We finally have ornaments on the tree. It has been 'falling' now for a week ;-) I am recovering from a 'thing' and wasn't about to really do much of anything today. The last thing I was supposed to do was sit in a chair all day and that is pretty much what I did. I got caught up on bills and Xmas shopping, then had to do a little research for work. Strobist info: Canon 580EX2 camera right and slightly behind the ballerina ornament, 1/8 Power, fired with Cybersyncs.

When I saw what the FGR Challenge was this morning, I knew I had the cheese to pull this off. I had this kind of shot in mind, the "Fonzi theme" was something I came up with while shooting (I can be so crafty like that). We just got back from the Polar Express. It is about 1 1/2 hours north of here. For some reason, every time we go, the wind chill is in the negative teens. We've had this warmer than normal winter so far, then Bam! out of no where comes this arctic cold the day we do this. I took my 70's shots before we left, but there wasn't enough time to process them.

Here I was upset that we didn't have anything on our tree and wouldn't be able to take a photo of anything Xmasy. I forgot about our front bushes. I've got my camera on the tripod to take this Out Of Focus (OOF) shot of the lights when I realized two things:

1) My Cullman Tripod Head is shot, it no longer locks. I tried to save a few $$ and paid the price.

2) The EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro has some flare. Though you can't see it, in the center of the photo is an odd flare. It was much more pronounced in some of the other shots that I canned.

Either way, I got the shot I was looking for and realized that I can break out my Lensbabies 3G with a custom Aperture for a shot perhaps tomorrow.

You can tell it's the holiday season by how many bags of stuff are sitting outside of the Salvation Army bins at the Transfer Station. For today's FGR Challenge, I bring my camera everywhere, I was able to show that I literally bring my camera everywhere. Sunday morning is my Trash day, the transfer station is just around the corner, but I normally bring my gear with me. Usually I take a bit of an extended ride home and find something to shoot, today I decided to find things to shoot at the Transfer Station itself. I had a few other shots that I'd planned on going with until I saw the Salvation Army bins at the gate on my way out. I pulled out and around and parked the Tahoe to walk back and grab a few shots of the bins. After Xmas, these bins will be full again and there will be bag after bag of stuff beside them. I did the selective coloring in LR again, the trick is to paint the entire photo with negative saturation, then selectively remove (erase) the selection of the areas that you want the color to remain. It helped that this is red on white so I could afford to be a little sloppy and it wouldn't matter. It gets tough when you have two colors that border, then you have to be very careful.

I sort of had the day off, I spent most of my morning and most of last evening working though. I did get to do a lot of running around, finally getting to start Xmas shopping. OK, technically I started a while back, I've been collecting stuff for a little bit, but not getting the big things. I've gotten a few of the big things now.

So the FGR Challenge today is Hip to Be Square, a Square Format (Cropped) portrait. I didn't break out any my TLRs, this is just a simple square crop. For some odd reason, I decided to use the UWA, so I am a little out of proportion (at least the nose is). I had a slightly different composition in mind, but went with this approach. The background was just too busy, so I lowered the flash power and used a foamie snoot (just a sheet of black foam wrapped around the flash head). The 580EX-2 is camera left at 1/32 power, about 3' away.

With a big storm happening in the Northeast today and the "Six Word Story" FGR challenge on the docket, one would think it was a match made in heaven. I actually drove into work today, it has been some 5 months since I've driven a 4-wheeled vehicle into work. I threw in my tripod and camera bag (not that I don't usually do this on the bike). Today's story, however, was more like "My Canon is NOT going outside". That isn't completely true, I was so busy at work that I never really got to have a chance to go outside (but you wouldn't have known that). On my way out of the building, I noticed that they'd just cleaned the rest rooms and there was a photo op of maximum proportions! I took the chance. I can only imagine the story I would have to come up with had someone walked in on me.