Streets Project : Summer

This is my second post on a personal project photographing people in the middle of a street they are attached to. For more on the project and to see my first post, check out Kiersten. Here is my favorite image of Summer in the middle of A1A at Sunrise Blvd in Fort Lauderdale, FL.

Here is an additional one we did on the sidewalk. 

How can you not take pictures of the sunrise? I would love to print this huge 

Streets Project: Kiersten

To begin my Streets project, Kiersten and I ended up on A1A along the beach in Boca Raton. 

And in between waiting and dodging cars. 

I'd like to continue with this personal project and create series of pictures of people in the middle of their street. Their street as in a street that represents them or has been a part of their life. Here is a random one that I photographed after Best of the Best in the middle of Biscayne Blvd. The ridiculousness of it being in the middle of major street in downtown Miami got me thinking.

I think the best streets are those where you normally would not see someone standing in the middle of it. 

So if you have a street in mind let me know. If we can make it happen I am down. 

Grassy Waters Preserve

Grassy Waters Preserve is a wetland nature preserve and a water supply of the city of West Palm Beach. I was initially going to integrate my photos from my trips there into a photo essay, but the images I created were more on the artistic side. Here are my favorites from the second visit. You can also see the first. 

A Cool Million

Wouldn't it be nice? 

Pursuit of an Essay

One of the things that has kept me busy over the last few weeks has been my Photojournalism class. The long term main project of the class is a photo essay on either a topic related to water or consumerism. I decided to kind of do a little bit of both when I chose my essay to be about the inefficiencies of consuming water through bottles. Of course there are some situations where bottled water is necessary, but the bottled water companies have capitalized. Their clever use of mountains and springs to advertise has influenced the population even though, in numerous cases, tests have shown tap water to be better then bottled water. In fact, one third of all bottled water is from the tap. The creation of the water bottles also has a negative effect. “Each year the making of all the bottled waters in the United States uses enough oil and energy to fuel a million cars.”(The Story of Bottled Water). Even more energy and oil is spent distributing the bottled water.

Check out this awesome video "The Story of Bottled Water" created by The Story of Stuff Project that kind of got me going on the subject

My thesis for my photo essay is that bottled water is not an efficient way to consume water and has a negative effect on the environment. From the creation to distribution, bottled water uses energy that could be saved by drinking tap water.

I don't want to post the essay till it is complete, but here is an image of a chain link fence that I took while at Mount Trashmore, the local landfill.

Staying Creative

This past week was a slow week with out many photos being taken. I get a little antsy when I don't have any photos to edit or projects going on. Sometimes it's in these situations where I'll take a simple artsy photo that I've taken recently and see what I can create. I'll start of with the photo and play around with it in Lightroom and try out different presets. I might lose interest in the photo or bring it into to Photoshop and see what else I can create. Like a painter contemplating his next move, I'll sometimes view the image for an extended period of time and just think about it. Unlike a painter, I can try as many different things as I want! I am big fan of interesting geometry and perspective so that is what I went after here with this example.

The location. I was actually scouting for a future shoot

The unedited image

The two edited images I brought into Photoshop. The poles reminded me of matches or pool sticks

The final creation "Sticks Inside"

I love art that is printed HUGE. Here is another image I put together from the past that is a composite and would look great printed huge.

Mom's Backyard

My mom recently moved from the house I grew up in and my family wanted to have some photos to look back on. The house has a huge deck and is located at the edge of the lake. I remember the time when.....

The View

More then once have I jumped off the roof into the pool

The reeds that surround the lake near my house. 

Grassy Waters

I am exploring the possibility of putting together a photojournalism project on green initiatives in South Florida. On a friends suggestion, I headed up to the Grassy Waters Preserve area in North Palm Beach. It is a the water catchment area for West Palm Beach. Unfortunately by the time I arrived around 4:30 the main preserve location with boardwalks was closing. I ended up walking around some nature trails in the area by the Solid Waste Authority. Overall the trip was lackluster with the trails I traveled not as promising as the main Grassy Waters Preserve. Here is a composite I put together. When I photographed the original photo with the birds swarming I got the feeling of what the composite is.

My Original

The sky that I added

The Nuclear Silo that I added

Old film texture overlay

I really wanted to get a great sunset image of the everglades, but there just wasn't a good view in the area. Here are some more artistic images I took while walking around. They are not in the direction of the subject of "Green Initiatives" at all. It's back to the drawing board.