Dilly Dally Dailies

02-11-09, originally uploaded by BetweenTheShutter.

Guess where this cute little flower light is.

Go on, guess… come on, it’ll be fun.

Nope, not Disneyland.

Give up?

Ok I’ll tell you,

The Santa Barbara Ralph’s Grocery Store. Go figure.

I had played around with some actions on this one. What do you think?

Hi Friends, 

I’m on vacation this weekend – and you better believe I’m taking pictures. But I won’t be able to get them up here until Monday or so.  In the mean time here are some b-sides from January.  I’m planning on doing this at the end of every month… Some days I take more than one picture (this month I took a grand total of 623!) and it can be challenging to pick one.  So I was thinking I’d put a couple of the “almost but not quite” ‘s up here every now and again.  I played a bit more with some coloring effect on some of these which was so fun I might keep doing it.  (some of them got a little out of order – sorry!)

Hope you enjoy these, let me know what you think and I’ll see ya next week.

Muah!
Jules 

1-12-09: 225 E. Cota St. – This place was just too cool to only take one picture!

1-13-09: Santa Barbara Post Office

1-14-09: East Beach on a Beautiful Day!

1-15-09: another angle of my “make a bad day better” dasies 

1-17-09: A trashcan that says “grace” on it… deep.  (I played with the colors a lot on this one)

1-19-09: A really cool deck I found at the beach.  The sun was setting which made for some fun lighting. 

1-20-09:  limes make [almost] everything yummier. 

1-12-09: I didn’t realize we had a foodland (or that they existed at all) until I took a weird way to get to a friends house. I guess there is exploring left to do here.  I really like the reflections of the traffic signal and my camera lens (yes, I took this through my car window while at a red light). 

1-24-09: Agua Dulce Foursquare Church’s outdoor lighting (I went home for a wedding shower that day).

1-29-09: I loved how these flowers weren’t going to let some silly fence keep them from growing the way they wanted to.  I really needed this encouragement the day I took this. 

1-24-09: Wedding shower just isn’t fun without a wedding dress made of toilet paper.

1-12-09: 225 E. Coat St. again – (Can you tell I liked this place?)

1-23-09: They day I found the cool green truck I also found Colonel Mustard, a crazy cool patchy blue guy, and Rusty McRuster.

1-30-09: I think I need to look up more often.  I have fun playing with the colors on this one.   

1-30-09:  I really liked the abandoned crayons at the foot of this massive artistic column.  There are a lot of different meanings you could throw on this one.  I’ll let you decide. 

1-28-09: Another image from my paperclip jar’s modeling debut. 

1-17-09: Seriously, how does she look so cool? I can’t decide which coloring I like better.  Feel free to vote. 

What a month! Thanks for keeping tabs on me and Happy February!

02-04-09, originally uploaded by BetweenTheShutter.

If you happen to stop by my office (which hardly ever happens) this very realistic bobble-y version of Elvis will greet you in lieu of a receptionist. Yup, we’re that awesome.

2-02-09, originally uploaded by BetweenTheShutter.

I love the vintage-ness of the greyhound bus station. Maybe it’s just because they are too cheap to renovate but I’m glad it’s still got the 60′s sign.

This is a building that I’ve always wanted to photograph — I just love it — but it’s a pretty tricky place to shoot. The tall trees cause some pretty crazy shadows and it’s on the corner of one of the busiest intersections in town so standing in the street to be at the right angle wouldn’t turn out well for Jules. But if I ever get my hands on a fish eye lens, a ladder, and a police escort this is where I would go. If I had all the above and a personal jet I might choose differently but that wasn’t part of the question was it?

 

1-31-09 1, originally uploaded by BetweenTheShutter.

I like to think that I don’t spend much time in LA but I’ve managed to drive down there 4 or 5 times this month! (Let’s hope this doesn’t become a pattern for the rest of the year.)

Today traffic was moving so slowly that I was ready to go insane. So I pulled out my camera and practiced some slow shutter speed movement stuff. It took a while to get a smooth circle which helped the hour it took to go a mile pass much faster.

Santa Barbara seems to have a lot of these trees.  They look normal enough the rest of the year but then in January something crazy happens and all of a sudden they are COVERED in these cute white flowers.  They seriously come out of nowhere.  And the best part is that I always forget about them until they show up. Yay for the happy flower trees!

I had trouble with this shot.  All the whites were too bright or the colors were too dark, or the background was a mess, or the picture was just way too busy (there are a ton of these flowers all over the tree) so I finally settled on this one and then had some fun in photoshop on it.  Experimenting in the spice of Dilly Dally I guess.   I’m still determined to get a couple good pics of these trees before the go back to normal so you might see something similar in the next few days.

Today I used my overflowing paperclip cup as a model so I could play around with some fun lighting techniques.  (Don’t work it was after work hours.)  

Sorry about the late post, my work computer was throwing a fit!

Also, everyone should start getting excited.  I have some extra tidbits planned for the end of the month!

01-25-09, originally uploaded by BetweenTheShutter.

I went to Silvergreens (my new favorite resturant) with my good friends Chris and Katie Humphreys for lunch today and found these arches and fun hanging lights. I’ll admit I boosted the contrast on this one quite a bit… because contrast is sexy.

 

01-24-09, originally uploaded by BetweenTheShutter.

Today was a bit of a roller coaster but luckily it ended well – lots of candles and some goofy friends playing everything from hymns to Beatles to Stravinsky to MJ on 2 violas, 1 violin, 1 piano, 1 table, 1 crutch and 3 or 4 voices. It was a fun hodgepodge of music

Unfortunately it was too dark to get any decent pictures of the music making (I did record a bit of it though – i love that my camera as an audio record feature – and for what it is I’m pretty impressed with the quality).

   

01-23-09, originally uploaded by BetweenTheShutter.

I loved the color of this old pickup, there was also a blue one, a yellow one and a purple one all parked on the same block!

The rainy weather is making this project more difficult. Available light isn’t what it used to be and my little point and shoot’s flash is all sorts of useless. I’m working on making a diffuser for it. In the mean time I’ll have to study up on available lighting, hold my breath and keep my white balance on “cloudy.” Hmm a tripod might be a good idea too. Any other suggestions?