Tag Archives: photography

iPhoneography and Auburn SEC Conference Play

Getting Ready for the Auburn Basketball SEC Opener

Last night Auburn started their SEC conference play. This is always a favorite sports season of the year for us, so I started off with a little iPhoneography art of Auburn Arena. Something I love about my iPhone is how it gives me the ability to move beyond formal photography and put my own artistic flare in the image. Some don’t like it, but over the years I have grown to love the freedom in living outside the rules of photography.

This image results from a technique I use called stacking, which is just something I made up, but comes from stacking the image in different apps where the end result is something you can’t just get from one single post processing app. You can certainly overdue it, and the garbage in garbage out rule of photography always applies. Now with the iOS Panorama you can get some really cool results, like this, and with all the great apps like Camera+ and others the artistic results are almost limitless. Some day I will have to list all the photography apps I use and how they work but that’s not for today.

Indoor Fireworks at Auburn Arena

The AUHD Crew

Fall in the Face of a Child and His Parents

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Last week I did a photo shoot with this little guy and his family. I love his countless expressions, his pure innocent adoration of his father, and the love he has for his mother. Here are a few shots from that day on one of the last warm days for a while. We just barely have enough leaves on the ground to make it somewhat fall like, but being the first of November, fall is finally here.

Jacob: The Limitless Sky Video at the Royal Observatory

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Jacob: The Limitless Sky Video for the Greenwich Royal Observatory

I few months ago the guys from Lonely Leap Films came down from New York City to do a piece on my nephew, Jacob Marchio, for the Greenwich Royal Observatory highlighting his work in astrophotography. This year Jacob competed in the Young Astronomy Photographer of the Year contest at the Greenwich Royal Observatory in Greenwich England. This video was part of his image being selected from a huge number of entries over the 2012 year (see some of his moon photography here and his astrophotography hereon Flickr). This yearly contest is a really big deal for astrophotographers worldwide, Wired.com even wrote a nice article about the context in Royal Observatory Picks Best Astronomy Photos of the Year.

Obviously being a photographer myself for almost 20 years now I am more than a little excited about one of my nearby relatives taking an interest in photography. I know he is just getting starting in his understanding of telescopes, cameras, and astronomy so I can’t wait to see what’s next. He has already started talking about building his own telescope here on the property so there may be photos of that down the road. For now, please check out the video shot by Lonely Leap Films. They did such a fantastic job (and for you tech junkies out there, they shot this whole thing with 2 Canon 5D Mark II’s, including the audio).

Jacob: the limitless sky from Royal Observatory Greenwich on Vimeo.

If you have a chance to head over to his blog, his updates include everything from astronomy to techniques used in photography to just life in the South. Even after shooting as long as I have he inspires me to want to get out there and shoot the night sky again and again.

Royal Observatory Picks Best Astronomy Photos of the Year (wired.com)
A Thanks to Lonelyleap (jacobmarchio.com)
Best Astronomy Pictures of 2012 (news.nationalgeographic.com)
Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2012 (bbc.co.uk)
The Universe Shines for Astronomy Photographer of the Year Winners (universetoday.com)

Weekly Photo Challenge: Solitary

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Children's Remand Facility in Uganda Africa

A teenager watches others play at a children’s remand facility in Uganda

As soon as I read the topic for this week’s photo challenge I immediately thought about several images I took at these so-called remand homes in Uganda (to read more details and see more photos go to these two posts They are Hidden but Not Forgotten and The Challenge of Being Salt and Light in the Darkness). These two images presented here for this week’s post were taken 24 hours apart from each other at two completely different areas in Uganda hours away from each other, at a place defined by solitary from the rest of the world. The desperation for children who sometimes get stuck in here for years ranges from joy in just being alive to actually dying from malnutrition.

There is a missional group called Sixty Feet who have a team on the ground there 24/7, and they do some fantastic work over there with these kids. Since these images were taken, Cornerstone Church has sent several teams to visit these facilities to try to provide a little hope to those who find themselves in this situation. We have another team leaving this coming Tuesday (see updates on this blog) with plans for several more teams over the next six months.

As a part of the WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge on Solitary I would challenge everyone to take a look at Sixty Feet and just see what they are doing in Uganda. Even if you have no intention of partnering with this group at all, just check out what they are doing in Uganda and make yourself aware of what life is like for some of these children. They are in a desperate situation, but many had more joy than I’ve seen anywhere else in the world within the most unimaginable situations.

Child looks on at a children’s remand facility in Uganda

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The Beauty of History and Tradition in a Church Sanctuary

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The inside of the main sanctuary of Independent Presbyterian Church in Birmingham AL

Yesterday we had the treat of being able to tour the Independent Presbyterian Church in Birmingham on our way home from UAB, and what a gorgeous church it is. If you haven’t been to Birmingham, Alabama before, the Magic City has a ton of things to see, but the skyline around town has several incredible churches that sit nestled into the rolling hillside between downtown skyscrapers and medical buildings. Many of these churches were built around the turn of the 19th to 20th century, and this is one of them, founded in 1915, with the sanctuary being completed in 1926. I absolutely love getting to visit and photograph churches like this, I just rarely get the opportunity to do so.

Unfortunately I did not come prepared to do cathedral-type, stain glass, wide angle vaulted ceiling church photography when I left the house yesterday morning (not sure why, I should always be prepared for anything), but I did have my cell phone with me. The shot above was taken with my iPhone, so it doesn’t quite give you the overall beauty that a super-wide fisheye lens would do (like when I shot this museum in Auburn), but it worked ok yesterday, and I love getting creative with iPhoneography. I know one iPhone photo does not make a photo essay, so call this a preview for “some day.” They say one photo is worth a thousand words, and I could probably do that here, so for now one photo will have to do. Hopefully some day I will be able to go back and do a proper job with tripod in hand.

Malone Kaak Senior Photo Shoot for 2013

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I’d like you to meet one of our local seniors, Malone Kaak, who came out to our farm a few weeks ago for his senior photos. As I mentioned on a previous senior photo shoot post I don’t normally do senior photos, but this was my other exception for the year. Malone was a great sport and put up with everything we threw his way, I’m sure for his mama’s sake, since moms are really the point of doing senior photos anyway, right. There is one thing I know, moms love photos of their kids. I love the last shot of the two of them sitting on the swing together, that ended up being one of my favorites of the afternoon.

To me one of the many great lines written in the book of Psalms is this four line poem from Psalm 139.16:

Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them,
the days that were formed for me,
when as yet there was none of them.

All of our stories are different, individually crafted by God, but Malone has a great story of perseverance in a world of uncertainty. A story I have related to well over the last few years. If you want to read more about Malone just head over to his mom’s blog and start back a few years into the archives. God has an exact plan for each of us, down to the exact day, and on this day, it was for us to share the afternoon with Malone.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Merge

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Sun Rise over the Gulf of Mexico on St George Island, FL

It didn’t take me as long to come up with an image for “merge” this week as a part of the WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge (Merge), but it also looks like one of the more popular posts from the traffic as well. A sunrise might be a little more cliché than my previous posts, but we just got back from the beach, and this is what you shoot at the beach. I also have an extreme fondness for sunrises and sunsets. Twice a day we get such a unique view of God’s creation, and no two are ever the same. Last year I watched two sunrises and almost three sunsets in about a 24-36 hour period when I flew from Atlanta to Africa (which I actually don’t think I have posted yet).

I love the topic of photographically showing merge. There is no better way (to me) to photographically exhibit the topic of merge than a sunrise or sunset over the ocean, except perhaps a heavy fog. The night merging into the day. All the colors merging and blending all into one. Then the horizon disappearing or reappearing, marking a change in time from one day to the next. This shot was taken yesterday looking out over the Gulf of Mexico from St. George Island, FL just about 30-45 minutes after sunrise, just about the time all the color in the sky and water faded into dull blues. It was just as peaceful in person as it looks in the photo above.

I’m going to do another post later with just photos from St. George, so for now, here is my version of “merge” for this week. Be sure to check out some of the other entries below.

Makayla Massey Senior Photo Shoot for 2013

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I so rarely do senior photo shoots, but somehow I ended up doing two within two weeks of each other this summer. This is the first one with Makayla who is entering her senior year next week. Even though I don’t get to do many of these shoots, I love the personal attention and time you get to spend with the parents and the student. It is nice to get to know people a little better than just the normal setting. On this occasion, Deborah and Cindy (Makayla’s mom), got to walk out into the deep thick grass of the pasture in 100*F weather while we did the shoot. Thank goodness you can’t tell that everyone except Makayla is sweating to death. Makayla did super, hope she has a wonderful senior year this year.

Below are a few of my favorites from the shoot that evening. You can see a few more over on my Flickr site as well.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Wrong

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This was another very difficult topic this week from the Weekly Photo Challenge over at WordPress, and I decided to completely forgo the theological “wrong” since I covered one of those last week, and besides that topic is just too enormous to narrow down for this post. Since I’m such a huge fan of semiotics (not to be confused with the nonexistent signology, or the non-theological Sinology), I thought this whole week I would post one of the many “wrong” signs I came across. There were so many possibilities, like the photo of what to do when you get locked in a restaurant bathroom, or the creative porta-potty business owners here in Auburn, but I thought those just too tacky for the sophistication of this series.

If you are wondering why I’m even doing this Daily Post series called the Weekly Photo Challenge (which is actually part of the larger WordPress series called the Post a Day series), it is because it makes me think outside the box, and that helps me with almost everything I do. When doing some photographic research for an artistic interpretation of “wrong” you get some really weird stuff, like this not-so-innocent looking cat. That really makes a true photographic interpretation of wrong open to almost anything the heart desires, emulating our world today I might add.

In keeping with my desire to photograph something unique amongst all the other posts I tried to figure out what the stereotype photo of what “wrong” would be, and I have concluded there isn’t one. So instead, I chose the ultimate wrong of our technology culture today by using my iPad as an example, but it’s more like a Where’s Waldo wrong than a smack you in the face wrong.

It’s probably overly obvious to some, but I’m sure not to all. Anyone… ?

Weekly Photo Challenge: Growth

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Project 365 [Day 253] God Gave the Growth

1 Corinthians 3:6-7 :: God Gave the Growth

This is part of the WordPress weekly photo challenge, on growth, and as with each week, I try to figure out what 95% of everyone else will be photographing, and I eliminate those as possibilities. This time it took me almost a week to find some unique way to photograph “growth” in a way that wasn’t a plant growing or a flower blooming. It’s like trying to photograph a concept, and was actually much more difficult than I anticipated. The word growth has some type of organic regenerative something, like the process of photosynthesis or a child growing into a teenager and the like. So, instead of an example of growth as seen in the form of life, I give you the concept of growth, as explained by Paul’s letter via 1 Corinthians 3:6-7. One of my favorite pieces of wisdom from Paul, and one that really shows a unique perspective true growth.

I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow.

The word growth in this context is a Greek word used here by Paul, αὐξάνω, which is a phrase that roughly translates “to make” or “to cause growth.” It can be used as a noun or verb meaning multiplication or growth, primarily the term involved the natural reproduction, but always under God’s direction and control (Lv. 26:4; Dt. 7:13; Ps. 67:6).¹That’s sort of a long explanation for a photo, but so be it, what’s a good blog post without a little bit of etymology.

Below are some other examples of this week’s photo challenge of growth. There are some great examples there as well, if you did the weekly post, leave a comment, I would love to check out your post as well.

¹P. A. Blair, “Increase” In , in New Bible Dictionary, ed. D. R. W. Wood, I. H. Marshall, A. R. Millard et al., 3rd ed. (Leicester, England; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996), 505.

Scott Fillmer

Life in Faith & Photos

Tag Archives: photography

iPhoneography and Auburn SEC Conference Play

Fall in the Face of a Child and His Parents

Jacob: The Limitless Sky Video at the Royal Observatory

Weekly Photo Challenge: Solitary

The Beauty of History and Tradition in a Church Sanctuary

Malone Kaak Senior Photo Shoot for 2013

Weekly Photo Challenge: Merge

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Makayla Massey Senior Photo Shoot for 2013

Weekly Photo Challenge: Wrong

Related Posts of Wrong

Weekly Photo Challenge: Growth

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