Sunday, October 10, 2010

Weekly Photo Challenge

For the past few weeks, a group of friends and I have been doing a casual weekly photo challenge. It's supposed to help us with our photography, and give us an excuse to share more pictures with each other. There's no winner or prizes, just the challenge and feedback from others.

Our rules are very simple. One person uses an online random word generator to pick a theme for the week, and at the end of the week that person picks who gets to pick next week's theme.

Here's what I've done so far:

1) "Water"

bow spray

This is from a trip Kristin and I took to the Titanic Museum and Attraction (which is as horrible as it sounds) the day of Bryan's memorial service. We had been planning a trip for the three of us all summer, and when Bryan passed away it seemed like the best way for us to remember him.

He would have made snide comments the entire time, and we would have loved it.

2) "Home"

porch bench

My porch and bench, which I inherited from Bryan. (I believe he inherited it from our friend Lauren when she moved to the west coast.) I played with the color of this picture a little, which is why it looks so orange-tinted.

3) "Cook"

stove burner

This was a lot harder than it seemed like it should be. The camera didn't want to focus (the trouble with a point and click), I kept wanting to try different angles, and your face gets really, really hot leaning over a red-hot burner for twenty minutes.

4) "Contradiction"

knoxville hates nazis

This one was kind of a cop-out. I didn't see anything specific that said "contradiction" to me all week, but I had taken this downtown at the graffiti wall on Wall Avenue (which is now gone; I'm kind of crushed since I've been visiting that wall since I moved here to see what's new and pretty) and figured I could submit it and make a half-assed argument about the symbols and stuff.

5) "Pizza"

3 minute microwave 3 meat

This is a departure for me, in that I don't usually play with color on my photos. On this one, I just kept playing and tweaking and playing some more and that's what I ended up with. It started out as a plain snapshot of the inside of the freezer case at Kroger, and turned into that.

6) "Electric"

outlet

I'm not going to mention which friend's kitchen I took this in. Also, it's very difficult to look at this picture without anthropomorphizing it.

7) "Frown"

This was the week I was having computer trouble. I didn't even think of taking a photo, because that consumed most of my week. In the end, it turned out to be Comcast's fault, and nothing was wrong with my computer.

8) "Number"

seven and eleven

The idea for this popped into my head while I was walking around the craft store, looking for things that had numbers on them. I got the dice on my trip to Vegas, but don't actually use them for anything.

9) "Mileage"

maps

I'm not happy with this one, either. I wanted something that didn't have to do with roadsigns or a random picture of the distance to somewhere, but the week ran out before better inspiration came to me.

10) "Current"

the oarsman in black and white

I like this one, but you kind of have to know it's "The Oarsman", a statue downtown of a man in a rowboat, for it to make sense since my angle cut out the entire boat. I was walking to the river to take some shots off of the bridge and really liked the way the light was hitting this when I walked by, so I took this photo and then changed it to black and white when I got home. All of the pictures of the river left me displeased, so I went with this.

Next week's theme has not been picked yet, but I wanted to share what I've done so far, so that later I would have all of these images and themes in one place.

2 comments:

Justin Bower said...

This is really cool. We had a photo club going here for a while, but people kept moving away, and it never got really going. Only a couple of us seemed to take it seriously anyway. It's a great excuse to go shoot things you might not have normally noticed. very cool!

leonor said...

this is awesome!

love the shot of the burner!

I want to play!!! can I get the word e-mailed to me too?!?