Oops. I didn’t realize I’d saved this as a draft and never published it. *facepalm* I am so awesome.

But here we go, in its full glory – MY PHOTOBLITZ!!! *obnoxious cheering noises*

20 minutes, 10 photos, 5 ladies, 1 beautiful winery – CAN we do it?!

Oh heck yes.

When I read the ds106 Week 5 Assignment page and found the Photoblitz assignment, I KNEW I wanted to do it on my Sissy’s birthday, at one of the wineries we were going to visit. Preferably after grape-stomping, and preferably after all of the wine that was to be consumed, had been consumed.  Beautiful, mountainous, rich scenery, slightly-tipsy ladies…seriously, how could this POSSIBLY go wrong??

So I checked with the professors that this was allowed (a group photoblitz), and I checked with the ladies who were going, and everybody was stoked about the idea.  One of my friends (Tara), a professional photographer herself, decided to take up the challenge herself, and may have even been successfully recruited to ds106 herself because of this…we shall see. I hope she posts her photos soon – she has an amazing eye for things, an amusing sense of creativity, and a camera I’d do appalling things for.

But anyway. The blitz. Are you ready?? On your mark, get set…GO!

It ended up being a total disaster.  We decided to do it at our last stop of the day – Miracle Valley Vineyard.  When we were finally ready to start, we stacked our phones on top of one another’s to get a funky starting-time picture.  The phones wouldn’t all stay on at the same time.  I finally decided I didn’t care enough and had waited long enough to start my blitz, and snapped whatever shot was available at that second, and started to dash off.  Tara stayed behind to make it perfect.  The other three ladies didn’t know who to follow, or what to do.  For a while they alternated between us, but in the end, as I ran through the muddy swamp to chase some converging lines, one friend stayed with Tara to be a prop, and the birthday girl and our other sister headed for a stone wall on top of a hill to drink their wine glasses and laugh their bums off at us from their beautiful vantage point.

I used that, and turned it into my human emotion picture.  It became one of my favorites, and I had a hard time choosing just one.  But it was a moving photo, with my beautiful sister, laughing it up, and making herself laugh at her own made-up laughs after I told her ‘do it again, I missed it!’, this time laughing even harder than before.  It was a beautiful day, full of lots of awesome memories we created – this photo really captures the essence of the day.

Another favorite was the shadow.  My sister found this one, too, and WOW, how cool.

Obviously, I like trees.   I laid down in the half-muddy grass to get this shot, but I think it was totally worth it.  What a cool tree, what awesome shapes it makes, and I love the perspective I took of it.

I also loved the picture that I took of the house on the hill, next to the vineyard.  I took this picture trying to accomplish the ‘supernatural’ photo. I don’t know that I did that, per se, but I loved the way this shot came out, nonetheless.  there was a gorgeous view no matter which way you turned here.

I also loved the stained-glass grapes close-up.  This was another one that was my sister’s idea, and it struck me as a better shot for the ‘doesn’t look like a photo’ photo than the ones I had tried to get.  It came out really neat-looking, though, like the backgrounds that people are always looking for.  I certainly NEVER would have taken a picture like this outside the realm of this project.

Aaaannnnd…TIME!

Okay, so maybe I went about 2 minutes over. I did my best, though!
For a few honorable mentions – I was rather disappointed that we didn’t do the grape-stomping.  Not that you can blame us – look at what they wanted us to stomp in!

Oh well, we had fun anyway. But instead, I found a beautiful display that was absolutely dominated by purple paraphernalia. It was perfect, so I snatched it.

I also really liked the photo representing openness.

Fun assignment! I’m looking foward to more like this. It’s hard to choose just 5 favorites, though!