Business Cards!

I ordered business cards recently and I got them in the mail today! Check out how cool they look!

The Front

 

The Backs

I ordered these from moo.com. They have great prices, and the quality is awesome. They have great templates for photography business cards, too! And, if you ever want to order more, they save your previous orders. The template I used allowed me to make five different backs, which is nice because I can give different ones out to people. Interested in senior portraits? Here, have the card with the senior portrait on it. Looking for something out of the ordinary? Here, have the card with the horse in the shopping cart.

Hopefully I’ll be able to give these out to people. I’m thinking maybe when I’m out doing a shoot and someone asks me what I’m doing, or when I’m standing in line at a store with some weird assortment of objects and the person in line next to me asks, “What are those for?” I’m thinking about leaving them in miscellaneous places, too. I’m new to this, can you tell?

It would be super cool if I could get more freelance work. Wish me luck!

 

Memorial Day and How Hot Air Balloons Exist

It’s Memorial Day in the United States, which means it’s a holiday weekend! This weekend I did quite a bit in the way of photography, so here it goes!

I got a new camera. Kaiden and I went to a couple flea markets and I scored a Sears KS-1 camera with a fixed 50mm lens. The camera is semi-automatic and I can only set the aperture. The camera sets the shutter speed. So, it’s good for when I’m in a hurry. I also scored a Promatic FTD4500AF Hot Shoe Flash- which I am SUPER HAPPY about because I’ve been wanting a flash for my analog cameras but hadn’t gotten around to it. Now I can play with gels and TUNGSTEN FILM I AM USING ALL CAPS BECAUSE I’VE BEEN WANTING TO SHOOT TUNGSTEN WITH A YELLOW GEL FOR ABOUT A YEAR NOW AND MY TIME HAS COME.

So that was pretty great.

Sunday morning was the more intense adventure. My boyfriend and I woke up at 3AM to drive two hours to see a hot air balloon launch in Frankenmuth, MI. For those of you who have been around for a while, my hot air balloon attempts from last year ended with two good photos of the balloons on the ground (one of which is being published.) I’ve started the hot air balloon season with determination, and I was not disappointed.

I was, however, deeply confused.

I’m new to this whole hot air balloon culture. All I know is that they are pretty and they fly and I want to photograph them. Last year, I always went to evening launches, where there would be a giant roped-off field and crowds of people sitting around it waiting for the balloons to blow up and get flyin’. Since every evening launch I went to ended with no balloons, I did some research and found that the balloons are more likely to fly in the morning. I’m not a morning person, but it was a “challenge accepted” kind of thing.

We got to Frankenmuth.

Nothing.

No one.

There was a field, but no people.

Imagine my tired confusion.

I took to the interwebs and found that they were not launching from the designated field, but rather from different backyards in the area, and that they were going to meet over a nearby air field. The hunt was on. We found the air field, but saw no balloons. On our drive though, we saw some balloons being inflated. So we waited.

The sky was dotted with balloons within 15 minutes. We parked the car and started walking, looking for a place to see the balloons more clearly. We got to an open field where there was a clear shot to the air strip, where the balloons were congregating. Pictures ensued.

Thank goodness I brought my zoom lens, because those balloons were a bit too far for 80mm. They are a bit back-lit, but that couldn’t be helped because, y’know, I can’t control the sunrise. I got a little lens glare as a result, but c’est la vie. Live and learn, as always.

I’m not super pleased with the photos, but I am excited I got to see balloons in flight. I’m going to more launches this summer, and I’m hoping that I’ll get to go to an evening launch, where the balloons will be a lot closer and hopefully not back-lit.

I took a picture frame that had a stock image of a hot air balloon in it with us because I had an idea for an instax picture, but we ended up using it for more than just that. Some of my favorite pictures are from messing around with it.

And that’s the hot air balloon adventure.

Our adventures on Sunday did not end there. We went to the beach to see my family and ended up going on a nature trail. I had my Minolta X-700 with me, but it randomly stopped working, so I was out of luck. I had my Minolta Weathermatic A with me, but it only had 6 shots left on it and it was quickly filled (but I can finally send it off to get developed!) I had to resort to using my iPhone, but I got a few pretty shots.

It was an excellent weekend for photography. I’ll have a double-exposed roll of my hot air balloon and beach escapades, but I have to finish the roll. And, speaking of double exposures, I’m still taking submissions for my double exposure challenge. Follow the link for more details and email your images to owensbydanielle@gmail.com. I’ll be posting the submissions by the end of the first week of June.

That’s all for now- I’m looking forward to seeing more submissions! Happy shooting~

 

Deo’s Double Exposure Challenge!

And now for something new!

Double exposure is a photographic process originally used for analog. A double exposure is the superimposition of two exposures to create a single image. Sometimes it’s the same exposure multiple times, or different exposures. Nowadays, this process can be done a multitude of ways.

If you know how to shoot double exposures, you can save yourself from my explanations below and skip forward to my challenge.

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In-Camera Double Exposure

This is my favorite way of shooting double exposures, because I feel that it can be challenging and this process forces you to think. There are two ways that you can shoot double exposures in-camera:

Shoot a Roll Twice

1. Shoot a full roll of film, then rewind it and shoot it again.
2. When you shoot the roll the first time, be sure to under exposure each image by one stop. Then, when you re-shoot the roll, under expose by one stop AGAIN. This is because you are layering exposures, so the combination of the two one stop under exposures will balance each other out and create a properly exposed double-exposure. Make sense?
3. It is also important to pay attention when rewinding your film- you do not want to rewind it all the way back into the canister, as it will be difficult to pull it back out.
4. For most cameras, if you rewind the film up until the moment the rewinding-crank stops resisting, you should be fine. Or, you could sit in a pitch-dark room, take your film out, and rewind it by hand (I usually use a pair of scissors to do this.)

Shoot Double Exposures with the Film-Rewind Trick

1. Shoot the exposure you want, then while holding down the film-rewind button, push the film-advance lever. That way the film won’t advance. This is the process I use, and the exposure rules I explained above still apply.
2. You have to pay close attention when using this approach, because when you are ready to take the next set of doubles you have to advance the film all the way.
3. So, when shooting double exposures, the pattern would be something like this: snap, hold down film-rewind and advance the film, snap, advance the film without holding down the film-rewind button.
4. Not all cameras can do this, so be sure to poke around the internet for more information on your particular camera before shooting.

Layering Negatives

This is a process I have never used, but I found a nice, short article that gives the general idea of how to do this. And, the images are breath-taking: http://petapixel.com/2012/09/10/create-beautiful-surreal-photographs-by-stacking-your-film-negatives/

The Digital Approach

This is the very first process I used, and a lot of people are using it nowadays, since analog photography is nearly obsolete or pursued by hipsters or photography students or… You get it.

Layer and Change Opacity

1. Open your photo-editing software and take two images, and layer them on top of one another.
2. Then, select the top layer, and change the opacity so you can see the image beneath it.
3. Play with contrast, hue, saturation, whatever you want to get your desired results.

BONUS: Double Exposure Silhouettes

Pop Photo made a good tutorial on how to make double exposures with silhouettes of faces. Here is the link to that tutorial: http://www.popphoto.com/how-to/2014/04/how-to-shoot-camera-double-exposure-photo

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So you know how this whole double exposure business works, but you don’t know why I bothered making this large post about it, and I mentioned something about a challenge? Well…

DEO’S FIRST EVER CHALLENGE: DOUBLE EXPOSURES

I am challenging you all to shoot some double exposed images to send in to me, and they will be featured here on my blog. Here’s how to do it, and here are the details:

1. You must email me the image you want to include and if you have a blog or website, or somewhere else, please include the link. My email address is owensbydanielle@gmail.com. Please tell me your name or your business, and the title of the image.
2. The image size should be as small as it can be, so the largest side should be 1000 pixels or less.
3. Please insert either your name or your blogs name in the file name.
4. Remember to include a link to your blog or website.

Please note you don’t have to be a WordPress blogger to be in this challenge, you can have a link to a Facebook page, a Flickr page, anywhere really, or no link.  I just want to see people trying/sharing their double exposure work- this is all for fun!
Just to let you know also, that as soon as the challenge is published, all emails and images you have sent me are deleted from my computer.  I respect your copyright and would never keep any of the images. That, and it would be just plain rude of me to do that.

I will be taking submissions until MAY 31ST. All images will be posted, so this is a cool way to get your work seen!

If you have any questions, feel free to comment or email me!

Babes in the Woods (and Other Places)

This past weekend I visited some friends and attended their graduation party. I only had my Natura Classica with me, but I filled it quickly at their party, which was near a wooded area. I took some pictures of my friends (who I don’t normally get to take photos of so it was a treat,) and yeah. I don’t know what else to say so here are the photos:

At their party there was a huge bonfire that I got some good pictures of- but you won’t see those until I make my “May’s Photos” post! I filled my roll that was supposed to be for the month of May on these photos, so half the roll is from my random captures and the other half are of my friends. I loaded my camera with a new roll, so maybe I’ll fill it up before June (which is ten days away but whatever.)

The woods were really beautiful, I hope I get the opportunity to shoot Christine and Amber there again sometime.

I have a shoot tomorrow with a roll of film that I souped- I can’t wait to show you guys and give you the recipe!

Thanks for looking and happy shooting!

Five Months

It has been five months since I’ve done a roll of double exposures on my Minolta X700. More than that, maybe, I don’t know. I’ve lost count. It was probably for the best, because for a while there I was double-exposure happy. But, I have come off my hiatus with a developed roll that I started at the end of March in Dayton, OH and finished today here in Michigan.

As I mentioned before, I started this roll in Dayton, OH. The second picture is of my friend Rachel, in this weird room in our hotel parking garage. The hotel we were in was extra shady, mostly because of this parking garage. After the sixth level, there were no lights and there were tarps on the ceiling, and on the second floor there was this room. It had no explanation, just a desk and a single, creepy, light bulb. So, Rachel posed all stoic-like for me.

The next three images are from when I moved out of my dorm about two weeks ago. My room was empty, and I figured I might as well take advantage of it. My favorite is the red-hued image (that’s me on the floor with my fish, Charlemagne.) I framed everything and my boyfriend pressed the shutter. Team work!

The last three are from this past weekend, when I went with my niece and nephews to a carnival near our house. We had to leave early because of violence (long story, people are dumb,) and ended up at a park by the end of the evening.

I have one image that I scanned in straight from film, and that’s because I was looking over my prints and realized that one of the images I took wasn’t printed by the lab. So, I scanned it in myself, and took some liberties with the colors.

That’s my niece and nephew, waiting in-line for the pirate ship ride, with the ferris wheel superimposed. It’s my favorite because if you look closely, you can see that they are holding hands.

I also took a couple non-double exposures that I think have their merits, so here they are.

Those are my nephews, and that is the pirate ride. I think the light leak that appeared over the bottom half of the image was pretty lucky. It makes it look misty, and hey, pirate ships and mist? They go well together.

Do you guys enjoy taking double exposures? If so, how do you do it? Do you do it with your digital camera and them put images together in Photoshop? Do you put two negatives together? Or do you do your double exposures in-camera? Comment and share!

Since I like doing double exposures so much, I think I might so a double-exposure challenge for you guys. But, more on that later.

Happy shooting!

One of Those Things

Ah, yes. One of those things I finally got around to doing, after about of year of saying I was going to do it.

I stitched on a picture!

So I took this picture back in March. I edited it, and then went to spoonflower.com to get a fabric swatch made and sent to me. I got the swatch in April, and have been working on it on and off since. It was a nice go-to activity between classes and whenever I didn’t feel like studying.

I have a list of these I want to do, and I’m currently waiting for a new swatch to get here so I can start another one. If I keep at this, I’m looking forward to seeing the progression. Undoubtedly, I’ll learn more embroidery stitches to make these images special. I also have a few ideas that involve beading, so this is going to be a grand ‘ole time, I think.

In other news, only seven weeks until I study abroad in London! I’m getting my photography stuff together for the trip- remember that time I brought six cameras to Los Angeles? Yeah, it’s going to be like that, but worse better. I’ll have to make a blog post about what I’m bringing when the time for my departure draws nearer.

That’s all for now- happy shooting!

Found Photos

Moving back home for the summer from college means going through my old stuff. During one of these, uh, adventures (they really are adventures- sometimes I find man-eating spiders that breathe fire and capture kingdoms,) I found some old photos. Glancing through, they all seemed like standard high school shots of my old friends and I doing high school things. Like painting t-shirts with puffy paint and going to Meijer (the supermarket of Michigan,) at 3AM for cooking dough. Now that I think about it… I still do those things.

BUT ANYWAYS

I found some pictures from my freshman year of college, when I was unwittingly on a photography hiatus. They were photos taken on my Holga TIM and my Lomo Oktomat (before it decided to crap out on me and waste two rolls of amazing film) of adventures I had with my boyfriend. They’re nothing too spectacular, but I noticed a couple had their merits. And the light leaks are pretty near. One photo in particular made me smile from ear to ear, and I’ll tell you why.

One spring afternoon, when the semester was ending, my boyfriend and I went on a stroll around campus, because I wanted to take pictures. This picture is special, because it creates a narrative about our first date. It was five months previous to our walk, on a cold November evening. He was taking me to the opera at the campus auditorium, and as we walked across the crosswalk, hands clasped together, he asked, “So, is this a date?” I think I said “Sure.”

We’re an eloquent pair.

But yeah, I thought that was pretty neat. It’s nice how photography can help you relive memories. They say that smell is the strongest sense for bringing about memory, but I think that sight is up there, too. If sight didn’t help us recall memories, there wouldn’t be a need for photography. It’s human nature to not want to forget; when photography was first invented, people would document their deceased loved ones before they were buried, so they wouldn’t forget their faces. And, bonus fact, before the invention of photography, people would shine a light by the deceased person so their shadow would be cast on a nearby wall. The living relative/loved one would then trace their silhouette on the wall. So they wouldn’t forget. It’s pretty morbid, but sweet at the same time.

So enough of the sappy post I’ve got going on here… Hold on to your photos, you’ll never know when you’ll look back on them and think “Hey! That was a great [insert memory here]!”

 

April’s Photos

April Photos bring May… Photos.

So I didn’t finish my 35mm film role until the 6th, so I kinda cheated a little bit this month and didn’t complete it in a month’s time. But that’s okay, I still got some nice shots.

My scanner is really dusty. But the little dusts and fuzzies on the images make them look like they have a special effects filter, like they look older. I like that. Did I like, say like too many times in the past couple of sentences? I’m trying to like, make you realize I like what happened.

But I’m totally cleaning the dust off it off next time I use it.

My best friend, Kaiden, really saved my butt. We were at a graveyard, doing one of my Fictionisms, and I really liked (there it is again!) how the light was shining between the trees. I pulled out my Classica and went to take a photo- no film. I just kinda stood there for a minute, staring at my empty camera half-expecting a film canister to magically appear. Thankfully, Kaiden had a spare roll and he helped me out. You should check out his Flickr– he has some really cool double exposures!

I find that it is getting harder to keep up with this project, but I’m still carrying my camera everywhere. I think I had such a hard time this month because I was swamped with final exams and final projects. My head was hanging low whenever I was going somewhere, thinking about what I had to get done for the future instead of being in the moment. It’s kinda sad to think about how many wonderful shots I missed. I’ll have to try harder to be present in the present.

Something cool happened when I was scanning my images- my scanner thingy got jammed, but it kept scanning as I un-jammed it. I found this surprising image on my memory card:

It looks so cool! I want to try this with other images, maybe a mix of my photography, some stickers, maybe even magazines… This was such a happy accident and I can’t wait to experiment with it some more.

I’m thrilled it’s summer break for me now. I have so many experiments to try this summer- I’ll be sure to share them all with you guys and gals and others, so you can try them out too~

Happy shooting, everyone!