Abstracts

As I walked about Missoula today, the sun was setting through broken clouds creating what is called "squall light". The light was falling on the hill, but not on the dark sky behind. At first I was just looking at it thinking that while it looked cool, it probably would never photograph well. But I had my camera around my neck with the 100mm Macro already so I took some shots trying to just use form and color for interest. 

I was at Kathryn's play, and this was on the wall across the gym. I liked the way it looked but again thought it would probably not really work as a photograph. In fact, the only reason I have this shot is because I used the wall as my neutral grey to set my auto white balance for taking pictures in the gyn for the play. As I looked through the view finder I was thinking "hey, this looks kind of cool."

I guess the moral of the story is: Take pictures. It is not like it cost me money to press the shutter. Sure, none of these are gallery pictures (at least in my gallery), but they are all pretty decent and are all exercises in simple composition. I bet if I bothered in PS, or if Becky did, these could be made even more interesting.

Anyway, I'm starting to feel that creative surge again. Hopefully I can get out soon.

PS. If you do not know how to set the custom white balance on your camera, you should learn. It makes a huge difference when you are photographing under difficult lighting conditions, like in a gym with industrial sodium, fluorescent, and incandescent lights. If you look at the photos on the family blog from Kathryn's play, the skin tones and color all look great. Those are all JPEGs strait out of the camera after I set the white balance in camera.