the 312 hole

To wrap up the year, I wanted to look through my photos and compile a few lists of the things I enjoy shooting. I will be posting the top 10 photos across 10 categories to close out 2010. These 10 categories will be: Books, Film, Portraits, Projects, Sports, Weddings, Cityscapes, Travel, Videos and Live Music. Last year, I made similar lists, and you can see my 9 in ’09 here.

With the exception of my Final Four video and the Cessna flight, my videos are mostly stop motion / timelapse compositions of still photography. I try to take a lot of still frames in sequence and piece them together using various programs. I haven’t advanced much over the last year, but I am working on a few new projects that will incorporate actual video along with still frame capture, timelapse pieces. DSLR cameras have opened up a whole new world, and I’m continuing to explore it.

10. Swimming Moose

9. Changing Seasons

8. Sunset Cessna Flight

Sunset Cessna Flight – Chicago – 6/29/10 from Jeff Trost on Vimeo.

7. Napa Valley Stars

6. Chicago Sunset

5. Melting Ice

4. Shore Lunch

Shore Lunch on Molson Lake from Jeff Trost on Vimeo.

3. 2010 Christmas Party – The Return of the Grinch

2. Beach Dance

1. 2010 NCA Men’s Basketball Final Four

2010 NCAA Men’s Basketball Final Four from Jeff Trost on Vimeo.

To wrap up the year, I wanted to look through my photos and compile a few lists of the things I enjoy shooting. I will be posting the top 10 photos across 10 categories to close out 2010. These 10 categories will be: Books, Film, Portraits, Projects, Sports, Weddings, Cityscapes, Travel, Videos and Live Music. Last year, I made similar lists, and you can see my 9 in ’09 here.

The last few years have been filled with weddings for friends and family. I traveled to several different states for weddings this year – New York, Washington, North Carolina, Missouri, etc. While the travel is tough, the ceremonies and parties are well worth it. Each wedding is like a mini-reunion for all of your best friends and absolutely cannot be beat.

While the last few years have been dedicated to weddings, I imagine the next few years will be filled with baby girls and baby boys. Several of my closest friends have had new additions to their families at the end of this year already, and I can’t wait to meet their new family members over the coming years.

10. To Tomorrow!

9. Cupcakes

8. The Ring

7. The Venue

6. The Church

5. The Church Again

4. Dance With Me

3. Pin The Flower

2. The Decision

1. You May Kiss The Bride

To wrap up the year, I wanted to look through my photos and compile a few lists of the things I enjoy shooting. I will be posting the top 10 photos across 10 categories to close out 2010. These 10 categories will be: Books, Film, Portraits, Projects, Sports, Weddings, Cityscapes, Travel, Videos and Live Music. Last year, I made similar lists, and you can see my 9 in ’09 here.

Merry Christmas!

I haven’t perfected any of the below projects, but I’m working on new photos for some of these that I really enjoyed. Over the course of this year, I spent a lot of time experimenting with different things I had never tried before.

10. Circular Glow (Long Exposure)

For this shot, I strapped various glow sticks and multi-colored flashlights to my ceiling fan. Once I had the lights on the fan, I turned off all the ambient lights in the room and took nice long exposures at various fan speeds. The result was perfectly symmetrical circles of various colors. Pretty simple. Click here for an early shot of me putting up one light on the very end of the fan.

9. Pinhole Friday (Pinhole)

I experimented with various pinhole cameras throughout the course of the year. I made my first one out of a simple black film canister – poked a hole in one side, and it exposed a single frame of film that I had taped into the canister. Then I made a camera out of a matchbox – and this one had the ability to roll the film up into an empty canister, which eliminated the need to unload the film in a dark room. Finally, I made a fully functional San Pellegrino pinhole camera. Click here to see a picture of this camera, and below is a shot taken with the contraption.

8. Heart This City (Shaped Bokeh)

I should have worked harder to get more out of this little experiment, but I haven’t yet. By cutting shapes into a piece of thick cardboard and placing that over a fast lens, the bokeh created takes on the shape of the cutout. This has a pretty cool effect on city lights and would also be cool for something like Christmas tree lights (if you’re looking to try it out over the holidays). For me though, I couldn’t sleep one night and just took a handful of photos from my balcony. I never tried it again, but it’s probably worth another experiment. As you can see in the below photo, all of the street lights are shaped like hearts for this photo.

7. Cubs Splash (Semi-High Speed)

One night, I decided to stay home and drop things into cups (thrilling). I had no idea how difficult it would be to get a good shot – or how messy it would be. I am extremely underprepared for high speed photography. In fact, I shot these by holding down the shutter in rapid bursts with one finger, while dropping ice cubes and other items with my other hand. I was only using lights from my kitchen, which meant I wasn’t really even doing anything high-speed at all. I just cranked up the ISO and shutter speeds and hoped I timed it right. Some were better than others, but it was a fun test.

6. Swirling Stars (Bulb Exposure / Stacking)

Once again, I was a bit unprepared for an experiment I wanted to try. I took a 45 minute exposure and tried to capture some star movement while away from the city out in northwest Illinois. There are lots of issues with a single 45 minute exposure – one of which is the long exposure noise that is created. I like the overall idea of this experiment, but I plan to do more of this using different methods, such as stacking multiple photos.

5. Sunset Cessna Flight (Aerial)

I’d like to make this more of a long-term project – aerial cityscapes. Over the summer, I was fortunate enough to have a good friend take me up on a flight with him. This was my first time taking photographs of Chicago from an angle like this. Needless to say, it was amazing. I have some ideas for aerial projects like this, and the one flight has definitely inspired me to continue. Also, one of my shots from this flight – click here to see it – made it into Flickr Explore, which was the first time for any of my photos.

4. Jump

Everyone likes to mess around with jumping shots, and some people have even turned the idea into a business model – such as the Action Booth guys. I’m going to expand on this in the new year as well, but it’s a pretty simple photo to make happen – even without a flash – like this photo.

3. City Upright (Reflections)

This photo is again the result of a late night without much sleep. I decided to try something with a small liqueur glass, and this idea is transforming into a larger project I’m working on. The idea here is to shoot a reflection of your image (upside down) through various liquids, such as water. Depending on the glass you use, the effects can be pretty cool.

2. Napa Valley Stars (Timelapse)

I have only tried timelapse or stop-motion photography a handful of times. I am working on several new projects like the below, which will be much more refined. The overall process here is to take hundreds or thousands of still frame photos over a set time frame and then put them together in order via video – think of a cartoon flipbook. It’s amazingly simple with a DSLR and an intervalometer. This little 30 second clip uses about 300 photos, but the latest ones I’m working on have 24 or 30 still images per second of video.

1. Ha’upu Range Off Kipu Road (HDR)

The below shot is a simple HDR shot composed of three RAW files (-2, 0, +2 exposures). I started experimenting with HDR this year – sometimes I get it right; other times the shots are horrible. I was very happy with this image – the details in the mountains, the trees and the fields really pop.

Last year, I decided to do a year-end wrap up, and it was pretty fun. I enjoyed looking through all of my old photos and deciding which were my favorite and which were just horrible. I don’t intend for this to be a list of technically amazing photographs – I’m far from a technically sound photographer. I do intend for these lists to be some of my favorite shots – whether for the memories or the actual photograph.

I put together 9 different top 9 lists last year, focusing on the various things I enjoy shooting. These lists were: Film, Sports, Travel, Music @ Pitchfork, Portraits, Cityscapes, Fans @ Pitchfork, Life and Live Music

That made sense for 200″9″. Now it’s 20″10″, so I’m going to do 10 different top 10 lists. I plan to start rolling these lists out one per day for the last 10 days of the year.

December 22nd = Books
December 23rd = Film
December 24th = Portraits
December 25th = Projects
December 26th = Sports
December 27th = Weddings
December 28th = Cityscapes
December 29th = Travel
December 30th = Videos
December 31st = Live Music

Hopefully these will be interesting to more people than just myself and those who put up with my shutter-happy finger. Be sure to check back here each day – and enjoy!