On account of the fact that tomorrow is the kickoff day for the Bloggerstock blog-swap I thought that I would bump up my Foto Friday to Thursday.  It doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, but the concept is the same.

Today’s photo comes from the archives.  In fact, it is old enough that it was originally shot on film.  Crazy right?  Not really.  I still have my film camera, it mostly collects dust, but every now and then I think that it would be fun to take it out again.  When you shoot film there is always the mystery and waiting to see if the photos turned out the way you wanted (or turned out at all).  There is also the factor of having a limited number of images you can shoot at once (24 or 36 frames).  I think makes you think a little more when you compose your shots.

A white Lupine up on Sugar Hill, NH

This photo was taken in 2005 in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire.  Every year they have the Lupine Festival when the fields are covered in lupines.  Generally you see purple lupines, so it is fun to find the white ones in the middle of a field of purple.  It is really beautiful to see the lupines in bloom, it just makes Sugar Hill and Franconia that much more wonderful.

I do think there is something about film that gives a different feel to photos even when they are scanned.  As I went looking for a photo for this week, this one caught my eye.  I hope that you enjoy it as well.  As always, comments and critiques are welcome!

One of the photographers whose blog I follow always has great advice.  One of the tidbits that he has mentioned for people who want to be professional photographers is to find some niche in the market.  So, what I do, which seemed to be a natural fit, is shoot for theatre.  I do production stills for the theatre company that I work for as well as a couple other local theatre companies and the theatre department at the U of U.  It is a lot of fun and it can provide a way to make some fairly artistic images while capturing the art that we make on stage every day.

This week I thought that it would be fun to share one of my recent images from the archival photo call from the U of U theatre department’s production of Molière’s The Would-be Gentleman.  The show is extremely funny and it seems like the cast had a lot of fun working on it.  It was hard to pick one image to share with you, but I think that the one I picked is pretty good.  If you want to see more of them or the cast list you can find the entire gallery at this link.

Lucile's "fairytale entrance"

There are many rather funny and what now seem cliché moments in the show, however this is the kind of literature that defined the ideas we think of as cliché.  The moment in this photo is Lucile’s “fairytale entrance” where she comes in to meet her lover accompanied by perfume and birds and flower petals.  Of course you couldn’t complete the scene without the servant sweeping up the mess.

So enjoy the photo, and as always, please feel free to leave comments, questions, and criticism.

infrared – |ˌinfrəˈred|  (adj): having a wavelength just greater than that of the red end of the visible light spectrum but less than that of microwaves. Infrared radiation has a wavelength from about 800 nm to 1 mm, and is emitted particularly by heated objects.

Infrared (IR) photography is not a new photography technique, however the advent of the digital camera has made it a much easier technique to get into.  All the imaging sensors in digital cameras are capable of collecting light from well beyond the visible spectrum which includes the infrared and ultraviolet wavelengths.  Because normally we don’t want to capture the non-visible light, digital cameras come with a “hot-mirror” installed over the imaging sensor.  This mirror has a dichroic coating that allows only visible light to pass through and reflects all of the non-visible light.

Relatively recently people have started to modify digital cameras by replacing or even removing the hot-mirror so that they can capture images outside the range of visible light.  The most common modification is to place a new dichroic filter over the sensor that only allows infrared light to pass through and maybe a little bit of visible light at that end of the spectrum.  If you are comfortable taking apart your camera you can buy a kit, but for not that much more money there are companies that will do the modification for you.

Why would we want to photograph light that we normally can’t see?  Well, it is just another way to look at the world and it can produce some very striking images.  With that, I gave you my photo of the week:

Captured using a modified Nikon D70 on the banks of the Saco River in Maine.

As you can see, the colors are very different than what you normally see.  The most odd is probably the sky, which comes out orange.  IR images also make beautiful black and white images which you can do right in your favorite photo editor.  It certainly gives you quite a different perspective on the world.

This photo was taken lat summer with a Nikon D70 that had been modified for IR.  I borrowed the camera for a few days from the staff photographer at camp to play around with it.  Hopefully I will get the chance to do more this coming summer.  I would love to have one of my old cameras converted, but right now I could use the money for other things.

As always, comments and critiques are welcome and encouraged.

A Utah juniper on the edge of the canyon at Canyonlands National Park.

Canyon Tree

So, we opened the fifth show of the season, I had my birthday, the Winter Olympics started, and I led part of services at temple this week.  Lots of exciting stuff.  It is nice to get to the weekend and have some time off, and what a good weekend for it.  The holiday weekend will be nice, with no work Monday I should be able to get some good skiing in.  We will just have to see how the crowds are.

The service on Saturday morning was nice.  Once a month we do a lay-led service that is known as our Shir Hadash (new song) service.  I know that there are some people in the congregation who don’t really love the service, but I think that it is nice.  I think that it is great to have a service that encourages more people to participate and is less of a concert by the cantor.  Today was a really great service.  I lead a large section of the service and I could tell that people were getting into it.  After the services, many people came up to myself and the other leaders to say how much they liked the service.

We are looking at ways to edit and update the service and how it is conducted so that we continue to keep people interested and excited about coming.  I will be meeting with a couple of the people responsible for such things this coming week to look at where the service came from and where it needs to go to stay good.

It also turns out that next weekend is the 13th anniversary of my Bar Mitzvah.  That is kinda cool.  I certainly haven’t really thought about it, but they were looking for torah and haftorah readers for next weekend which is how I found out that it was my parasha.  Go figure.  I still know most of it, and since the first time, I have actually learned how to learn it again.  So I will be reading the haftorah next weekend in honor of my Bar Mitzvah anniversary.  It seemed like a god thing to do.  So, if you are going to be in the SLC area next weekend, you should come!

The other new thing this week is that I started a photo project that has been going around the tubes, Project 365.  You can find the images from my project over at http://365.icewolf08.com.  The goal is just to take at least one photo every day for a year.  Since I kicked the project off on my birthday, it will end on my next birthday in 2011.  Hopefully I can make it work.