This weeks challenge was fashion. Not much inspiration for this weeks. I had a bunch of ideas, including rat-fashion, but generally didn’t get much captured, and thought this was probably the best of the bunch. I liked the colors, the umbrella in the back drawing the eye from the text, and the totally un-square window.

My other option was this, but it just didn’t have enough focus.

Tried to steer clear of clocks for this one, as it seemed too obvious. I liked the colors in this shot, and contrast of the two materials aging differently. In hind sight the shot would have been better taken slight lower down.

Took a non-traditional view of the toys theme. I actually searched around trying to find this type of image for this theme – so it’s not just something convenient I used for this week.

Taken in Negril, Jamaica. Flippers and a wooden paddle are this mans wage toys. He actually goes a couple of miles out night fishing on this board.

A little late this week. Didn’t quite capture the emotional impact I was looking for.

This weeks challenge was “Shadow”. I had some ideas for outside, but, cold, and lack of sun put me off, so I ended up indoors. Still struggling with getting a nice background, I think mostly lack of light.

This weeks photo challenge topic was “close up”. I decided to try photographing ink dispersion in water. It took a few attempts over a couple of days to get the setup and camera settings right, but the result pretty good. A fun technique, and one I will revisit.

I learned a lot from this photo shoot, so in the interests of sharing…

The topic this week, Still Life is pretty broad. Traditional still life seemed to be oriented around flowers, and household objects arranged in a natural setting. More recent interpretations though became more interesting, possibly as household objects became more interesting.

I took an extreme view on this, and decided to use a modern subject, with a drawing based rendering to reflect the painting oriented still life topic. Basically anthropomorphizing a robot lamp, and it’s dreams of vacation in Venice. The shadow at the back represents the ‘big ideas’ of the robot. Turns out the rendering wasn’t too popular, but I still like it.

This week: Books. Spent a while thinking about this and setting up. Probably the longest task was finding a book with an appropriate quote. Hint here is to pull a bunch of books and do a real quick scan for the right words. Here I used a single desk lamp as a light source.

The paper color could use a little work, but this seemed to be a good balance between white which was too stark, and the opposite which would have been too much yellow.