During the day I finished up a computer science project that's due two mondays from now. Getting it out of the way took a huge load off my back. In the evening I tried flexing my creativity muscle while taking photographs. After ten or so shots of absolutely random stuff, an idea suddenly popped into my head.

I took out my remote shutter release cable and looked for places that the camera normally doesn't go. Usually it's difficult taking photos from weird locations, but with the cable it's much easier, since you don't have to have a finger on the shutter to take the photographs. I put the camera in the fridge, oven, microwave, cabinet, washing machine, closet, and various other places.

Of all the portraits I took tonight, my favorite turned out to be the one in which I stuck my head and hand into a cabinet, looking at some pills. It's definitely the weirdest thing I thought up tonight.

I really like abstract ideas when it comes to photography. Sometimes if I'm reading a magazine, I'll come across a surreal photograph that I really like, like a man digging through a hole into grass in the middle of his living room. It's just something about seeing a scene in a photograph that you'd never ever expect to see, unless you were dreaming or something. Maybe that's it...

Anyways...

I'm heading back to berkeley tomorrow at 7 in the morning. I'm not sure what I'm going to be doing, but I might go shoot downtown in the evening. I've only gone by myself for 2-3 hours at a time so far, but if anyone is interested in coming along, let me know. It's not TOO dangerous over there.

I Am by mark schultz is such a good song, but I think I'm slowly killing it by listening to it too many times in too short a time span.

Here are a couple techniques I discovered today when photographing these "portraits".

If you're trying to autofocus on yourself with a DSLR, there's no way you can look through the viewfinder to do it... Duh, right?

If you use autofocus points, it might be tricky, since they could focus on something other than you. One way might be to set it on manual focus, and choose the distance you're going to be at. However, I discovered today that if you use only the center autofocus point, you can focus on your own eye using your reflection in the lens filter. If you can overlay the lens opening with your eye in the reflection and then autofocus the center point, it will focus on your eye. With a remote release cable, you can do this, and then recompose the shot while keeping the same focus, before taking the picture.

The second trick I discovered when taking these pictures with the remote release, is that to take pictures in which you're a little farther, you can use your foot to set off the shutter release. This makes it so your arms aren't a limiting factor in choosing your distance from the camera.

That's all for now folks. Cya.