My first memory of photography is somewhere around the 3-4 year old range when my mother was heavily into photography. She took me with her into the darkroom and let me do photograms, and she’d let me slowly get into taking pictures with a wide array of cameras. I hit the darkroom throughout elementary school, high school, and a little bit in college before turning to digital.
So I’ve taken thousands of images over the years (boy that makes me sound old). No where near all of them have been digitized, and very few are posted… But nevertheless here’s a list of my five favorite images that I have posted on Flickr. Most of my Flickr images are relegated to the landscape and inanimate object variety, but that’s only because in this day and age I don’t like posting images of people without their 100% permission.
So the photos here may be my favorite for composition reasons, or because of the memories associated with the image. Regardless here’s the list as it sits now and could very well change with the weather.
5. untitled – 2007. That is the top of a willow tree up at my grandparents place in Angola Indiana. This is an infrared image, but the thing that makes me love this is light clouds in the sky. There’s nothing technically hard about this if you know basic infrared, but it just makes me happy for a reason that I can’t quite say now that I’m trying to.
4. Defender 110 and Neil on Pearl Pass – 1999. I love this image for what it shows and the time it takes be back to. The storm in the distance is a bit looming, but the sparse landscape shows you that there’s something different about where this image was taken. This was actually taken with my first digital camera. A Sony Mavica that only got up to 1024×768… That’s right, less than a single megapixel.
3. Smear over Silver Lake – 2008. This image was something I had to work for. This was the culmination of a few years of trying to learn High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography. It’s not that I hadn’t produced HDR photos that I’d liked in that time, but this was the first one that came out in the way I really wanted to when I set out to learn HDR. Then again, it is one of those easy to take scenes, but the processing hoops I went through were pretty complicated. This image probably stopped what was my increasing frustration in getting what I wanted out of HDR.
2. Millennium Park – 2007. This is here mostly because it’s such a cool subject, and I was pretty happy with this being my first serious attempt at HDR. I’ve reprocessed it since and gotten a few things better, but not the intense blue gradients with no other people around. I actually shouldn’t have had time to take this because I was waiting for a group of people to get into Chicago, and they should have been there hours beforehand. While I was pissed that they were so late (completely within their control), I’m pretty happy I was able to go and get this and a few other images.
1. War Memorial – 2007. I just really dig the backlit thing going on in this. I was actually in the middle of doing a time lapse with my D200, but I had the D100 on hand to take quick one-offs like this. I’m glad I did. This was the best thing I got all night.
Honorable Mention:
One Comment
1 Hungry Hank wrote:
While the Pearl Pass one sparks good memories, I’d have to say my favorite is the infrared taken at your grandparent’s place … love the clouds being lit up like the sun is about to burst through them coupled with the eerie feeling like the world is ending due to some nuclear event … very cool.