Downtown with the Step Bro

Today, Sam and I went downtown for around three hours, photographing and just walking around. I expected to get a lot of cityscapes, and other urban shots... however, Sam proved to be a worthy subject and I based many of my photos off of him! In the first two photos, Sam and I are at an abandoned building near Church Street. The next is just a cityscape of downtown Asheville during sunset, and the last two are photos of Sam that I took with a macro lens, external speed flash, and a portable softbox.

Recently, I have become interested in photographing extreme sports, and just any sort of outdoor adventures... specifically rock climbing and bouldering. If anyone knows of any opportunities, please send me an email at jacob.diehn.photographer@gmail.com! Thanks so much!

Christmas is in the Air!

Tonight we finally put ornaments on our Christmas tree! I always love Christmas, not because of the gifts (while yes that is awesome), but it just feels cool and relaxing. There always seems to be a warm atmosphere and the lights are the perfect shade of orange/white and it feels very comfortable. Even if you aren't Christian, I'm not, I think that you should still celebrate it! Call it something else! It is a nice time to spend time with family and think about and reflect upon the happy times and good feelings inside of you. I just hope it snows! It just doesn't seem right without at least a couple of days of snow... huddled inside the warm house drinking whatever hot beverage one might prefer.

Here, I have two photos. The first one is an ornament that kind of shows how even though some people aren't here with us right now (Sam will be soon!), that we still think about you guys all of the time. Lindsay is probably digesting some sort of strange animal's body part in the Czech Republic... but Merry Christmas to you and Merry Christmas to you, Sam.

The second photo is just a generic looking Christmas photo that I thought looked neat.

Night Sky on the Parkway

This isn't the sharpest photo but it certainly is beautiful. I took this at f4 with a 30 second exposure and 200 ISO. I like this one because if you look close enough, you can see small star trails due to the extensive exposure time. Technology has really been able to show us things that us humans can't see with our bare eyes, such as the nebula on the right hand side of the photo, and the faint appearance of a part of the milky way galaxy in the center. You can also see that I picked up a shooting star near the bottom of the photo just above the trees. I was trying to get as far away from light pollution as I could so that I could get a clear night sky, but in this photo, the light pollution in the lower right corner gives the picture better, more complex coloring. My dad drove me up to the parkway, and while we were up there (two weekends ago), it was 12 degrees! Being outside of the car for only a minute froze our ears off!

Light Painting Photography

Last week, I went up to the Blue Ridge Parkway with my dad to do some astrophotography. Unfortunately, we got TOO elevated which put us in the dead center of a cloud, blocking out all of the sky. However, it was high enough up that there was minimal light pollution, which makes for some good long-exposure shots! Instead of doing astrophotography, I decided to try out light painting photography for the first time. Light painting is basically where you set you camera to a long exposure (I used 30 secs) and you wave light around in front of the camera to make patterns and trails of light. Since it is so dark and you are constantly moving, the camera only catches the light and whatever the light illuminates. In the picture below, I used the highest f-stop my lens would allow (12-22mm ultrawide), an f4 aperture. I set my exposure for 30 seconds and got my dad to stand still for that time (which was quite difficult considering it was literally 12 degrees up there). I waved the light around and this came out.

Ghost Town

This photo is a composition of seven different photos, stacked using Adobe After Effects. I shot at f4 with a 1/10 second exposure using my wide angle lens at 12mm.

Gram and I were in the river arts district a few weeks ago trying to find something to shoot. We couldn't find much, and so on our way home, we saw an interesting bridge with a place to sit in between the two lanes. I shot about 10 photos in a row with continuous shooting mode on, and stacked the photos in After Effects. What I originally intended on happening was for the photos to look normal and just be stacked, but what happened is that the light apparently combined and created extreme highlights. I think that this looks really neat but I needed to crop out half the photo because the rest of it is just white. It looks like there are four clones of Gram and I like how everything is just a little transparent, the car being the most. It's a photo that is unique to my typical styles and I really enjoyed having this produced!

P.S. I edited very minimally beside lowering the exposure just a bit (the brightness) and adding some grain to create more texture in the spaces that are just white.

Intense Focus

     This is a photo of Kaylee, she is in my group along with Daisy (in the background). We are working on an English project where we are required to construct an epic poem and create a brief film from it. Kaylee and I make a great team, as she is interested in filming and I am interested in photographing. I took this photo while I was messing with the school's digital media equipment and surprisingly took this picture with a low-end camera. Kaylee at the time was editing and piecing together our clips that we recorded earlier that day, which made her a great model as she was being moderately still.

Even Bugs Can Love

This picture means something to me, with a totally vague representation of what it looks like. Bugs aren't really... a concern to us humans, and I'm not saying that's wrong. For me, the bugs holding on to each other, on to love, represents us as people, trying to hold on to our culture as it is lost. The bugs are very insignificant, and that is the same way that we as people are thought about to many high social class businessmen that run the world. We are just bugs to them, as are actual bugs to us. I'm sure I could find multiple things that this picture represents to me, this was just one that popped into mind when I first saw it. I also just think it's a beautiful photo that shows love in the most profound, and tiny places.