Spike is a term used in software development for a quick research project. I recently commissioned myself on a photography spike - using lighting.

I've never used lighting much, or even been that favorable to it. Mostly, probably, because I have generally been a nature and candid moment photographer and lighting isn't always necessary or practical in these scenarios. Also, it's always kind of seemed like cheating - like artificially altering the scene no longer makes the picture a legitimate capture of a real moment - so I just relied on what the scene provided. I realize, of course, that photography isn't just about snapping a picture. In many ways, photography is about creating a picture and lighting can be an immense help. I've admitted it, I've purchased a little lighting kit to begin experimenting and playing around with, and I'm excited to begin learning some new areas of photography.

The picture of my daughter here, who curiously watched the whole endeavor, is one shot from a small roll of the first experimental photos I snapped in our home studio.

This is a water bottle. Kind of weird, huh? If I hadn't made this and someone showed me and had me hazard a guess, I definitely would not have guessed it was originally a water bottle.

I was bored of my previous phone wallpaper so I snapped a pic of a water cooler bottle that had beads of condensation covering the inside to see if I could tweak it and wring something interesting out of it in Photoshop. I actually won't even be able to repeat exactly what I did as it was a completely non-scientific process. Basically, it went something like this: crank up the contrast, convert to black and white, adjust the hue, up the saturation, apply a crazy filter (that gave it the cool texture), tweak the color and lighting settings a bit more, and call it macaroni. I converted it back to black and white for my wallpaper because the coloring is a little loud for my taste.

It was a nice winter morning the other day - one of those clear, crisp, bright days - so I took my camera around with me and took shots whatever I came across that looked interesting. Shooting just to shoot. You'll see some of the other photos from this morning in the roll.

I swung by a farm where there's a couple horses to see if I could entice one to come near by and let me take a couple shots of it. It wasn't hard, carrots did the trick. This one here was walking back-and-forth along the fence, but I wanted it's head to be closest to me and in the forefront of the picture - since that generally gives animals a friendly look - so I held the carrots on my side of the fence and made it lean over to get them. It was a willing model as long as I kept the carrots coming.

I did a little Photoshop post-processing to this image in order to give it a little more character and a bit of a farm, countryside feel.