random

I love this grey building. I need to figure out how to capture it properly. I did like the concrete expanse and littered cubes giving scale and depth at this distance though.

Dessert from a fine restaurant in the new opera house. I loved it, chocolate ice cream, skyr mousse, pistachio brownie cubes, plus all types of sweet crumbs sprinkled over.

Skyscraper right near my work. I love it, the design is really pleasing to me. I wanted to show a bit more of the side squatty building plus this run down construction wall in front. Borg means city in Icelandic.

I love color, and icelandic houses are colorful.

I also like blue and red.

When I liked a photo I took, but the color is superfluous or almost gone, I convert to B&W because then I can go even crazier with contrast than normal, which I think emphasizes the shapes. And if it's a photo without much color, the shape is most likely what drew me to the shot.

This scene seemed serene to me somehow.

sharp at F/2? you betcha!

Click for full size. This is a 100% crop on the left, from the larger image on the right taken at F2 against a very bright sky (I brought it back a bit in post to show the clouds, it was near white in the jpg preview embedded in the RAW file) No purple fringing, no chromatic aberrations. Shots taken in the same location with the canon 85mm 1.8 showed severe purple fringing.

2nd portrait shoot.

The full write up is here on my lighting blog, but here are just the images:

buildings and food

I might try something different and give a brief reason for each photo and what made me want to capture it.

The reds and greens in this scene made me want to capture it. It had something somber going on.

This is the quintessential Icelandic scene; the candy wall. Every theatre, grocery store, and gas station has a candy wall for you to put together "Blandi Pokka" (mixed bag). Adults and children alike enjoy this. Most of the candy has licorice in it.

This is a shot of a dish I made recently, shrimp pad thai with tons of chili and peanuts. I love egg noodles. I normally photograph most of the food I prepare, but more for sharing purposes with friends on facebook. I thought there was something really pleasing about this image for a wider audience.

This building seemed to have a presence. I liked the red bottom to it also.

I liked the contrast between the rocks at the bottom, the corrugated steel, and then the blue textured door. I also liked the strong diagonal of the roof.

This one had so much texture and various lines going on. I loved it. It had a very dilapidated feel while still being structured. As a side note this shows how much dynamic range the X100 can record. The clouds clipped just the smallest amount, but the building was very dark, I had to pull it up a lot in post to keep the exposure correct.

A two person submarine? sign me up!

family shots with the x100

The X100 makes such a great family snapshot camera. It's small size means I can keep it around my neck all day. I'm on crutches for 6 weeks and even in this state I keep it on me. I definitely wouldn't bother with a larger camera. So many times I saw something my cousins would do that was cute, or a scene I wanted to remember about this delightful weekend, and all I had to do was lift the camera and snap. My mother in law brought her 40D+kit lens, and only brought it out a few times in comparison, and had a large bag that had to be found each time she wanted it.

Plus two from around the city. Every day I see something tiny that makes me want to grab. This one was the texture of these vertical boards. I knew I wanted it in B&W too.

And this one was the sun dappling on the mountain in the background plus the clouds.

laugarvatn

I took a trip out to Laugarvatn this weekend with my family in law. Was great. Tiny wooden house, out in the countryside. Even being on crutches it was an amazing recharge. Sleeping late, gorgeous scenery, NO INTERNET (a good thing on vacation), family, good talks, making pizza for everyone, lamb legs, ice-cream, it was everything a good vacation should be.

But first, a few squares from Reykjavik near the main shopping mall.

This old man crossing the road made me want to snap. The goal of this blog is not to over think, but to shoot a lot, and try to hone my photographic eye. Not sure what made me want to take a photo of him, and he was quite far away so this is a bit of a crop, but tried to make the best of the image in post to capture what it was I saw in real life to make me want to grab it.

Now, Icelandic nature. (needs no introduction)

Couldn't help but doing one geometric square at the Geysir stop. The orange and wooden boards drew me to it.

textures

This post is mostly buildings who's texture made me interested in the shot.