Erty's Blog: My Life and Times, Through Photographs

Fluorescent Lights

2011-08-12T11:06:00.001-06:00

Some experiments I found on my camera.

You might recognize the third one from a little over two years ago.

--Erty

Nearly A Year

2010-05-07T22:28:00.003-06:00

Whatever.

New pictures! Look! A Chicken!

Nice chicken, you might say? Here's a rooster. He glares.

Here's a chicken and a beautiful lady. Two for one!

Now a flower. Desaturated except the flower itself. Hip!

And a wagon. I bumped up the saturation and vibrance in this one. Joyful!

That day, it snowed! Look! Irises and snow!

Apple blossoms and snow!

I took a really long exposure shot of the yard at night (I am at Greta's house)

Okay cool.

--Erty

My Neck Hurts from Rock Music

2009-06-22T23:49:00.003-06:00

It's been awhile since I've coherently updated. Looking back, I promised pictures from graduation, posted a 2am rant, and then went on to advertise something based on an entirely different site. Not the way to win readers' hearts. But, I figure, if I'm going to stay up this late on a work-night, I might as well get something useful done tonight so that I can feel good about it.

It's a strange thing, really. I didn't really notice my high school graduation. I was so busy, so stressed by the immenent death of the school, so focused on getting those last good grades, that when the moment came, I really didn't notice it. Summer, since then, has been going by rather fast, too. When I'm in an office for eight hours a day, I'm focusing more on that night than the time that I'm in, and when I'm home at night, I'm more focused on getting to the weekend, and stuffing as much fun as I can into the four hours between when I get home and when I have to go to sleep (which was, incedentially, two hours ago). During the school year I want it to be summer, and during the summer I want it to be the weekend.

Changing topics now.

At the beginning of the summer, my parents, my friend Sam, and I all went and stayed at the Jersey Jim fire tower in Mancos, CO. It's a fire lookout tower from before they had fancy satellites to track smoke and infrared - rangers would hang out in the tower and watch for smoke all day.

A picture (alebeit stylized) of the tower:

While I was there, I also took some other pictures of the surrounding area - some from the tower, some while I was on a walk in the woods. My favorites:

A picture of some trees about a mile from the tower. I liked the combination of backlit and frontlit leaves.

My personal favorite, a sunset from (I think) the second day:

At the top of the tower were hummingbirds, sipping sugar water from the feeder at the top of the tower and zipping around peoples heads like little green meteors. They seemed to know what they were doing. Becasue the sunlight was pouring down, I managed to grab a few shots of the little creatures in flight, only to find their wings captured as an unrecognizable blur. This placid fellow, however, I snapped a photo of, moments before it buzzed off to find more unsuspecting flowers.

My friend Sam Golon came with me on the trip, since my sister opted out. Here he is (Sam, not my sister :) \)

We found a strange structure in the forest. Actually, my family and I had found it years before (We've been to the firetower a fair many times), but this time Sam and I explored it (and I had a camera with me). There are no electronics inside, and the best guess is that it's a strange sculpture for geocachers or the like. Around the sculpture is a large patch of strange cabbage-like leafy plants, that grow in all the bogs surrounding the area.

My parents, at the foot of the firetower:

As a parting shot, the front and back of my rock (tradition: Seniors place a rock on campus bearing their name and a [usually inspirational] word):

It's right outside the admin wing.

--Erty

24-hour comic

2009-06-10T23:40:00.002-06:00

For those of you who follow me here, I've just put up my 24-hour comic from 2006. For those of you who don't know what that is, it's a 24-page comic (plus cover) that I wrote and drew in 24 hours.

Link -> YAY!

Check it out!

--Erty

The Day Before

2009-05-23T23:18:00.003-06:00

I realized today that I am walking some of the Conserve School trails for the last time ever, and that there is not a relaxed moment that I will have until probably tomorrow night.

However, I will be able to have Swedish Pancakes (You may know them by another name, they're basically crepes) tomorrow morning, made by my grandmother.

Also I learned today that I have Arabic ancestors way way way back (like 800 or 900 CE), which is pretty cool. Apparently some of the people near Persia moved up to Sweden and became reindeer salesmen. I'm also related to Eric the Red, who was a viking, and Leif Ericsson, who was an early discoverer of America.

Aaaanyway, Today (technically, since it's like 12:30 in the morning), is my high school graduation. Yeah. Wow. It's slowly getting to me, like some sort of five-gigabyte download over dialup, that this is my last night at Conserve. I may return as an alumni, but we'll see.

The leaves are just amazing here. Last year around graduation, there was only a light fuzz on the trees, and I was dissapointed. This year, however, I asked the trees really nicely if they would have leaves for me by the time I left, and they did. Some pictures from this Thursday:

Amazing. Greta and I went for a walk in the woods to hang a sign in a special spot which I will tell you about once I have my diploma safely in hand, and to take some pictures of the leaves.

And some newer plants are pushing themselves up, too:

Good depth of field, yes? I like macro shots of things like this. One day, perhaps, I will own a lens that will allow me to do really really close up shots of things. Maybe I'll put some of my graduation money toward that.

There were a lot of alumni on campus this weekend, which has led to some very wild running around. Most of them are used to the freedom of college (or a year off) and so coming back here, where girls aren't allowed in guys dorms, etc., is kind of strange to them. Mischief is planned, which I of course know nothing about...

This crazy man is on campus, and I managed to grab a good shot of him on top of the swing set.

He, in return, took this amazing motion shot of me from that same vantage point on the swingset.

This past Thursday night was also the end of school dance. Some pictures:

I'll post pictures from graduation tomorrow, hopefully. Also, I have a new G1 Google Phone with Android! Woo! Thanks Uncle Steve and Aunt Barbara!

--Erty

Notes and Pictures From the Front, Complete with Code Words

2009-05-20T22:19:00.008-06:00

If you're friendly with the Conserve School administration or the trustees, I would like to remind you that the first amendment protects this blog post. Also I'm not lying.

Today my friends and I here at Conserve School planned and executed an amazing party code named "Otterhouse". I came up with the name while I was walking around, and it sounded cool, so I used it. There were secret messages and code words, meetings and conspiracies. This wasn't to exclude anyone, no. Instead, we were simply trying to avoid the prying eyes of our headmaster, Stefan. (whenever I refer to him henceforth, pretend I'm saying "he" or "him" with a tint of derision, please. Thanks.) He reads our email(I have 99% proof of it anyway), he somehow always knows what we're up to. He personally has created a terrible atmosphere of tension and surveillance here that more than anything has put a dampener on our last weeks here. I know for a fact that there are a lot of people who would rather we had a different headmaster who wasn't constantly watching, listening, and perusing our personal messages, thank you very much.

Oh, so anyway we planned Operation Otterhouse in secret, right? Nobody told him where this thing was, or sent it by email. We sent the time and date, the people and the details, but the party's location was kept to verbal communication only. So what does he do? He shows up. At our secret woods party. He shows up and claims to be "clearing brush" along the trail that leads to the peninsula. The only possible explanations I have for this are:

He overheard someone say the location(very unlikely, as we're all paranoid).
He was watching us from across the lake through some sort of binoculars or telescope.
He was patrolling the woods in his car, listening for party sounds.
Somebody accidentally sent the location by email (very unlikely, as we're all paranoid).

We partiers went to the main building for dinner, and when we came back, he's gone. In his defense, the trail had in fact been cleared, but what are the odds that he happens to be maintaing that exact trail on that exact day at that exact time? We hang out and play cards for a while (BS, mostly). We chat for a while. Then he shows up AGAIN, and asks us, "If I served root beer floats at 9:00 tonight in the commons would you guys like them?" Then he leaves. We said yes, though. They were pretty tasty, but everyone knows he's just trying to win us over after he kicked everyone out.

I understand completely his need to keep tabs on students. Unfortunately, I believe very strongly that although he has the right to read our emails and even listen in through our computer microphones (which I have yet to dis-believe), this does not mean that he should unless something is wrong. This is a man who has too much time on his hands (and too much money, I hear he's getting a raise after destroying our school do to 'economic woes', although this is unconfirmed rumor-stuff right now) if he sits in his office reading students' emails and watching our every move through the cameras on campus.

I wouldn't put it past him to have the entire campus bugged. I'm not even the one who came up with that. The atmosphere here is one of fear and division. I love what Conserve was. I love it no longer.

I still think a lot of the kids here are pulling thin strings of fun through our headmaster's steel grate of containment. Operation Otterhouse, the party, was still a blast. Some pictures:

Brendan in a tree.

Opal was a little cold. It was about 80 degrees but REALLY WINDY.

Hobbes reacts to... I don't remember. It's still a good picture though.

Lena, who has been featured before on this blog.

Finally a strange picture that I took of Dimitri's goosebumped skin. I thought it was a cool texture that I might be able to use in some strange way, like reference for a drawing. I also just thought it was a strange enough picture to share.

Weiiiird. Anyway.

We're holding out, but I know a lot of people will be happy to be out from under Stefan's rule this Sunday.

--Erty, codename "Señor Awesome"

Six Sweet Sunrises, then Say Goodbye

2009-05-18T22:47:00.002-06:00

Hello everyone. I must say that I've surprised myself by updating this often throughout my senior year of High School. Although there was quite a lull in the middle (I was distracted by such things as NaNoWriMo and various scholarly escapades), I would call this quite a successful web-log of my year, as it were. The above picture is Greta, at a peninsula that is hard to get to and fun to be at. If there were a picture where I did a good job of focusing on the eyes, it would be this one.

...

That sentence made no sense. Moving on.

Here's Greta again, looking down. We're all kind of weirded out here - if you haven't been in contact with Conserve School, we're in a kind of conundrum where the administration is a bunch of bums and decided to revamp our school. I wouldn't mind, except that they pulled off the transition horribly, leaving everyone except the seniors with no school anymore. Most of the juniors are facing a life decision of going to college a year early without getting a high school degree, returning to the shell of a school they once loved, or being first-year-seniors at strange high schools that are often too close or too far from home.

But I digress. That's a battle to be fought in other fora.

Below is a series of pictures that I took at an epic "tea-and-loud-music" party the other night.

It was pretty awesome. Below, pictures that I took of the "Painting Rock" on campus, emblazoned with my own logo design. Someone (who, I wonder!?) painted it on the rock on a brave, chivalrous, and amazing display of awesomeness that is... ahem. I mean, who painted it?

Six days until I graduate high school. Currently I am surviving finals. There will probably be pictures of graduation posted here soon.

--Erty

Coming Up on the End

2009-05-10T19:02:00.003-06:00

Greta and I went for a walk the other day. I was going down to the lake to take a picture of some leaves that I thought would make a good color scheme. None of the pictures of the leaves came out particularly well, but I now have a really cool color scheme that I want to use somewhere.

Not a photograph, per say, but I'm fond of it.

This picture I took of some birch trees that were white against the sky. Normally the brightness of the sky makes them dark, but both the trees and the sky exposed nicely in this one. The picture itself is a little busy, but that's beside the point.

I saw this bird on this log, and tried to get a lot closer. It flew away right before I was able to get my camera up, so all I have is this detail of a shot from a lot farther away. This picture was taken from the causeway, if you know where that is.

This flower was right outside the LAB the other day. The sun was just about to come out from behind the clouds, which then caused a huge lens flare.

Toadstool-mushroom-thing!

Greta and I stuck this to a tree in the forest here. If you find it, please don't take it down.

In lieu of a bland and white image, you get this super-short-depth-of-field image that Greta took. This was out by the climbing tree.

This squirrel was in a tree, and I somehow managed to get a shot of it. I would regale you with a longer story, but instead I think I'll just finish this up so I can go do my homework.

As I mentioned, I'm short on time, so I'll leave you with this picture of poor Lena about to get assassinated. Or perhaps assassafrassinated?

--Erty

SPAMMERS!

2009-04-24T17:44:00.002-06:00

Somebody has stolen my last post, run it through what looks like a bad traslator or a word changer, and posted it to their blog. It contains a lot of odd lexical changeups. From the title of the blog, I think they found it by searching for the word "photoshop". I'll see if this post also ends up garbled and stolen.

The link is: http://photoshoptrial.blogmas.com/2009/04/24/ertys-blog-my-senior-year-after-the-trial/

None of the information on that site is mine, and I would like whoever it is to please stop. I've sent a letter to the blogmas support team, and I'll see how far that gets.

Please remember that only some things you read on the internet are true - 1337guy.blogspot.com is my blog, not that theif's.

Unfortunately, that post showed up in a recent google alert about Conserve School - My link is the one to this blog.

Thank you,

--Erty

After the Trial

2009-04-23T20:07:00.002-06:00

Well, it looks like my school is going to die. Some might say that, no, it is just transitioning, but I happen to have bought into the idea that Conserve School as a four-year program was something really special. It was for me. Conserve School for me was a real home away from home, a school where I could really be myself. I don't think there are many schools that allow students to do that, and soon there will be one less.

Sometime soon, I'm going to make an image of Conserve School with both a birth and death date. Also, an image of our main building, the LAB, emblazoned with "NEVAR FORGET".

Anyway, I'm pretty depressed about the whole thing. I slept through most of Earth Day, and spent the afternoon at a house of one of the concerned parents, eating and trying not to talk about the whole thing.

Anyway, there was a small and low-key get-together at a local hotel immediately following the dismissal of our case to get our school back. (If you want to know what happened, https://bringbackconserve.com/). I took two pictures that I like.

Super high contrast, super high saturation. It reminds me of a carnival.

There was a pool table at the hotel, and although I didn't play, I did take some pretty pictures. This one was a slightly long-exposure shot that I played around with in photoshop. I darkened the eight-ball itself, and dodged out the white circle, to make it more of a focal point.

I'm pretty distracted at the moment, what with the whole school thing. 32 days until I graduate. I'm not sure how I feel about that.

Check out my new website design, if you have a moment: www.ertyseidel.com

--Erty

Stephen and Snow

2009-04-21T22:24:00.002-06:00

My good friend Stephen (pronounced Steven) McVerry was lounging and chatting, when I, the rogue photographer, snuck up upon him like a tiger among grass and pounced, shutter flying wildly open and closed as I tried to get the best angle and lighting to capture my subject.

...

Just kidding. I really just walked up to him with my camera, took a few shots while he struck poses like the one above, exchanged some quick and monosyllabic words, and walked away to go play DDR.

But it's fun to dream. Here's another shot of him:

Secretly, this second one is actually a pretty blurry picture, but I shrunk it down enough that I don't think anyone can tell unless they look really hard. Both these images are nicely rule-of-thirds and focus-on-the-eyes compliant, which I've been working on and seem to be getting the hang of. It might be the fact that my camera seems incapable of taking a "bad" image (barring those when I'm walking and shaking the camera so much that it would throw up if it were capable).

Also, it snowed. I am very disappointed about this and expect something to be done immediately.

Blizzarding down, we got about 5-6 inches in just two days. By Thursday, it's supposed to be 65 degrees here. Weather is so finicky. I was perfectly happy with the last time it was 65 degrees and clear. I think the perfectly logical explanation of this is that somebody with more snow karma that I went and sacrificed some small animals to the snow gods so that they could go skiing one more time.

I'm not bitter. Bitterly cold, maybe, but not bitter.

--

In addition, tomorrow is Earth Day. Here at our little environmental school, we like to celebrate Earth Day in a big way - we have the entire day off to do things related to environmentalism. I'm excited.

For those of you who know, tomorrow is also the big trial for Conserve School's future. I'm anxious, but I've decided I want to stay and go to Earth Day, since that's really why I'm here.

Good luck tomorrow, Mr. Leizerman & co.

--Erty

Return of the Pictures

2009-04-20T23:18:00.004-06:00

Well, I finally have a cord to get pictures off of my camera, and although I still do not have the highest confidence that my camera will continue to work for a long time, I have, in fact, taken some pictures.

I've been working on the design of my main website, too. That'll be up as soon as I work out all of the bugs (which are numerous, since I'm not using tables. Those who are CSS-savvy will understand my pain.)

To pictures!

I start off with my black and white piece for the evening. This is my good friend Bill Meier. This was taken during a class in which we spent two hours flying giant weather balloons. Yes, my school is just that AWESOME. We were testing the feasibility of a wind turbine, and one of the important factors is visibility. Unfortunately, at 180 feet the balloon was visible from across the nearby lake, and so the residents may take some convincing. By the way, 180 feet is WAY UP THERE.

This picture I took while I was at home, and had been recently pestered by friends and family to take some pictures. Among some almost amazing pictures of a fan, I found this glowing picture. I imagine the bells of the lamps as fairy skirts, their delicate owners glowing inside their flowing glass-silk bulbs.

This image I took of the sun at 1/4000 of a second, F22. It basically means that my camera was taking in the smallest amount of light that it can manage. The sun is BRIGHT. Things are just blowing my mind today (and, although it was 4/20 yesterday, I am not on anything.)

Well, this last weekend was my school's prom. The theme? Venetian masquerade. I went in black and white, complete with cape. The picture above is my mask, which I made out of an old pinhole camera, which in turn was made out of a Mrs. Feilds' cookie tin. I cut out the bottom of the 10" tin with a can opener, drew on the dimensions I wanted in dry-erase marker, and cut out the shape and eyeholes with regular scissors. One side of the mask was painted black, so I ran some fine-grained sandpaper over it to scratch away parts of the paint, giving the whole thing a very interesting look.

I took it off after about 20 minutes to go dance, but I really enjoyed making and wearing the mask.

As she is most likely under 13, it would be uncouth and possibly illegal to post her name, but let me just say that I really like the photography aspect of this picture. I think I caught a lot of the moment in this one snapshot that I took before spring break during a pep talk for our school musical, Cinderella. The viewer is almost immediately drawn to her eyes, which portray just so much about her personality in this picture. This is probably one of my favorite portraits so far.

This is one of my good friends here at Conserve, who was hiding behind a chair. I added a quick vignette to the image, and a little desaturation. Voila! The picture takes on a dark and emotional flavor. I've always been a strong believer in the theory that the position of a subject in a picture holds a lot of power in the image. I may have mentioned this before, but a subject at the top of the frame is flighty, free, and happy. A subject at the bottom of the frame (as shown here) is heavy, trapped, and weighed down. Here, combined with the odd angles and perspectives of the stonework (I was standing on the top of the chair), I think I've created a nicely dark picture.

--Erty

Joe is in our wing

2009-01-29T20:44:00.001-07:00

I said I would blog about this. Joseph R. is in our wing right now.

--Erty

2009-01-02T11:45:00.001-07:00

bu hao! bu hao!

My camera is broken. As soon as I get it back there will be more pictures.

Sorry!

--Erty

Bo Shi Dun

2008-12-03T06:38:00.004-07:00

My camera seems to be on the fritz (No offense, Claudia). My pictures are coming out slightly grainier than usual, and yes, I have checked the ISO. Although I blame my camera, the real culprit may be the constantly cloudy days here. Besides the grain, It's also shifting all of my images down, i.e., if I place the top of somebody's head right along the top of the frame in the viewfinder, the top of their head will be a full fifth of the way down the picture, which makes exact framing much more difficult. I'm having to zoom out and then crop in, which is dandy, except that I really like having a lot of resolution to work with.

That being said, here are some pictures

A selection from a larger image of a tower that is part of a house in Boston, where I was over Thanksgiving break.

I'm pretty sure this is actually the same house...

Slightly warmtone picture of a tree in Boston. Boston is the one city I think I might be able to live in if I really really had to.

I am not a city person.

Sidewalk in Boston, next to a community center. The lighting is really flat, I know.

There's some of the color of the old images! Sunset on a wall, still in Boston. I probably should have just prefaced these pictures with the words "These are all in Boston," instead of introducing them as being in Boston individually. Anyway,

Some flowers, in Boston.

Sunset over a lake in Boston.

Larger version (3MB) here!. That's not the full resolution of the image, but that one was something like 20MB, but that's just a little too big. It's a panorama of a building that I took from across a lake.

Although you might be expecting it, this next picture is not actually from Boston.

Greta helped me take my senior portrait the other day (no, this isn't it), and we had some spare time, so we took a couple of pictures together. This is one of my favorites of the batch. I'll upload my senior portrait when I've figured out which picture it is.

Thanks for reading,

--Erty

Portraits, Arsenic, and Tennis

2008-12-03T06:15:00.004-07:00

An odd title, I know, but it's been a really long time since I put any pictures up and decided that I should return to the ancient and most honorable art of blogging. Without further adieu, le pictures:

Mr. Stephen McVerry, stylishly posed in a autumn setting to... Yeah. It's his senior picture. I took it. He owes me a hi-five.

Xiaoyu Chen, my Chinese teacher. He was dismissing his class for a break just as I walked by his classroom. We were working on portraiture, so it seemed the perfect opportunity to grab a picture. I eventually settled on a sepiatone because there wasn't enough contrast to allow for full desaturation. Since the image is slightly flat (we haven't had a good lighting day for about a month now), the sepiatone allows for a slightly rustic look, like something out of the 1800s.

Just a cool picture of my lamp. I forgot that Aperture varied inversely with f-stop, and so, while taking this picture at f5.6 (which I thought was small aperture), I wondered why I had to put my shutter speed up so high (1/4000 second!). Silly me. I made the same mistake some days later, much to the amusement of my friends.

The next set of images are from the student production of "Arsenic and Old Lace," a play by J. Kesserling that was preformed recently here at Conserve School. I'll just let the pictures provide the commentary. I took over 400, and therefore these represent a small selection.

Left to Right: Dick Fickling, Stephanie Spicer, Eliot Frost, Tucker Eibner
---

LTR: Jasmine Zavala, Chris DeLong, Shay Gallagher
---

Sam Eliot, my college counselor.
---

Kegan Leizerman
---

In photography class (recently after the play) we had an assignment to take pictures of tennis balls in whatever creative way we could think up. Here was my entry:

The background is penlights blinking over a long exposure picture, and the tennis balls are lit by a long-wave UV light that we borrowed from my Chemistry teacher.

Also:

Yay! I wrote 50000 words (plus about 100 just to make sure) in November, from the first to the 29th (I was done by the 30. Records include : Writing 7600 words on the last day, 560 words in 20 minutes. I had tons of fun, and my novel (rough draft alert) is avaliable to anyone who wants to read it.

Another update should come along shortly.

Thanks,

--Erty

In the middle of National Novel Writing Month...

2008-11-07T21:58:00.002-07:00

So, instead of posting a long and tedious rant about each and every image, I'm just going to upload a whole slew of them and let you sort through them. I'll put a little text underneath each, but only enough to let you know what's going on - I have 50,000 words to write in a month.

My friend Dick, holding a weather balloon we were testing in class - we were measuring wind speeds.

The teacher of that class, Robert Eady. I'm in three of his classes right now - Alternative and Renewable Energies (The one with the weather balloon), Chemistry, and Digital Photography. He's also the adviser for my independent study in using videogames to teach Chinese. The man does everything.

Same location as the last two. I shot (once again) through a cardboard tube.

Some mushrooms with a cloth "multiply" layer applied in photoshop.

A dandelion taken while backlit with fill flash. The next day we had two inches of snow.

Practicing some portraiture with my girlfriend. Thanks, Greta!

An interesting image with odd depth of field and color.

With some photoshop, a bad image of some forks becomes stock photography!

See you in a while, and thanks for reading!

--Erty

Playing with a Camera

2008-10-13T05:35:00.004-06:00

Just to prove to you that this post is actually about what I am telling you it is about in The Title, I will present to you two pictures that will not only astound you, but also... well, okay, no, they're just pretty cool pictures. Anyway:

I have a whole collection of these - basically, I take a long exposure picture (usually with a small aperture) , and adjust the focal length while the shutter is open. Basically I zoom in while taking a picture. What you get, then, is a zooming effect. I plan to work on this and hopefully I can get an image that exhibits a perfect zoom (right now I have a problem with lingering on one or more locations in the zoom, which means that the subject, as in this picture, is clear at one point. A perfect picture using this effect would have a smooth zoom). Either way, I am still a fan of this picture. Pictured is Bill Meier, then Chris R.

Next picture, please?

Ah, yes. Muffins. Yummy yummy muffins. Pictured is Kathy P., with muffins. (The muffins are on the plate). This is because they are yummy muffins. I also think it's a good portrait.

I found a Pringles tube whilst on a recent camping trip (exploration week, where the entire school [~150 students] goes on trips depending on their class. Seniors went canoeing in the Boundary Waters) and decided to take pictures through it (the Pringles tube). It makes a very interesting effect, almost like a solid vingetting or inner frame. I may experiment with other salty food boxes on a later date. Pictured (for the second time this post!) is Chris R.

This picture is currently my desktop. I took it at Northland College, and it's pretty much a normal picture - no fancy whitebalances, apertures, f-stops or shutter speeds. It's a little overexposed to bring out the dark undersides of the clouds, but otherwise this is pretty much as I saw it.

Pretty cool, a?

My friend Zach and I in a tree. Greta took this picture. It just seems like a picture that would go on the cover of a yearbook or something. A little touch-up with the dodge tool on Zach would probably do the picture some good, though.

Not a spectacularly interesting image in terms of color - I think the entire picture could be characterized as "brown". I could probably bring the contrast up here, too - the histogram shows three little mountains all on the left side. But whatever. It's a pretty awesome mushroom.

My photography teacher, Robert, was talking to us just the other day about taking pictures from interesting angles. This is Opal (the girl from the golden picture two posts ago). In terms of most interesting hair, this picture wins so far.

It's interesting how this picture looks so much like a reflection. Look closer - the highlights on the top and bottom pencil don't match up. In fact, these are just two pencils sharing the same piece of lead (a good trick to make it look like the pencils are perfectly balanced). I just like the optical illusionness of this picture, and the fact that it's so hard to tell that something is off without being told so.

I took my friend Isaiah's senior picture in exchange for a handmade walking stick. I have two more pictures lined up - one for a bunch of stuff from China and one for, so far, an "awesome hi-five".

For my (almost) black+white picture of the post, here is my friend Will T-W as an 1860's soldier. Except that he's wearing a t-shirt. And the hat is totally not from the 1860's.

The beard is, tho.

---------------------

So I'm having some problems with my computer - I'ma wipe the hard drive tomorrow or the next day. Photoshop crashes whenever I open more than one picture. Anyone who has checked my website knows that my uploader (puTTY) crashed whilst updating my website.

Anyway, I'm also not doing so well - I spent the day in the health center with a nasty cold. Doing better now, tho - Greta brought me some tea and stuff. Being sick is great for catching up on stuff, though. I wrote my college essay.

--Erty

Sunset

2008-10-02T07:34:00.002-06:00

I took a walk the other day with Greta, and we grabbed a few photographs just as the sun was setting over Big Donahue Lake. Romantic night, really.

The clouds, about thirty minutes before sunset. I had to stop and take a picture because it looked like someone had put dabs of white oil paint on a pure blue canvas. That or photoshopped them in. You never know in today’s world. Anyhoo, I took a couplea pictures and this one is so far the best. No photoshop, either (except for a little cropping).

Here’s the sunset I was talking about. &hearts& Wisconsin fall.

Same sunset, same lake. Oh man was that a cool sunset. No photoshopping on either of these images. Just pure awesome.

Here’s greta. I wouldn’t have put this one in (it’s lacking something in the intensity department), but for the sloping background. I almost didn’t notice it at first, but it’s there. It’s a perfectly fine image until you notice that the horizon is at something of a 20^o angle. Greta, in this picture, thought I was still taking pictures of the sunset. It just shows you how candid shots give the photograph a little more realism than one where the subject knows that they’re being photographed.

Here’s a better one of Greta. She was trying to get away from the camera (in a joking way, of course, I wouldn’t put these images online if she minded), and most of the shots I took around this one came out really blurry. This one was taken just a few minutes before sunset. I would have put it first, but the sunset pictures were just too good. Not of course, as beautiful, however.

Greta managed to get the camera from me for a bit, and got this one of me. Beginners luck, I say, for such a good picture. Note that I have a goatee in this picture. I actually don’t anymore. I called it a “try-beard” and whoever gets that reference gets enormous bonus points. Anyway, I shaved it off on this last Friday morning. Nobody noticed, or at least commented. Maybe I’m just that bad at growing facial hair?

Honestly, I think this one was also taken by Greta. It would make a really cool desktop background.
Next week: Exploration of the Boundary Waters and trips to college!
--Erty

Fun with light

2008-09-30T09:31:00.002-06:00

My friends Eliot Frost, Dick Fickling, and Zach Strauss spent a class period playing around in our school’s darkroom with a red penlight and a white penlight. Pretty much, we had a lot of fun and ended up with some pretty cool pictures to show to our Digital Photography instructor. Our results included the following:

This is Eliot, with Dick and Zach using the penlights in a strobe-like fashion. There’s a certain symbolism to the white and red lights here. Think about it - Hell is classically red, and Heaven is classically white or blue. In this way, red and white have come to symbolize good and evil, respectively. I like these images because they take a human form (in this case, my ex-roomie), and split their face between the two. You’ll see this especially in this next photo.

I’ve always thought that Dick, pictured here, has an excellent persona and face for pictures. Whenever I take a picture of him, he seems to have an intelligence and depth that comes out well in the pictures. In real life, he’s pretty cool, too, but anyway…
So here in this picture there’s more of that red-blue that I like to talk about. He’s lit from below here, which gives a mysterious, flashlight-under-the-face Halloween look. With the hood and totally black background, he looks like someone you’d be wary of meeting on a darkened city street.

But then I guess he looks like that anyway. Just kidding. Kinda.

Here’s a shot that I think Zach took. It was a bulb-exposure picture, which means that the shutter was open as long as Zach kept his finger on the button. Basically, dick stood in the middle of the room and I traced him with the aforementioned red penlight. I’m not really sure what kind of symbolism this picture has, or even what it means, but it’s a cool picture that I had fun taking.

9900K M2 is the secret here. For those of you who don’t know what 9900K M2 means, it means that I whitebalanced my camera to something blue, and it told me that I had a really hot light (9900K) and it was blue (obviously) and so artificially put in an M2 color filter. If you still don’t know what I’m talking about, tough cookies. This is my good friend Opal, for those of you who don’t know her. In this picture, the pine trees in the background look like bright golden sparks, which certainly is appealing to me. Opal certainly seems happy.

This is ninja (and my unsaturated picture of the post). He’s a little ninja from Ninja Town, that Dick bought for me for Christmas(?) last year. One of our assignments for digital photography was to take pictures of a small object and photograph it in various settings (With a focus on the lighting). I took a lot of pictures of Ninja, so I’ll skimp on the commentary a little.

This picture is done in the same style as the traced picture of Dick, above. Same penlight, too.

My good friend Keegan helped me out with this one. We thought it would be funny if we had a bunch of people ‘praying’ to Ninja, so we got some volunteers.

Ninja surrounded by his slain enemies; a true warrior of the night.

Keegan came up with this one of Ninja hanging by his feet from a tree. Fun with depth of field!

You’ll either get this one or you won’t. It’s a Bruce Springsteen(sp?) album cover, except that instead of a red hat, there’s Ninja. Fun times.
My friend Berndan Krull is pictured. He’s cool – he lives across the way in Donahue house.

Now we’re done with Ninja, and on to a picture of a mushroom. Everyone always tells me not to center things in pictures – it makes the picture uninteresting and bland; a cupcake without rule-of-thirds icing. Sometimes, however, there’s something to be said for placing the subject right in the middle of a picture. The way I see it, there’s a specific feeling given to each area of a picture. I’ll divulge my feelings on the issue, and feel free to comment. A subject placed in either of the top corners, facing across the picture (upper-right corner facing left or vice versa) is a subject with a distance to cross. It has to make its way across the picture, and often this gives that subject a feeling of flight. A good position for birds. If the subject is in the top corners and facing either toward the camera or has no face to speak of, then the photograph is given an air of freedom; the subject is above the average and emotionally higher. If the subject is placed in the bottom corners, an opposite effect is achieved. The subject seems to have weight and certainly gives the image more gravity. See the picture of Dick lit from both sides (#2 from the top). Anyway, to the point, if the subject is in the middle, it gives it a feeling of importance and significance, which I find amazingly appropriate for this little mushroomy specimen I found on a log.

Now if I just spent more time thinking about getting into college…

Here’s a crop of a picture that I really like. I got the sun shining through a tiny hole in a leaf. Shows you just how bright that darn sun is.

I’ll leave you with this interesting creature. If your computer is at the same resolution and everything as mine, then the bug pictured here is lifesize. If anyone knows what this is, please leave a comment. It looks like a cricketwasp and if nobody corrects me then that’s what it is. I love language.

--Erty

Intense

2008-09-02T09:36:00.005-06:00

You know what's intense? Camping.

I'll let you sit for a while until you get that one.

My school is awesome. The first two weeks of school this year were only three days each. The first one was for no particular reason - something about a required number of days. The second week was relieved of its Thursday and Friday for what we here call Wing Treks. Wing Treks are forays into the world outside of Conserve that take place... three times a year? Anyways, my wing (ten people) went camping and minigolfing.

Oh, but before that! There was a dance to celebrate us coming back to school. Coincidentally enough, it was called the "back to school dance." Shocking, eh? Pics.

You may recognize this as Dick Fickling. I don't know what the light is, or how I got it there, but I'm not complaining, because it's a good picture. Not much else to say about this one.

Hooray for ten-second exposures. Besides the ghostly appearance of the dancers, there isn't much here that is eye-catching. I was really just having fun taking long-exposure pictures, which the dark dance room allowed for excellently. You'll notice a shadow cast by my lens on the floor. The a200 has a low flash height, which means that if I'm zoomed all the way out to my maximum focal length, I can see that shadow. This was the only complaint people up on the blogosphere had about this camera when I was researching it.

And now, Camping.

This is my friend Chad. Chad is awesome. However, I must pull your attention away from him because the coolest thing about this picture is definitely the texture of the shadows on the bus. I love playing with light and shadows. Perhaps that will be my next project?

That night we had a fire, (and about a pound and a half of steak each. We cooked over an open flame on rocks like real men.) Later, after most of the people had wandered sleepily off to their polyester sleeping bags and there were just a select few of us sitting around a slowly dying fire, I experimented with long-exposure pictures of the fire. A few of them came out really well, like this next one.

Spooooooky. This is a 30-second picture of a campfire at f/14 aperture. I like the glow of this image, a bright white of the burning logs that seems so dim to the human eye, and so bright to the ccd when exposed for so long. As I was looking at this picture, I saw a shape that made this picture stand out particularly for me - I've zoomed it below.

I call him the horseman of the apocalypse. My friend calls it a rabbit that fell on it's face. Maybe it's the glow and the color, but I prefer my description. See the horse's skeletal form and the horseman leaning back? No? Okay, maybe it's just me.

Two more from the next day...

One of that ever-growing club of favorites, this picture combines a lot that I like about photography into one image. First of all, this image has to be in black and white to have the impact that it does; where else can you find something where a loss of data is a good thing? Second, it takes something ordinary and turns it into something extraordinary. As if I haven't posted enough about him, this is Dick again. Also, it shows how easy the few rules of photography are. The rule of thirds is followed by the hand in the upper-right hand corner (or at least closely enough), and the edge of the minigolf green makes for a nice strong horizontal line to ground the image.

This is my ex-roomie Eliot, whom I've mentioned before. Although it's just a snapshot, I like this image because he just looks so happy.

More pics after I take them!

--Erty

First day(s) of school

2008-09-01T12:49:00.005-06:00

Busy busy busy. Isn't everyone? I've been wildly snapping away like an alligator at fresh meat, only that the fresh meat is good pictures and I'm not an alligator.

Yeah.

So I have a lot of (what I consider to be) good pictures to post here, and I'm going to release them slowly so that I don't overload people who can't take too much photography at one time. That, and I want to have a slight buffer in case I run into more stuff to do. These images I took half a month ago, on the 16th of August when Conserve School was just starting and everyone was running around, trying to figure out their schedules.

As promised, pictures.

Two of the students who were obviously happy to be back at school although probably not so giddy when posted as nametag-hander-outers, hugging (I caught them at their booth). Ever since the picture of the man in the airport (see below), I have become increasingly interested in portraiture, and this picture is part of my foray into that intracate act of lighting, emotion, and personal flair.

On that subject of portraiture and cool lighting, I present you with this image of two of my good friends. I put this one in all its unsaturated goodness up because of the way the lighting is harsh and reminds me of an old snapshot taken at some long-abandoned summer camp. My friend Eliot Frost argues that people use black and white to make pictures look artsy when they in fact are not. I say that removing color from an image is a tool that can improve a picture's artistic value by forcing the viewer to focus on something other than color, like texture or contrast. Color is a strong force in photography, like it is in any art, and removing it brings up many of the subtle details that were skipped over like a small red flower stealing the scene from a crumbling wall.

This picture, I must admit, was taken by my good friend Dick Fickling. I let him borrow my camera for a few minutes and he managed to fill most of the two-gigabyte CF card with images mundane and extraordinary. I think I may take a little time in Photoshop someday with this picture, as it could stand some brightening up to bring out the emotion. I suppose that's the problem with lots of backlighting.

This ethereal spectere is in fact my speedy photographer friend, Dick. You'll see in the future several long-exposure shots of people and things. Fire at f5.6 30sec is amazingly beautiful, as the time melds the licks of flame together into one solid glow. I have yet to figure out what the white scratches are that float over his shoulder in the picture above.

My friend Stephen McVerry is responsible for this portraiture. This is me, for those of you who don't know what I look like. Not much to say about this picture, but McVerry snuck up on me with my own camera and grabbed this one during that first day of business.

This picture I took as it was foggily drizzling down on this beautiful campus. I decided to go for a walk with my camera on the second day I was back (there wasn't much else to do), and saw an excellent thistle with nothing around - good fodder for a shot with small depth of field. I must admit I played with the color in Photoshop to bring out the purple hue of the flower. Sometimes purple just isn't purply enough.

Whoever can remember the name of this impish fellow should post it in the comments, as I can't seem to remember. He stands on our school's founder's estate, and lights the path from the main driveway to the main house. His eyes are really what do it for me, though - he looks deranged and weather-beaten; he is definitely not a tame one.

I'll leave you for today with this shot, because I wanted to show off the awesome view that is right outside my bedroom window this year at Conserve.

More pictures soon, as I start to sort through and throw all the good ones in a pile to post.

--Erty

Nothing

2008-08-21T22:17:00.001-06:00

I don't have anything for the blog - my school is having internet problems and I can't get my images online. I'll check back here as soon as I talk to IT.

Thanks,

--Erty

Snapshots, Portraits, and Other Generally Cool Things.

2008-08-03T00:16:00.005-06:00

I'm writing this post as a very tired Erty. Last night I had quite the sleepover party with my friends Eric, Sam, and Matt. I took some snapshots, which you can see below.

Eric with a Pop-Tart. Om Nom Nom Nom.	Matt, laughing.
We played some music - Sam on Bass, me on Guitar, and Matt (pictured) on drums.	Whazzzzupp?
For the Pop-Tarts, it was a horrible night.	Um... Yeah. I'm not crazy.
I don't think he believes me.	As I mentioned, Sam plays bass. I thought this was a pretty cool shot.

As for the artistic pictures, I took a few of those recently as well. One of my favorite pictures so far...

...is this one. There is an odd scale at work here. The tree is actually a branch, and what looks like rough grass is in fact a juniper bush. I like taking pictures of small things because people so often overlook them in their daily lives. I'll get a really good macro lens someday, and I'm sure you'll see pictures of things like ants and roly-polys.

For a while now, I've had problems with taking pictures of random people. I lamented this problem in my last post, but I'm glad to say that I have now taken a picture of a complete stranger. My dad and I were in the Admiral's Club at LAX (He's platinum with Am. Airlines), and I decided to go and see if I would actually take pictures of people. The first guy I asked turned me down - it was a really cool picture, too - lit from three sides and surrounded by airplanes. Anyway, this guy was sitting in a room watching TV. He looked nice, so I asked if I could take his picture. Long story short, I got a few shots, and he said that I should go to Paris. Apparently there's good pictures to be had in Paris. Lesson of the day? Don't be shy.

My dad and I went and got haircuts, so we decided to take some pictures to send back to my mom. We were on Los Angeles Air Force Base at the time, which is full of really bright, white rocks and buildings. The whole place is so bright that on most days it hurts if you don't squint. Good light for pictures, though.

So it's one more week of work for me and then back to school. I really should finish up my comics.

--Erty

Shaky hands ruin good pictures.

2008-07-27T21:55:00.004-06:00

Only four pictures today, because for some reason I kept taking shaky pictures. On our walk today, my dad and I stopped by a hockey rink. I managed to grab two pictures that weren't completely blurry.

The composition of this picture is interesting to me, because the shape of the players draws the focus of the picture slowly to right between the two hockey sticks, where the action is about to happen. I think if I take pictures like this with a little more light in the future, they'll come out better. I guess that's what bracketing is for.

Because the goalie seems to be on a flat line, with the net, while the top of the picture seems slightly angular and more action-filled. Assuming the goalie's on the red team, he seems to have a tough night ahead of him. There's also that spotlight-thing on the ceiling that seems to be putting him more in the center and under more stress. The back of his helmet almost looks like a mask, like some sort of strange spirit-goalie guarding the ice rink.

A huge fogbank was rolling in behind this picture like an unstoppable steamroller headed straight for downtown LA. I saw this cactus and decided that the lighting and colors (yellow, green, dark blue) were interesting and exotic. Maybe an hour earlier and I wouldn't have had to use a flash. I really don't like using a flash. I'm sure there are times and places for a flash, but to me a flash makes the picture seem like an excerpt from some twelve-year-old's MySpace snapshot album.

I think I'm going to have at least one black-and-white picture for each post. I got this great shot of my uncle right after he got home from a basketball game. Oh, wait... he just stopped by - here's another picture of him:

If you're looking at this picture on a good monitor, it's much more exciting - the background is an opaque orange, and the whole thing has a great color to it. I'll probably be taking some more pictures of him.

Taking pictures of people has always scared me. Friends, I'm fine with. It's when I go up to a complete stranger and ask if I can take a picture of them. Honestly, I haven't actually done this yet. Someday I will, and then I'm hoping you'll see some excellent portraiture. This was my last weekend in California, so we'll see what kind of pictures I take over the next week.

For now, enjoy the new week.

--Erty

Still Summer, Californa Style

2008-07-26T03:06:00.001-06:00

My dad and I went for a walk yesterday afternoon, and I brought along my new camera. It's a Sony alpha-200 (a200) that I bought for some $600 at Best Buy. Took all of my savings, but so far it's been worth it. The hardware and software are amazing on this thing, especially for a beginner-user like me.

Anyway, on to the pictures!

This one was actually one of the last ones that I took, as the sun was setting behind the Rolling hills of California's southern coast. The colors on this one are a little muted, but I like the dragonfly, and the fact that it is the focal point among all of the bright pink flowers.

This plant is one of the main reasons I wanted to get a camera out in California. It grows along a winding walkway lined with crumbling brick that my dad and I walk by often. The leaf structure has always reminded me of some crustacean creature's claws - A plant/animal hybrid, which appeals perfectly to my mad scientist personality. Photography-wise, I like the construction of this image. I used f/5.6 at 1/160th of a second to get the short depth-of-field that is so prevalent in macro plant shooting. The sun here was coming out of the west from over the ocean - about an hour before sunset.

Looking at this image, I would expect it to be found on some point-and-shoot camera. It's not particularly vibrant, interesting, or exciting. Why, then, would I put it on this blagospherical endeavor? Because I liked what was printed on the windshield:

Let's see... what's next? Ah yes - one of my favorites!

This picture reminds me of rough elephant skin, or the scars of some leathery old warrior. In fact, it's a Palm Tree's bark. Does anyone know if people perform some sort of bizarre 'shave' to give palm trees this kind of flat bark (as opposed to the remnants of leaves)? I've been wondering that for a while - is the skinny part of the plant manmade or natural?

This bush, which grows at 33^o46'31.05"N 118^o22'30.08"W, reminds me of a windswept ship - a clipper ship with all of it's various sails unfurled and catching the wind like wings.

This picture didn't come out nearly as vibrant as I expected. Even after copious amounts of retouching in Photoshop, the flower looks orange and dead instead of colorfully red. I figured I should post this because I don't like it. It's got some interesting composition; if only that darned orange would turn red.

Some pretty flowers on a shrub near a house on the Rancho Palos Verdes hill. I experimented with focusing the camera at eye level and then holding the camera above my head to get a better shot. I think this one came out well. I photoshopped in a little white-vingetteing to brighten up the edges of the picture and pull attention into the middle flowers.

For the past year, I've worked in Black and White. Out of necessity, mostly - my school's darkroom is ill-equipped for any sort of color photography. This picture was pretty much like any of the others, but now it's a little more special. The flower was origionally in the center of the picture. Amazing how much of this "spicing-up" seems really mundane. And yet how much difference it makes!

Right before I saw this tree, I was explaining (at great length) to my dad that tree pictures were only good if the surroundings were perfect. The previous night, I grabbed a few shots of the deciduous foliage in my grandfather's LA backyard. The roof of his house was right behind the tree in all of these shots, which completely ruined them. While explaining this principle to my dad, I pointed out this tree as a perfect example of a good tree to shoot. It took me a while to realize I should probably take a picture of it.

My dad pointed this one out to me. He pointed to the bark of this tree, which is most common in these parts of California, and told me he thought the way it peeled off would make an interesting picture. I have to agree.

I think this is the same tree as the picture above. If not, it's certainly the same type. I love being a photographer - it means that I can randomly lie down on people's lawns for a good shot like I did here. I'm fond of the side-lit effect the sunset gives this one.

So, I'm hoping to keep this blog up with all the pictures I take during my Senior year at high school. I'm going to be spending time in three states - California, Colorado, and Wisconsin. Also on the agenda are some college trips and field trips to exotic places like New York, Maine, Michigan, and Washington. I only have two or three more weeks of summer vacation (I'll bring pictures of my workplace sometime soon) before it's travlin' time for me.

Here's to a good year, and a continually updated blog. Be sure to check out my comic work at www.ertyseidel.com.

Oh, and also:

f1rst p0ST!

--Erty Seidel
www.ertyseidel.com