2012 Project 366 {El Dorado County Portrait Photographer}

So, I’ve joined the ranks of the “take one picture per day for a year” crowd. I take pictures frequently.  In fact, I’ve probably taken tens of thousands of pictures just last year.  I know I threw away more than 10,000 photos as I was going thru 2011 to find “The Best of 2011” (which I will be posting later on.)  So, taking pictures every day is not really a challenge.  Taking good and/or meaningful pictures every day is a challenge and I see that I ran up against the wall just this week.

For day one I had several options…an 8 point buck, a flock of turkeys, my husband’s New Year’s Day food and pics of my family.  I will usually opt for a people picture, and especially a family picture, over other things any day of the week, so I thought this one of my daughter, her boyfriend and my husband with champagne glasses would be a good start to the new project.

January 2, 2012 was all about recovery.  My husband and I were home alone after several weeks of enjoying lots of company and Christmas celebration.  I love Christmas time because there’s lots of stuff going on and we get to host lots of people.  However, I also enjoy quiet evenings at home with my husband.  We watched football and movies and my husband cooked a simple Cheeseburger with freshly ground meat, cheddar cheese and marinated red onions.  We also had green beans with toasted almonds.  Simple, but luxurious and very tasty.  We even sat in front of the tv and watched “A Perfect Murder”, which was based on the Hitchcock movie, “Dial M for Murder” that we saw the night before.

On January 3, 2012, while Obie and I were out for a walk, I saw this tree and found it very “appealing”!  The ant was a bonus.

The next day I had quite a few photos to choose from because I was looking for things to photograph for a weekly challenge I participate in. I was photographing one of my favorite places when the sun started to go down.  It didn’t look like it was going to be a good sunset, but I waited and my patience paid off.

I admit that it was a rather slow day at the Schmautz Haus on January 5 and so I resorted to taking pictures of the wildlife.  It’s not a particularly good picture, so I will try to do better.

Day 6 was relatively uneventful until I decided to remove my outdoor Christmas decorations and discovered that my socks exactly matched one of my Christmas snowflake decorationss. I was delighted with this and couldn’t help but take a picture of it.  Actually, I took several pictures, but this was the best one.  The women in my family (my daughter and myself) love to wear colorful or interesting socks. In fact, we go out of our way to buy each other fun socks when we come across them.  So, this photo is probably only exciting to me (and perhaps my daughter.)

Finally today’s entry was all about another challenge.   The Challenge group I belong to has a new photography challenge every week.  The picture must be taken during the week of the challenge.  This week I got to choose the challenge subject because I won the challenge from the previous week. (Yea me!) So, I chose Depth of Field (or bokeh).  A shallow depth of field generally involves focusing on one thing in the photo, while the rest of the photo blurs out.  The blurred out portion of the photo either helps to tell the story or becomes indistinguishable.  The viewer’s eyes are drawn to the item that is sharply in focus. I got the idea for this picture while I was taking down my Christmas decorations.  This isn’t necessarily the photo that I will be submitting, but practice makes perfect.

Hopefully I will become more creative thru the process of taking a meaningful picture every day.

If you’d like to set up a photoshoot for you or a family member, or if you are interested in purchasing any of my photos, please contact me at schmautzhaus@sbcglobal.net or visit my website:  Sierra Springs Photography