J4F

J4F totally means nothing to anyone unfamiliar with Plainfield, but it stands for Just4Fun, which is the go-kart and putt-putt place where my good friend Maggs worked through high school, and I also took these pictures just for fun. So there you go.

Anyway, I made an effort not to take any pictures in focus the other night--a few snuck in, but mostly not, and it was really fun.

This is the creek that runs through my apartment complex, and I like how it looks like a painting. Also, Billy has been taking me around and doing vision experiments on me for school (nothing major, just like ... can you read this sign from here) and a couple nights ago I had to walk around without my glasses on, which was kind of bizarre, actually. I realized that I recognize a lot of things I can't actually see, which is cool, and it's totally weird when I suddenly realize there's someone coming toward me. But anyway, the point of all this is just to say that I think this picture is not entirely unlike how I see without my glasses or contacts.

Some school buses! This is actually one I'd like to try to reshoot, or some variation of it. The flare is a LITTLE fun, but I don't love the blown out sky, and I think I might want a smaller aperture. You don't think aperture is going to matter much when you're shooting out of focus, but you can start to see where it makes a subtle difference.

It's Flash! My little golden sunshine puppy! This isn't actually my favorite picture ever of him, because he usually looks happier and more thrilled about life, but he was just NOT in the mood to model for me and this was about as good as it got with the sitting still. But he's still the cutest puppy in the universe, so he can be on my blog.

This is where the sun started going down behind the trees behind my apartment, and I liked it. I'm going to REALLY like it when those trees grow some leaves. Any day now.

Blurry lights at Chili's! Yeah, I totally took my camera in. I had been having a mad craving for this fried tilapia that I'd had there a few weeks ago, but they didn't have it and in hindsight, they probably were only serving it for Lent. So I went for a blackened tilapia instead, and seriously, if you are trying to watch your calories (as I am, and I've lost six pounds, so yay for me!), that is the thing to eat. It was so spicy that I didn't even finish it, nor did I eat probably more than a cup or so of the rice that came with it, and I was STUFFED. I had leftover calories galore that day. And now I'm getting hungry again. I always start talking about food right before lunch, and I've gotta stop doing that.

This is Portillo's, which, if you don't live up here in the Chicago area, is a hot dog place. This one also has pasta, which I'm into. But it's so funny and kind of amazing--until we moved up here, me and Billy had never really seen just a free-standing hot dog restaurant. But anyway, I love this pic and I took it from the car, and that's another I might like to revisit sometime. The colors are so fun, and again, it's not unlike my uncorrected vision. In fact, I can look at this and see blobs of light and be pretty sure which one is a streetlamp, which I think is kind of weird.

This is also Portillo's, just with a different split tone on it. I thought some of the nerds out there might be interested in seeing how different split tones change a picture, and as for me, I just liked them both and I'm the boss of this blog.

That's me! I don't make appearances in my own blog much, but I figured while I was taking blurry pictures, I might as well take one of myself in the mirror too, right?

This one, obviously, is more or less in focus. I can't decide if I like it or not. This tree is outside my apartment complex and there's a light that shines on it and it's like entirely yellow against a black sky, and it's really stunning. But in the picture, the yellow was like ... blowing out. So I adjusted the color temp in RAW (just space out if this is all jibberish to you, I'm sorry), but in hindsight, I maybe should've just adjusted the saturation. Maybe I'll try that tonight.

Anyway, I totally took this picture squatting down, with Flash's leash around my bicep while he tried to yank me over in hopes of getting a closer whiff of goose poop, or whatever it is that he does. So it's a miracle that I got such a clear shot, under the crazy conditions.

And finally, this is one I took of the lights reflecting off the creek, and it's one I'm kind of interested in trying out again with a different lens. But I LOVE the colors, the blues and golds, and I'd like to give it another shot. And that was the really fun thing about the shoot--I felt like I got in some good experimenting I had a lot of fun doing it, and it made me want to take more pictures. Yay!