The Creativity Project – Environmental Portrait

In my ongoing attempt to keep the creative side of me flowing (which was the original purpose of this blog), I’ve decided to take on a weekly photo challenge.  It sounded like fun, so I’m giving it a try.  Photos on the blog are reduced to ensure faster loading.  So they actually look BETTER than they do here!

Still a little behind but catching up.

Week ten was “Portrait – Environmental”.  The challenge here is to show the subject in their natural environment, tell their story through the environment.  Portraiture remains a challenge to me. Finding someone in their environment I could photograph was an even bigger challenge.  I did find one, took the picture and either my camera or my computer ate it!  Can’t find it anywhere.  Very frustrating.

An Irish festival seemed like a place where I might be able to snag some interesting pictures.  Some rain put a damper on it so I didn’t get a lot.  Was actually two seconds late on this one.  The adult was stilled kneeling when I brought the camera up:

 

Again, nice but not thrilling.  I spent some time following the pipers around trying to get a good portrait of the drum major.  And it paid off.  I really like this one:

Exposure – f/8 at 1/70 at ISO 200

Next week’s challenge is Landscape – Reflection.  Find the beauty through reflection.  A mirror image world.  I still have to work out the kinks for my panorama too.

I’ve been struggling with some strange color shifts in the photos.  While that gives me a great opportunity to grow my post production skills, I’d rather get good originals.  This week went very red/pink.  In digging through my settings I see that my white balance control is set to manual.  I do not ever remember taking a manual white balance.  Which may explain a lot.  Learning more about myself as a photographer and my equipment!  Pretty good challenge.

This is part of a year-long photographic challenge.  Dogwood Photography came up with this interesting challenge (HERE) where you have to come up with a photo a week in one of three categories – Portrait, Landscape or Artistic Impression.  Each week has one with a slightly different challenge.

For the folks who are interested in technical type things:

Primary camera is a Fujifilm Finepix S1000fd.  It is a 10.0 Megapixel CCD, sensor size is 1/2.3″.  I shoot in the Fine JPEG 3648 x 2736 format and usually in the “Chrome” setting.