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.

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.

These ice cubes took a lot longer to melt than I expected. In total, it took about 3.5 hours. I ended up shooting approximately 2400 still photos – a photo every 5 seconds. I put the photos in sequence using MPEG Streamclip at 15fps, and then doubled the speed of that video once in iMovie. The music is a cover of Modest Mouse’s Exit Does Not Exist performed by Sun Kil Moon from their album, Tiny Cities.