Category Archives: Still Life

Alexis, Birthdays, Black & White, Brandon, Carla, Dad, Drone, Grandma, Jason, Johnathan, Kanoa, Logan, Mom, Nature, Panorama, Still Life, Teresa, WPC - Alternate, WPC - Reminder

Rodan139: Water Alternate

September 25, 2020 Christopher D. Bennett

I need to start today off by wishing my Mom a happy birthday. Without here, none of this would be possible. Not only would I never exist, she also bought me my first camera. A Minolta Maxxum 450si.

Happy birthday Mom!

It hope is as amazing a birthday as you want it to be!

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I went to Ledges on Sunday morning to take my WATER picture for THE WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE. I took several pictures. Here are some of the others I took that weren’t ready for the world on Monday.

I hope to take Rodan139 out again this weekend. On Tuesday I came off a self-quarantine from a potential exposure from a previous Sunday. As it turns out, I wasn’t exposed, so good news for the friendly skies!

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This is your reminder that STILL LIFE is this week’s theme for THE WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE:

A STILL LIFE image is a picture of an inanimate object. Usually posed.

Happy photo harvesting!

Andy, Becky, Carla, Dad, Drone, Elizabeth, Kim, Kio, Micky, Nature, Still Life, Tamara, Teresa, WPC - Submissions

WPC – WEEK 262 – WATER

September 21, 2020 Christopher D. Bennett 2 Comments

Can you believe it? 51 straight weeks of double digit submission! 1 week short of a full year of double digit submissions! WooHoo!

But you didn’t come here to hear me talk all tommyrot about participation rates. You came to see the submissions!

ELIZABETH NORDEEN

ANDY SHARP

CARLA STENSLAND

MICKY AUGUSTIN

TAMARA PETERSON

CHRISTOPHER D. BENNETT

BECKY PARMELEE

CARLA STENSLAND

KIO DETTMAN

KIM BARKER

CATHIE RALEY

But enough dwelling on the past. Time to look to the future. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future! This week’s theme:

STILL LIFE

STILL LIFE! What a great theme! But what is a STILL LIFE photo? A STILL LIFE photo is any image of an inanimate object. Usually one that you have posed, but not necessarily. From this week, Elizabeth, Kio’s, and Kim’s photos are excellent examples of STILL LIFE.

Here is a look back at the 7 previous times STILL LIFE was a WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE theme:

RWPE #25 – STILL LIFE

RWPE Y2 #10 – STILL LIFE

WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE – WEEK 12 – STILL LIFE

WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE – WEEK 61 – STILL LIFE

WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE – WEEK 127 – STILL LIFE

WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE – WEEK 184 – STILL LIFE

WPC – WEEK 214 – STILL LIFE

A look forward to your new interpretations!

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HOUSEKEEPING

A MESSAGE FROM THE PHOTOGRAPHY 139 RULES DIVISION

The picture has to be taken the week of the theme. This isn’t a curate your pictures challenge. This is a get your butt off the couch (my personal experience) and put your camera in your hands challenge. Don’t send me a picture of you next to the Eiffel Tower, when I know you were in Iowa all week. I will point out that I have let that slide some in the past. I will not in the future. Since it is literally about the only rule.

Your submission needs to be emailed to bennett@photography139.com by 11 AM on the Monday of the challenge due date.

I now allow people to text me their submissions. In the past, I had made exceptions for a couple people that aren’t real computer savvy, even though it was an inconvenience for me and required at least 3 extra steps for me. I am now lifting that embargo because I have a streamline way of uploading photos. I’m not giving out my phone number, but if you have it, you can text me.

It should be pointed out that this blog auto-publishes at 12:01 on Mondays. So it wouldn’t hurt to get your picture in earlier.

That is it, them’s the rules.

A MESSAGE FROM THE PHOTOGRAPHY 139 SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION DIVISION

Nobody showed class, taste, and sophistication this week by signing up for a Photography 139 email subscription. I’ll try and do better next week.

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That’s all I got for today, so if the good Lord’s willin’ and the creek don’t rise, we will commune right here again next Monday. Hopefully it will be a very still Monday!

Baseball/Softball, Black & White, Candid Portrait, Faust, Flowers, Formal Portrait, Jesse, Macro, Still Life

2010-04-05

September 12, 2020 Christopher D. Bennett

The pictures in the folder 2010-04-05 are from a combination of us introducing Jackson to the greatness of Homerun Derby and then the rest are pictures for a MACRO theme of the first year of THE WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE, then known as THE RANDOM WEEKLY PHOTO EXPERIMENT.

WEEK 13 - MACRO - CHRISTOPHER D. BENNETT

Makes me want to get a big red bat and knocks some balls around the yard again!

By adding these pictures to the Photography 139 Gallery, I was able to restore the following historic “An Artist’s Notebook” entries to their original glory:

Home Run Derby: The Next Generation

The Virtue of the Bored

RWPE #13 – Macro

Next Saturday’s walk down memory lane will involve the most beautiful campus in the entire world.

Candid Portrait, Commercial, Mom, Shannon, Still Life

Honey Hollow

August 20, 2020 Christopher D. Bennett 5 Comments

A few Saturdays back, I went on a small road trip with my Mom. We went to the State Center Rose Garden. We went to the Neal Smith Wildlife Refuge. We went to Hardee’s in Indianola! Then we ended up at Shannon and Jason’s store Honey Hollow. It is located in their lower level of their house near Indianola. It is really nice!

Have a look:

You can buy honey, creamed honey (which apparently is a thing), bees. hive equipment, wax, soap, and brooms there. Here is how you get there:

“Located halfway between Des Moines and Indianola, Iowa. Head south out of Des Moines on highway 65/69 toward Indianola until you come to Summerset Rd. Turn east and we are .6 miles down Summerset Rd, nestled between Summerset Trail and Plug Run Creek. Our 2 story log cabin is very visible from the road.”

Their hours are something like 5-8 on Tuesday nights and 10-2 on Saturdays. I might be wrong about that, but it isn’t it more important that is just feels right?

I’ll go more into the creamed honey at a later date.

Animals, Equipment, Fisheye, Flowers, Formal Portrait, Jesse, Logan, Naima, Nature, Night, Self-Portrait, Still Life

Red Fish, Blue Fish

August 16, 2020 Christopher D. Bennett

I meant to publish a post on this subject a week or so ago, but the derecho put those plans on hold. I’ve meant to be more proactive about writing about when I get new equipment, even equipment that is fairly small or seemingly inconsequential to most people. Hopefully this post starts just such a new era for “An Artist’s Notebook”.

The most recent thing I purchased was a fisheye lens for the mirrorless camera setup. Have a look:

Here are some specs for the lens:
FOCUS TYPE: Manual
CLOSEST FOCUSING DISTANCE: 7.9″
FOCAL LENGTH: 12mm
ANGLE OF VIEW: 180
MAXIMUM APERTURE: f/2.8
MINIMUM APERTURE: f/22

On a 35mm camera or a full frame sensor camera, a 50mm lens is the same as human sight. When you look through a viewfinder with a 50mm lens on the camera, what you see should be about the same as when you aren’t looking through the lens. Your angle of view won’t be the same, but objects should be about the same distance.

To illustrate how a fisheye lens, I took pictures of Jesse with a 50mm lens and with my new fisheye lens so you can see the difference between human sight and a fisheye lens.

50mm

Fisheye

50mm

Fisheye

50mm

Fisheye

50mm

Fisheye

I wanted to make this example to be more scientific, but I couldn’t find a football field in Boone with yardlines already painted that wasn’t being used. So these distances are mostly eyeballed, but they are pretty darn close.

Now that you know what it is and what it does, here are a few sample pictures I have taken:

The next piece of equipment I will talk about is a macro bellow I recently picked up. Then maybe a remote camera trigger. Then I need to purchase some stuff.

Birthdays, Brandon, Logan, Macro, Russ, Still Life, Teresa, WPC - Reminder

Derecho Beta

August 14, 2020 Christopher D. Bennett

I need to start today by wishing a happy birthday to Russ! Happy birthday Russ!

I hope your birthday was as wonderful as you wanted it to be!

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The first day after the derecho, I woke up without power. I figured it wouldn’t take long to get power. While I am a dirt poor, blue collar working stiff, I do live in what is considered the “nice” side of town with a bunch of swells. I figured that while my economic status wouldn’t get me preferred service, I would be able to ride the coattails of the country club set.

I was wrong. While even people who live west of Division Street got power back, I spent my day going back and forth between the darkness of my working man’s humble abode and to my Mom’s to get a charge on various electronics. My Mom did get power back at about 10 AM. The electric company came and moved the downed power line that was laying across her backyard. This allowed us to clean up her backyard. Shortly after that crew left, another crew came and turned her power back on.

Since I live about 3 blocks from my Mom, I thought I would have power back within minutes. Or at least within hours. But that power never came. I thought that I might have to travel to Ames to work at the Computer Mine, but they also didn’t get power back until late Tuesday night.

With no power and no job to work at, I grilled myself a semi-frozen pizza for lunch and then drove out to the “Stop Eminent Domain Abuse” semi trailer that had reportedly flipped over. Then I went back to Luther to photograph the grain bins one more time with a different lens than I brought the first time.

Here are some pictures:

I went to bed without power and now the amount of generators in my neighborhood had tripled. I loved the dark, I just wish some quiet would have accompanied it!

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This is your reminder that this week’s WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE theme is MACRO:

MACRO

A MACRO photo is a closeup photo. I was going to get into the technical definition, but nah, closeup photo is enough of a description.

Happy photo harvesting!

Flowers, Self-Portrait, Still Life

2010-02-15, 2010-02-17, & 2010-02-22

July 25, 2020 Christopher D. Bennett

There aren’t many images in the folders 2010-02-15, 2010-02-17, and 2010-02-22 so I combined them all into one post. Most of the pictures are of flowers. But there is a WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE photo in there and a self-portrait.

WEEK 7 - OUT OF FOCUS - CHRISTOPHER D. BENNETT

By adding these pictures to the Photography 139 Gallery, I was able to restore the following historic “An Artist’s Notebook” entries to their original glory:

PERSONAL PHOTO PROJECT OF THE WEEK NO. 8

PERSONAL PHOTO PROJECT OF THE WEEK NO. 9

RWPE #7 – OUT OF FOCUS

Next Saturday’s walk down memory lane will involve self-portraits.

Animals, Art, Night, Politics, Still Life, WPC - Alternate, WPC - Reminder

My Mind was Full of Razors

July 24, 2020 Christopher D. Bennett

Last Friday night I prowled around Boone for a little bit taking NIGHT pictures for THE WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE. Many of them, just couldn’t make the cut for Monday. But they seem to be ready for the world now.

I really don’t do enough NIGHT photography these days.

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This is your reminder that this week’s THE WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE theme is ANIMAL.

ANIMAL

An ANIMAL photo is any picture of an ANIMAL or ANIMAL byproduct.

Happy photo harvesting!

Animals, Art, Black & White, Flowers, Logan, Macro, Nature, Still Life, WPC - Alternate, WPC - Reminder

When I Stand in Your Love

July 10, 2020 Christopher D. Bennett 2 Comments

I have plenty more BLACK AND WHITE alternates for last week’s THE WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE:

I can’t wait until BLACK AND WHITE is the theme again!

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This is your reminder that this week’s THE WEEKLY PHOTO CHALLENGE theme is FACELESS PORTRAIT:

FACELESS PORTRAIT

Remember that a FACELESS PORTRAIT is simply a portrait of somebody that doesn’t show their face.

Happy photo harvesting!

Birthdays, Black & White, Flowers, Macro, Naima, Still Life, WPC - Alternate

My Fear Doesn’t Stand a Chance

July 9, 2020 Christopher D. Bennett

If you are near your Photography 139 Calendar, you know that today is a big day for the Photography 139 Universe. Today is Naima’s birthday!

While Naima is spending her birthday socially distancing as there has been a resurgence of Covid in Iowa and in most of the United States. You can still leave your gifts for her on the front porch. She might even come out and greet you.

Not enough Naima photo for you, click on the link below to peruse over 700 of them: