ChrisMaverick dotcom

Tag: cwd

Craig Street Bum

Craig Street Bum

For the Class with Dave group.

Assignment: "The Street" in B&W – Your portrayal of life on the street. Photos must be black & white.

This is the Craig Street Bum. He is what I can best term, a professional homeless man. In one month, I will have lived in Pittsburgh for 15 years. For this entire time, this man has been stationed on Craig Street between Forbes and Fifth Avenue. He sometimes moves from one side of the street to the other. He is never there at night. But every day, rain or shine, whenever I am on Craig Street he is there, perched on his milk crate, with a cup in front of him begging for change. I have often wondered if he is really homeless or not. Not to be callous, but you’d think after 15 years he’d either be back on his feet or would have died. I don’t very often see people giving him change (I think most passers by are aware that he is simply there every day) but he clearly changes his clothes from time to time, despite having "the homeless look." If you pay close attention you’ll even notice that his Nikes are newer than mine.

Maybe I should give the panhandling thing a try.

Red Light District: Safe Sex

Red Light District: Safe Sex

More pictures from yesterday’s photoshoot.

An idea Shiima originally had based on some other picture he’d seen was just to have a leg draped over his shoulder and kind of the implication of oral sex. I modified the poses a bit and kind of got Mallory more into the shot as well. One of the racier things that I’ve shot, at least recently, but I think it turned out pretty well.

used in LJ post:chrismaverick.livejournal.com/251041.html

4-24-07

Day 256 of 365 days. Part of me wonders if I am starting to lose my mind without having a day job. I was at every end of the multidimensional extreme today. I had about an hour of misery and uselessness as I fell into despair thinking I’m never going to find anything to pay…

Class With Dave: abstract

Class With Dave: abstract

cwd141 – Abstract. From wikipedia: Abstract art is now generally understood to mean art that does not depict objects in the natural world, but instead uses color and form in a non-representational way. You are free to create your abstraction entirely in-camera, in post-processing, or as a combination of the two.

class with dave: 12×12

class with dave: 12x12

cwd143 – Square Foot. The entire content of your photo must be 12×12 inches (~30x30cm). What? I’m talking about the entire frame. So, first…your photo must be cropped square (non-square images will be removed from the pool). Second, if you enlarged the photo to 12×12, it would be a life-sized photo. Am I making any sense yet? Perhaps an exmaple. Let’s say your subject was an 8.5×11 inch sheet of paper (boring…don’t you dare do it) – that’s less than 12×12, so there would be some space around the piece of paper. Now let’s say your subject was a person. People are bigger than 12×12, so you might have a head and a shoulder. Or maybe a couple feet and ankles. Get it? Bottom line: if you blew it up to 12×12, it would be life-sized. Obviously, I don’t expect perfect precision on the whole 12×12 thing…but if it’s obviously 20×20 or 5×5, I’ll boot it from the pool. Get as close as you can to 12×12. The goal of this assignment is to alter the way you look at things. Footnote: Please, no photos of rulers.

a 365 reject of my Day 249 shot.

bar mirror

bar mirror

When I was 2 years old, my grandfather bought new cabinets for my grandmother and he rebuilt the old cabinets into a bar that was a favorite family hang out spot in his house for years. When he died a few years ago and my grandmother decided to sell the house she was going to throw the bar out. Over my dead body. I drove to Cleveland, rented a truck and drove the bar back. Now, it sits in my dining room now as one of my most prized possessions.

This mirror was my addition to bar. It probably doesn’t seem like a big thing, but for some reason part of me just can’t seem to change the bar itself, but I wanted to add something to it. You can’t see it in this picture, but his name is on the mirror in decals. It adds a nice since of "barness" to it and it makes me happy to look at it it. I’m sure he would have approved.

Assignment 2. Mirror/Reflection. A great, though challenging, compositional element is the mirror. Use reflections to complement your subject. Anyone doing a self-portrait in a mirror will be tagged “phoned in.” All other reflections are fair game.

tennis serve

tennis serve

For the Class with Dave group. When I did the motion assignment I had already gotten the frozen time aspect down I think, so I wanted to capture something a little more natural. I wish I had had more time to watch the Carrick High School tennis team practice, but it was raining pretty bad and their coach made them pack it in. Luckily though, he was nice enough to let one kid serve a couple more for me so I could get this shot.

Assignment 1. Frozen Time. We’ve played with motion blur, but there is another very powerful way to convey energy, freeze motion in a way that can’t possibly just exist. High shutter speed in plenty of light will give a nice sharp image no matter how fast your subject may be moving. Images will be judged on sharpness.

4-3-07

Day 235 of 365 days. I’ve done long exposure shots before, even in this project, so I was really hoping to use this weeks Class With Dave assignment to do something else, but I haven’t had the time what with working on my paper (I’ve gotten it "complete." Tomorrow is for editing and turning it…

3-29-07

Day 230 of 365 days. One of the nice things about the Class with Dave group is that it forces me to get off my ass and do different shots. I actually thought of this one weeks ago, but just never got around to it. But this week with a health and fitness assignment, I…

3-25-07

Day 226 of 365 days. You know, I almost want to call this a bringing sexy back pic? What do you people think? I got to sleep in today. It was nice and I needed it. After I finally did get up, I did a little bit of the moving from our current bedroom to…

Cathedral of Learning

Cathedral of Learning

For the Class With Dave group. Assignment: Black and White architecture. This is a repeat assignment from earlier. My original version of this assignment was a much more standard, though high contrast B&W night scene, so I decided to go with something more creative and different from what I normally do. This was shot in the afternoon on the University of Pittsburgh campus. In order to get more fantastic and less realistic tones, I used a combination of Channel Mixer, Curves and Levels adjustment layers with layer masks.

Channel Mixer:
Red: +40 Green: +180 Blue: -100

Levels 1:
input Black: 10 Gray: 1.00 White: 233
output Black: 0 White: 255
with a layer mask blocking out the right (bright) side of the sky.

Curves (input,output):
0,0 41,90 168,141 197,181 228,137 255,255
with a layer mask blocking out the building and the tree

Levels 2:
input: Black: 0 Gray: 1.24 White: 255
output Black: 0 White: 255