Shot on my cameraphone. My cameraphone doesn’t take very good pictures, so I had to do a lot of work on this one. Color correction all around, rotated the image about 4/10 of a degree to straighten the horizon so I could split it at the horizon. With the image on 2 layers, I blew out the saturation on the flowers and then fiddled with saturation and lightness on the sky before blurring the sky slightly to remove ugly grain. All this to get it to look like I saw it in real life.

This is an alley near where I lived when I took this. I was walking home from work and there was a really dense fog. I got home, grabbed my camera, and went to a nearby park and snapped a bunch of pictures until the fog lifted. I cropped a lot off this, because in the original there is a gas meter and some trash cans just left of the “path”, but I liked the whole tunnel of foliage and wanted to bring this one out for people to see. Of note: I did almost nothing besides crop this image. Every one of my normal image processing tricks erased the fog, and any sharpening made it look fake, like I put a white layer over a regular picture. So this is almost exactly what came out of the camera.

This was another image taken with the “crapcam” – I think I had modified the camera to make multiple exposures and long exposures (by tying a string to the lever that moves the shutter and pulling it when I want a long exposure) or it could have been one of this camera’s many eccentricities. Even before I did anything to it, it was making double exposures and partial frame advances.  This appears to be the vines around my house, with what I think are some florescent light fixtures superimposed on it. This is a double, or possibly triple exposure. I don’t know how or when it was made, but I like it a lot.

I bought this cheap all-plastic camera that for some reason was built to look like a 1970′s SLR – though this camera has a shutter button and little else. It’s covered in fake controls. I took this picture near a school. This is the fence behind the baseball field. I have no idea what those square things are, but I loved the shadows and the shapes in this scene. I was in a “filmy” mood, so I dug out the “crapcam” and took this shot.

I bought a cheap 35mm camera and modified it into a pinhole. I did this by removing all the lens structure, cutting a good portion of the front of the camera off, and sealing a bit of aluminum with a very tiny hole in it where the lens used to be. It takes much longer to make an exposure (this one was in full shade in the middle of the day and took about 45 seconds with iso400 film) but I wound up with an amazingly wide field of view and a camera I could drop in a lake and not miss much (unlike my 8 or so hundred dollars worth of DSLR.) This exposure was in a local botanical garden. I laid the camera on a patio, facing straight up into this gorgeous old tree, and got this dreamy and beautiful picture out of it. I think what I like the most about pinhole photography is the lack of control. With my DSLR I have fine control over every aspect of the image, from focal length to ISO to f-stop. This pinhole has none of that. The only control I have is what direction the thing is pointed, and when the shutter is open. It’s very satisfying to get good images when the quality of the finished product depends very much on my photographer’s instinct, and not what buttons I pressed. A note: the artifact on the right side of the image is a partial double-exposure. In hacking the camera up I damaged whatever part stopped the film when it got to the next frame, so I have to do that by feel, and I get it wrong a lot. It’s all part of the art, I suppose.

A long time ago, my Mother-in-law apparently planted tons of crocus plants in the yard. Once in a while, we still get a smattering of them growing here and there. It’s quite nice to see these pretty little flowers growing out in the yard. This gorgeous specimen is right by a water meter out by the street, in an otherwise brown and ugly lawn.

These are  some weeds in my backyard. I took pictures of them and told myself I just couldn’t, with clear conscience, mow the yard with these beautiful flowers growing in it. Denial is a powerful thing. This is mighty oversaturated, mostly because the original was really flat and didn’t bring the purple in the flowers out at all. It was kind of a dreary overcast day when I did these pictures.

This is a dorm on the Oklahoma State University Campus. I walked around taking pictures of it while my wife tried to find a wifi signal so she could get online. I sepia toned it a bit because the color image wasn’t really popping for me, and I couldn’t get an agreeable black and white look.