January Photo Challenge and Desktop

January 2015 Desktop

Happy 2015 everyone! Something new I’m going to try this year is a monthly photo challenge. Every month, I’ll post a couple of photography assignments. I’ll also post that month’s 2015 revlimiter.net Calendar image as a downloadable desktop background.

I’m pretty excited about this. It might be a lot of work and headaches, but then again, it might be a lot of fun. Got my fingers crossed.

January Desktop Image

Download it here! It’s the same shot as the lead pic in this post. Sharka is the January 2015 calendar image, so he gets to be the first desktop of the year. Yay!

Photo Assignment 1: Snow

I’m cold just looking at this.

Since it’s the time of year for it, why not exploit the white stuff? Take your tiny car and go shoot it in the snow. No other requirements – just a Miata and some snow.

If you’re blessed with a LOT of snow in your scene, you’ll discover that your camera really doesn’t want to make the snow white. With default adjustments, the snow will come out a sort of medium grey and everything else will be under exposed. Try shooting on manual or just dialing in a bit of over exposure. +1 or +2 will usually do the trick in getting snow back to white.

Technical Assignment 1: Rule of Thirds

Rule of Thirds

This is a very simple one – rule of 3rds. There are approximately 43,071,998 web pages about this topic, so I’ll not attempt to type more pages about it. Take a look at Wikipedia’s Rule of thirds entry. It’s pretty decent.

The cliff notes: try framing your subject where two of the lines cross. Having the horizon at exactly 1/3 or 2/3 up the photo is… kinda unnecessary. It also often results in a bit of a boring photo. The useful bit of the “rule” is in the framing of your subject. Getting your car in the cross-hairs can turn a bland image into one that looks natural. The Rule of Thirds can add that final bit of pop to your image. And it helps you to visualize your final image before you actually snap the pic.

Discussion

I’ve got a discussion thread about this in my sponsor area of ClubRoadster. If you wanna chat about it, we have both that thread and comments below. If you want to post your photos… you kinda have to do it over on CR.

Good luck! Stay warm.