self-challenge 1

Someone close to me got on my case the other night about not having posted anything lately on this blog.  So, today I decided to create a challenge for myself to get motivated to try something new.

I wanted to shoot in monochrome (I shot jpegs to save a bit of hassle, so there are no original colour versions), which I had done for the first time a week or two ago.  We have a huge livingroom window that lets in a lot of light, so I assumed I'd look for things to shoot in the livingroom.  I found myself wandering into the kitchen when I was looking for letters to shoot.

I turned on active D-lighting to the highest setting at one point (a function I briefly read a sentence about this afternoon while quickly looking up monochrome settings), and messed around with my ISO more than usual.

The challenge was written before I picked up my camera, and I went through the list in order to get it all done.  My main two rules I made were to shoot only in monochrome and to use only natural light.

Here are the results of my self-created challenge.

If you are curious to know what I shot to make the word "love," I'll tell you.  But only after you guess at least one guess per letter.  The L is easy.  You can see the whole object for the O, but you might not know what the item is.  The V and the E are both parts of something, just like the L is.  I had to be more inventive with finding a V (you'd think that would be an easy one, but it was hard!).  I'll wait until there are a few guesses posted in the comments section of this post before telling you what the letters are made from.  You can post your guesses anonymously if you like - makes no difference to me! 

I have never shot letters before, but I've always thought it's kind of neat.  I guess I thought it would be hard to be creative with finding angles that would work.  It was much easier than I'd thought it would be.  I chose my word first, though, so that I wasn't trying to make a word with random letters after uploading the files.  I would consider shooting an entire alphabet in the near future...

Ps - Photoshop, you can't trick me.  And don't ever switch to dpc ever again.  Me-1, Photoshop-0.