Our assignment from the Daily Shoot for Saturday 13 March (#ds118) was “Curves, squiggles, and flowing lines interest the eye. Make a photograph dominated by a curvy shape of some sort today.”

Mehul at work has just bought himself a Nikon DSLR (a D90 if I recall — I’m a Canon-boy myself) and was asking for some help with it while I was in the offices at Glendale this past week. I was trying to explain bokeh and how the aperture has an effect on it (and probably confusing the poor chap), so it came to me that I should take a photo with lots of bokeh, to illustrate it for him. Here we are: my fave zoom at 135mm, with f/5.6 and some ridiculously slow shutter speed that necessitated a tripod. Plus I was holding up a white sheet on the right to reflect some natural light...

It came out pretty well, considering. I did take another at f/16 to show the difference, but I must have jogged the tripod during the eons-long exposure and it came out shaken. I was using a remote to make sure I kept my hands off, honest...

(Aside: the remote I was using was the Canon RS60-E3. It plugs into the side of the camera — I have a Canon Rebel XTi — and allows you to take either a simple shot, with auto-focus by pressing half-way, or a shot with shutter locked open (“bulb-mode”). Well worth the $20. You can even get Chinese knock-offs for about $6 on eBay.)

Now playing:
Orb - Into the Fourth Dimension: Essenes in Starlight
(from The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld)

The task for the Daily Shoot on Wednesday 17th February (#ds94) was "Fragility conveys tension. Make a photo today of a person or object in a fragile state." This one was somewhat difficult. I wanted to find something outside that would illustrate this (some of the early photos on the page had set me thinking), but there was nothing nearby that I could think of or that I saw when going to the dry cleaner's at lunchtime. So, instead I set up a staged shot:

For fun, and to emphasize the staginess, I used my own book as the "prime crusher"...