I’m back with another month’s worth of weekly photographic challenges. We’ve got five photos, none of which were taken with a phone. Will increased intentionality lead to increased quality? Find out!

Also, not using a phone means I can stick my lens way up in a flower’s biz just to see what would happen.

Speaking of…

26. Patterns

Nature is full of patterns, which is precisely why there’s so much pseudoscientific gobbledygook surrounding fibonacci spirals and the like.

So, this means that I can just shove my camera right up super close to a flower and I am absolutely correct in saying that the outcome is a pattern.

Incidentally, this marks the half-way point in my second year of doing 52 Frames’ weekly challenges. Yippee!

27. Negative Space

This challenge is a repeat of one from 2021, and it’s one I was really excited to redo. Except, of course, that there were few subjects that I felt really screamed out for the “negative space” treatment.

But, this image of a gas station and the sky was one of them.

Per the challenge, I’m supposed to use the blankness of the sky to direct the viewer’s eyes towards the orange gas station sign, but I chose to do (probably) the opposite. It was near pink hour, the sky was a lovely color, and I may have just turned up brightness and saturation in that part of the photo.

And, yeah, I think this is a lot more fun this way.

(Btw, if you look closely, you can see where I shoddily cloned out the lights from the bottom of the gas station. Having two glowing white squares there was distracting!)

28. Silhouette

This week, I was busy with a visit from my parents. Amongst our many excursions was a brief visit to Wiley Slough up in Skagit County, a place where I really enjoy taking photographs of the abundant bird life.

With that in mind, the silhouette is one of a great blue heron, shot against the sun, with a little detail remaining.

I shot this with a very long prime, and thought about changing my composition before I submitted. None of the crops I tried improved things, so the framing is basically straight out of camera…

29. Common Object

I got so far as to deliberately take a grainy, black and white photograph of a plastic Dr. Pepper bottle before I changed approaches dramatically.

I took this photo in the Moody Ales & Co brewery in Port Moody, B.C., depicting my friend Chelsea ordering another beer as framed through a beer glass.

I thought it was a cool way of using a common object to tell a broader story. Plus, what do photographers like more than glass?

30. Single Focal Point

Folks seemed to think my background was too distracting when I tried this one out in February of last year, so again this is a challenge I feel eager to repeat.

I don’t think this is a scene I would ordinarily gravitate towards – it’s the top of a telephone pole shot off of a bridge. (Lakeview Blvd.) And yet, I think it works well for the challenge. The background is blurred out, but not so blurry that you can’t tell what the *bleep* you’re looking at. (Props to the f/1.8 prime I had in my fanny pack.)’

I do have another shot of this that is angled better, but without the car. I prefer having the car because it adds movement to the scene and makes it more dynamic. I could have waited for another car to frame things better, but the weather is around ninety degrees F, and though there is no humidity, I still preferred to get off the flippin’ sunny overpass and down into the shade.

B&W vibe comes from SOOC Lumix GX85 Dynamic Monochrome filter. Love it. (If anything, I should play with this combo & the black and whites more because they are tremendous fun.)

And that’s all for this month!

Next month will bring color, night photography, and water amongst other challenges. These are all faves, so I’m looking forward to them. 😊

Toodles for now!!