Hello, and welcome to my reflection on my second month of participation in 52 Frames, a creative exercise in photography.

This month’s challenges ranged from the cinematic to sunsets. How did I fare?

As always, my submissions can be found on my 52 Frames profile here.

6. Single Point of Focus

I do enjoy taking silly photos that focus on a single leaf, or an aspect of a plant.

Unfortunately, little of that is on display in the middle of winter.

For this photo, I focused on this particular leaf, which was still hanging out.

I deliberately left a lot of distracting background in, which fades into the blurriness provided by the shallow depth of field of the Olympus 45mm f/1.8 portrait lens.

I like the texture, and the transitions into blurriness.

But, I don’t think this is a particularly good photo.

I think it would have benefitted greatly from tighter framing, or cropping, and less distraction in the background.

7. Golden Hour

The goal was to capture the golden hour, that time of day just after sunrise, or just before sunset when the low sun gives the environment a yellow hue.

Unfortunately, this week was one full of cloudy mornings, cloudy evenings, and snow fall, so I didn’t have golden light. I also decided not to artificially add any in post – I would prefer to keep my photos looking au natural.

So, instead the yellow is provided by…

the double yellow and a road sign.

I like the framing here, but I don’t think the low-light did this any favors. I took this not long before the sunset entirely.

8. Roll Credits

This is a photo I’m actually proud of.

This brief was a tad belabored.

The goal was to take a photo that could serve as the final frame of a film. In essence, to be cinematic.

I greatly admire the work of short documentarians who make short films about very local topics, for instance Pittsburgh-area jewelry makers or duck-pin bowling enthusiasts.

If I was going to make a film, I think I would make a short documentary along these lines.

One possible subject, would be the Geigertown Railway Museum. The museum is an open air collection of train cars, in memory of locomotive enthusiast D.J. Shirey, who died working on the railways he loved.

The film-like wide & short aspect ratio benefited the composition, as trains too are long short things.

More photos of the railway museum will follow in a future post!

9. Details

The brief - focus on shapes, colors, textures, and fine details of objects.

Perhaps I got a little tired of traipsing about in the snow trying to photograph things.

For this week, I wanted to just photograph an object indoors close-up, with interesting surfaces.

This is an old globe paperweight, gifted to me by my mother. Amongst its features are some somewhat strange political boundaries, including the Soviet Union, China, and the rest of Asia all being colored as monolithic blocks.

I photographed this up close with a wide-angle lens to capture both the surface, and the whole shape of the unit. The tricky part is that it’s difficult to keep things angled 100% right, or 100% still, but I think this is okay even though it’s a little crooked.