Photo Friday again, and this week’s theme is round. So here’s an unoriginal shot of something round. I shot this using my po-man’s wide angle lens. I’ve got a “real” wide angle lens coming.
5 years ago today, New Orleans was sacked by one of the most deadly and certainly the most costly natural disaster to ever hit the United States. I was living in New Orleans and lived to tell the story. I remember back to those days…it wasn’t easy. I don’t pretend to make light of what happened. Here’s some excerpts from what I how I was feeling back then:
I am powerless, and God is powerful. I am right: there is nothing I can do. But I pray that Christ’s power will rest on me and his grace will be sufficient for me. I want to delight in this, although it is extremely difficult to at this point–my hardships are overwhelming me as the floodwaters are the levees in New Orleans, but through that I want to be weak, so I may be strong, so I can then pass that grace onto others. This is my portion. This is my strength.
A few weeks later, I wrote this:
The answer I got from God was a reminder of his sovereignty. The more I thought on that, the more at peace I felt, and the more surety I had that everything is going to work out for his purposes. Through all this, I’ve been incredibly blessed beyond measure. My heart is overflowing with gratitude to so many people. The Lord does things for his glory. Sometimes, that’s a hard pill to swallow, but I will. And this time, I want to bless his name. My allegiance is with God, and if it means suffering loss, then I accept it. When it comes down to it, the answer to all my questions is simply this: God.
Most of my shots from my New Orleans gallery where from around this time. My friend Joe Kennedy was present on many of these photo-taking adventures to the French Quarter or in and around New Orleans. He’s done a fabulous job on his blog recounting the last few years.
I’m a Johnny-come-lately on this one. I interpreted the theme literally here. This isn’t the best shot in the world, but I suppose it will do.
Warm
Here’s a shot of a lady sitting outside the church doors.
After Church
Here’s the street, quite literally:
Black and white photography was the first form of photography to be invented over 150 years ago, and has remained popular since then for its aesthetic and artistic properties. Traditional black and white photography is more or less is the result of monochromatic, light-sensitive chemicals on some sort of medium such as film or plates. Some chemicals respond to different colors of light more than others. A combination of light color and film selection with black and white photography produce different effects when the colors are represented in monochrome. That is, if a film that was hypersensitive to red, it would have bright white areas if the light source was originally red. Traditionally, photographers had to choose a type of black and white film to whatever effect he or she was going for, and if he or she had control over lighting, would adjust lighting according to the film. Some photographers still prefer this method because of the limitation of digital cameras
When using a digital camera, a photographer obviously does not have the option to choose a type of film for a desired effect. Most cameras only have one sensor, so this requires that either the camera convert to image to a monochrome image, or the photographer convert in in post-processing. Some cameras have options when converting images to black and white, but for the most control, shooting and saving an image in a RAW format gives the photographer the maximum number of options when post-processing.
Here’s a shot that’s doctored in in CS-3. HDR + Some healing and cloning. Nothing too fancy.
The G.O.P. Just kidding! But all in good fun, here’s an elephant.
I shot this about 5 years ago over Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans. The tree was cut down later, but the birds obviously liked it.
