One year ago this month… January 2007
Since the primary focus of this site is to help me learn and improve my photography, I thought it might be nice to look back, once a month, to re-evaluate some photos from a year ago. Here then, are some photos and collections from January 2007… About one month after I bought my first SLR. (Click each photo for full-size image):
6 January 2007
On January 6th, I spent the day walking on the mall in Washington, DC and spent the night walking through Arlington, VA. One of my favorite shots of the day was the candid photo you see to the left of a man reading a book on a bench. It was abnormally warm that day for January, and this gentleman decided to take advantage of it.
The main reason I went down to the National Mall that day was because the clouds were laying very low early in the morning and I didn’t want to waste the opportunity. Even though the sun had burned many of the clouds away as the day progressed, there were still some amazing opportunities with what was left, as illustrated to the right.
At night, when I returned to Arlington, I decided to experiment with photographing neon signs in the Clarendon/Courthouse area. It was actually much harder than I had expected. If I’m not mistaken, I had deliberately underexposed the shots so as to make the background and non-neon elements darker, thus highlighting the neon tubes. To the left, you’ll see an example. Not perfect, but getting there.
More after the jump…
15 January 2007
| On January 15th, I took a short stroll through Alexandria looking for some inspiration. I didn’t quite find it, but I did find a decent shot of some railroad tracks, pictured right. |  |
20 January 2007
January 20th was a huge photo day for me, especially since I had just bought the Canon EF-S 10-22mm wide-angle lens. I spent a couple hours at the National Cathedral in the morning and then traveled down to the Jefferson Memorial late at night. Some of my favorites below:
25 January 2007
On January 25th, I decided to try my hand at neon signs again, this time right down the road from me in Shirlington Village. I managed to snap the following photo of the neon sign at the Carlyle Grand restaurant. (This photo was also featured at Schmap.com for their dynamic travel guide to the area.):
27 January 2007
Finally, on January 27th, there was a large anti-war protest downtown. Opinions on the war aside, these types of events are among my favorite to photograph. The photo opportunities are endless. Many of the photos from this day still rank among my all-time favorite photos:
I hope you enjoyed viewing them as much as I enjoyed taking them!
You can view all of my photos from January 2007 here.
February 1st, 2008 at 2:34 pm
fantastic shots. Forgotten how much i liked those shots from the anti-war protest. please do some explaining of how you got the blue in the sky to be so…BLUE!
February 1st, 2008 at 2:41 pm
Thanks! As for the blue, I really didn’t do much at all. There was some slight post-processing but 90% of that deep blue came from a combination of my UV filter and the EF-S 10-22mm lens. God, I loved that lens.