week, the Ames Photography Club meeting was a talk on HDR photography, so I’ve been experimenting with that a little this week.  Unfortunately, I don’t have any results I’m excited about.  But I did photoshop this picture I took over Christmas break and I think I like it enough that it’s going to be my entry in the photography club contest this year.  The theme is abstracts and I’ve had a lot of fun taking pictures of things I wouldn’t usually notice trying to get something good for it 🙂  As always, feel free to check out my other work on flickr and if you follow me, I’ll follow you back.