B&W Photo Challenge Day #6- Wet Fit

Wet Fit

This is a picture of my car after being in the snow (because it's snowing again!!!) her name is Gloria and she is a 2009 Honda Fit with a mere 37K miles on it, and I love her, so I figured she deserved a little action in my challenge. I took this photo with my 

Nikon D5100 18mm , ISO 800, 1/4 sec. shutter speed, no flash.

I used a little clip light to the right with a weak 60 watt bulb, I had it clipped to my weed whacker ;) !!

I noticed it did blow out the image a little in the headlight, but it was cold and the set up was shaky. All in all though I think it came out pretty good ( and now I know what I can do different, I will try again when the weather is better. I post processed this photo 1st in Camera Raw (because I shot it in raw) some adjustments I made were to the contrast, blacks, sharpening, and a few more tweaks. I then opened it up in Photoshop and basically did some more minor adjustments, and oh yeah I desaturated  it because I originally shot this in full color. Well enough of the ramblings, but before I go I would like to send a shout out to my few foreign visitors ( that I hope to gain more of) thanks for visiting people of Germany, Finland, France, and the Ukraine.

Gloria all Wet!

B&W Photo Challenge Day #5 Iphone 5s

Doctor Sleep

Today's picture was taken with my wife's Iphone 5s, which has a 8 Megapixel camera. I switched the shooting mode to Noir to take this picture of Stephen King's Doctor Sleep book while in Target ( and yes my wife was shopping again, seems like I theme) I didn't make any adjustments to the photo at all and I'd have to say that it came out pretty well. For those of you who don't know Doctor Sleep is the sequel to The Shining, and not that they need a plug (paper or author) here is a more thorough review of the book by the New York Times  I myself haven't had a chance to read this book yet (because lets be honest, who has time to read novels?) but it sounds really good, I just hope I get to read it before they make it into a movie. Tomorrow who knows what the day will bring.

B&W photo challenge day #4-"Unfiltered Poison on Sale"

Okay today it snowed(again) I didn't get a chance to leave my house, but luckily yesterday while at the mall I did manage to take this shot in Carson's of the clearance table. So just like yesterday this photo was taken with my Galaxy Nexus. The difference with this photo is that, I only used a basic B&W filter, and made no other adjustments ( so I guess it's not totally unfiltered 😋) I'm learning that this challenge will not be as easy as I thought. I said to myself " how hard can it be to take 1 picture a day?" Well how many times have anyone just took 1 picture and say " yep that's the one!"( never for me) Well I guess that's why they call it a challenge.

B&W challenge day #3

Today's picture was taken with the trusty old cellphone, the camera really only performs well in natural light ( and I mean a sunny clear day) my phone the Galaxy Nexus only has a 5 megapixel camera. I had to snap this photo while waiting for my wife at the mall, I took it in a bit of a hurry because another major problem with my phone, is the battery life is just terrible!

Anyways the app I used to post process this little plant pic was Snapseed. I used the b&w filter, made some adjustments to the contrast,and added some sharpening. I also ran it through the HDR filter. Still hoping to get a cool outdoor shot( damn you weather!)

B&W Photo Challenge Day #2 Hand of a Married Man

I call this one Hand of a Married Man. This is my hand, it looks a lot older in Black and White! This was shot with my Nokia D5100 

ISO 200, F/5.6, 1/30 sec. 

That's it for the technical info, but as far as the image goes, I am still getting the hang of my camera. I had the camera on Macro mode instead of manual ( I was being lazy) I did have the camera set to shoot in B&W (as they like to call it monochrome) however for this photo I used the on camera adjustment to make it B&W, other than that no adjustments were made. I promise to try to get out of my house and snap a pic of something more interesting than my hand, but it is winter and I hate being cold.

Black and White

I have decided to take on a little challenge for myself, for the next 30 days I will be taking b&w photos. The plan will be to take shots of various things, nothing in particular but I do want to try to take them with various cameras. I have a Nokia d5100, Sony DSC HX-1, Galaxy nexus, Nexus 7 tablet (with a craptastic 1.3 megapixel camera) and I may even try to snap some with my Apple fan girl of a wife's 5s, and iPad mini. So we shall see how it goes, I'm not promising I'll post a pic a day but I'll try to get them up at least by the week and at the end I hope to post them all. So for the first one I took today with the craptastic Nexus 7 camera a selfie ( since that's pretty much all you can take with it) I doctored it up using a few apps, cause otherwise it would really look crappy. I look So Thrilled Huh???

About the Name refocus

Hello, since I said I would explain more about the name of my little freelance business, here it goes. First of all I didn't capitalize the (r), well mainly because I didn't want to, but also as style choice ( I just think it looks better.) The 2nd thing behind the name is a little more deep ( meaning lengthy ) some of it personal some of it slogan driven.
I had been driving a taxi for 7 years, until the company closed. This was the first time I had to "refocus" what I wanted to do with my life. So I decided to take advantage of my unemployment by going to college. So then I graduated not too long ago, but unfortunately I have found out that most employers want a bachelor's degree. Well guess what time it became??? Yep you guessed it time to refocus! So I decided to become a freelancer. Now as far as the Slogan side of it, I thought of all kinds of tag lines like " Time to get your business back in focus" " refocus on what matters to you" or just "get focused" like I said there are a lot of possibilities with the name. Now all I have to do is get refocused on this freelancing thing and I'll be all right. Oh yeah if you need any help getting your businesses refocused, let me know and we can help each other.