Sun Block
Originally uploaded by Thorpeland

Sun Block
With my Tuesday night soccer season over for a few weeks, I took the evening to drive around some local back roads. I had success finding an interesting location for my last 52 Week shot, so I thought why not grab the camera and take advantage of the setting sun.

I drove down a country road for a couple miles and a gravel road to the right caught my eye. It was too late to make the turn so I kept going for a bit till I could turn around. I came back to the road and it was another gravel drive leading up to a natural gas pump station. There's a lot of those in this area of North Texas. But instead of the area being surrounded by crops, it was surrounded by a huge sunflower field. I immediately knew I had a nice find and needed to start snapping as the sun was dropping fast. I began walking through the sunflower field shooting randomly. It was as I turned around to work my way back out that I noticed this flower blocking the sun from my eyes. I snapped the shot and thought, "this one might be a keeper"! Just then i noticed almost every other flower around me was occupied by a large furry yellow jacket. Suddenly I felt panic flow through me. I ran from the field, jumped in my car, rolled up the windows and turn the air conditioning on (hey its like 100F here!). Bee's/Wasp/Hornets are one of my biggest fears. My cryptonite.

Hhmm... perhaps a future self portrait idea could be opening its doors here.

Solitude
Originally uploaded by Thorpeland

Solitude
This past Wednesday I set out to get off the main roads and find solitude. More specifically, find a remote...wide open location to get rural shots for my stock photography work.

I called up my friend Beau who lived in the area and headed out with my gear. It was about 7pm and we were about to hit that "magic hour" for some great agriculture type shots. Beau guided me down some back roads thinking a field like this would be what I wanted. As soon as i saw it, I said "perfect!". We pulled off the road, setup the tripod and camera. But as soon as I got setup, large clouds rolled in and totally blocked out the sun. Things became very gray and muted. That golden sunset lighting I wanted, was gone. Bummer. So rather than try to submit them to the stock agency, I toyed with them in Lightroom and Photoshop to give me at least some creative shots to post on my Flickr page.

25\52: No Turning Back...
Originally uploaded by Thorpeland

I can't believe im almost to the half way point of my 52 Week Project already! Seems like just last week I was sitting in my backyard trying to figure out a self portrait that didn't make me look stupid for my first shot of the project. Well, im 25 pictures into it. I have some good, some bad and a few stand-outs. This weeks I feel is one of those stand outs. Which is funny because when I took this, I didn't really even consider it a usable, quality shot. It was one of the final snaps I took before the light got too dark and I had to pack it in. Im looking to my left, off camera at traffic on the nearby road to see who was slowing down to have a look at me. Although this place was pretty tucked away and hidden from the main road. They would have had to go very slow to see me down this little gravel road leading to a natural gas well in the middle of a Milo field.

A bit of info on the processing. In Lightroom, I cropped it into a bit of a movie-wide screen look. It just seemed right, given my expression and the location. I then gave it a slight vignetting to darken the outside, putting the focus on the subject.... me. After that I applied a Lomo filter preset. Which gave it that green-ish hue. I saved as a full sized TIFF file and exported it over to CS3. From there I gave it a light Smart Sharpen and then applied a Photo Filter Adjustment Layer. I picked a light orange-ish brown color, which created that fire in the sky look behind me. As soon as I saw the result, I said... thats its, im done! Flatten layers, resize, save-as, shoot to Flickr.

19\52: My Friend, the Warthog
Originally uploaded by Thorpeland

Another 52 Week Project self portrait. This one taken at the Denton Air show in June. It was good times.

23\52: Always Be Prepared!!
Originally uploaded by Thorpeland

This is week 23 of my 52 Week Self Portrait Project. A combination of boredom, a weird hat and sleeplessness helped me create this odd shot. I figure i might as well use the help of Flickr to add to my blog.