This & That

All the Little Sweethearts

Last weekend was the Sweetheart Dance at the high school. It's a girls choice deal and The Girl did ask somebody. She also asked me if I would take the dance photos and make her group dinner. She told me she wanted me to make the dinner because then the food wouldn't be "sketchy." I guess that's a compliment of sorts. She uses "sketchy" almost as much as she uses "stupid." Oh, and could I make the table cute?

Was this cute enough?

I was worried about the timing of the photos, because I knew I wanted to take them outside if at all possible. They were supposed to be at my house at 5:30 sharp, but of course, no one was here then, including my own daughter.....and it was cloudy, which was good for color saturation, but not so much for available light. I'm fairly pleased with how they turned out. At least there was one good couples shot of everyone...whew.

The Girl and her date. The dress was gorgeous on her, but please don't ask about the shoe war we had....and it's not the shoe war you'd expect. Oh all right.....she wore a pair of slate grey Toms with this fancy dress, claiming it was just "her style". I lobbied for dressier shoes, but in the end decided it just wasn't a battle I was going to pick. It wasn't like she was going for 6 inch streetwalker heels. I let it go. You should have seen a couple of her friends in those kinds of heels walking over my lawn to get their pictures taken, though. I may not have to aereate it this year, lol.

The friends.

The whole group. 

Head Shots

Happy Valentine's Day! Interestingly, this post has nothing to do with hearts, love or Valentine's Day. I will hopefully get some pictures today that will be pertinent to the subject.  

The Girl has decided to participate in the Distinguished Young Women program, and if you're wondering what that is, it's a dressed up label for the Jr. Miss pageant. Now, I'm not a big fan of pageants in general, but I'm trying to be supportive. I think the peer group has a lot to do with her decision as 3 or 4 of her close friends are also on board. She needed to submit a "professional quality" photo of herself to be put in programs and such, so she actually ASKED me to take a picture of her.

These were taken right up against the trunk of one of those nasty, needle-dropping trees. Nice to know they're good for something.

Not that she liked any of the pictures I took and we ended up using one I took for the photo class. 

And in case you're wondering. I did not look like this at 16. I looked more like this:

Sometimes life isn't fair.

Practice, Practice, Practice

LS Boy got my old DSLR for Christmas and wanted a little instruction on how it worked. We chatted for a little while and then it was practice, practice, practice. 

And a little more practice.

And Ollie wondering when he was going to quit whatever he was doing and play with him.

Apparently, practicing can just wear you out.

A Little Bow-kay for You

And I'm not talking this kind of bouquet.

Or even this one....fancy though it may be.

I'm talking bokeh...the photographic kind. Bokeh is actually taken from a Japanese word meaning "blur" and is the quality of the out of focus area of a picture, often the reflection that comes from a light source. I wanted to try to get some pictures of the tree with only the tree lights as the available light source. I also wanted to practice focusing a little in low light.

This is the ornament that came from my childhood tree when I got married. It's a brass cherub bell. I seem to be surrounded by cherubs lately. 

I think this one turned out a little better. There were more lights around it but I was happy I could get some  focused pictures in the low light. Really, really high ISO's, though.

Light

I never did share the last real practice lesson I did for the Karen Russell class. This one involved the quality of available light...typically direct, indirect and indoor. There was a ton of information for this and honestly, I'm not sure how well I processed it.

Direct light--How nice it was for both The Girl and I to have another model besides her. She definitely gets picked on enough for things like this. AP Boy was more than willing to borrow him for a few minutes....and this even after he'd helped with the applesauce. In all honesty, I waited too late in the day to get real, harsh direct light, so this is much more an indirect type of light. For all 3 assignments, we had to take pictures in a circle around our subjects, and then repeat the process with our subjects moving in a circle with us to see the kinds of available light and what different angles did to our shutter speeds.

This was my favorite shot because of the nice, warm quality to AP Boy's skin and the catchlights I got in his eyes.

Now for the indirect lighting. In every instance, we were supposed to back up and take a picture of where we were and what kind of light was available so Karen could evaluate it with us.

I had to include this one, since it's so different from what we're used to seeing from The Girl.

This is the favorite from that part of the assignment, not because of the expression on her face per se (although it was nice not to have a scowl), but again because of the warm look to her skin. Because I had no natural reflectors here (no light sidewalk, no white wall), it's maybe not as bright as it could be, but overall, pretty nice.

And the indoor part of the assignment.

This one is my favorite. I just liked the kind of moody shadow thing going on here. She's sitting in front of my north facing, very large living room windows that actually run across the back of the house.

So there it is....all assignments done and done. We had a couple more weeks to the class, but those assignments were more evaluative by the students....posting a typical pre-class photo and one we've taken since and evaluate our progress over the 8 weeks. I felt like I learned even more in this re-take and again, I can't say enough how valuable her input, critiques and teaching are. 

White Balance, Custom Functions, and Cooperative Models

The most recent lesson for the photography class involved trying out various white balance settings as well as in-camera settings for pictures. The grey card/custom white balance experiment was a total success, but the resulting pictures weren't the best images of my cooperative DIL#1 and the SGB (half-closed eyes and such), so I won't post them. But believe me when I say that custom white balance is a brave new world that I will play with in the future, sort of like shifting my focus points.

Now, on to another cooperative model. Here's LS Boy with actual smiles. He didn't have to be bribed, beaten with a stick or otherwise coerced into sitting for a few minutes. He did have to try to keep Ollie under control and out of the shot which was sometimes successful and sometimes not. There are in-camera modes that I have which will do some in-camera processing as the photo is taken. For example, this is the "Portait Mode":

I like it....it gives really nice, true colors, I thought. Even to Ollie's nose which you can see there on the bottom trying to get into the picture.

Ironically, I felt like the best pictures of the day was this one, taken on the "Landscape" setting, although the teacher felt it left a little too much red in the skin tones. So nice to have someone willingly smile for me.

Don't forget about the giveaway on yesterday's post!

The Family

I had everyone I could have here last weekend. It definitely meant a family photo. I did this with a self timer, and B, I did like the cloudy white balance setting, but not totally pleased with the focus, even though this was on a tripod.

Cabin Weekend

It's a cabin couple of days for our family. I'm pretty excited since I will have all my kids, with the exception of PB in the same place for a bit. Can you say Christmas Card photo? Actually, I'm not at all sure I can pull the men out of the hills during daylight hours while we're at the cabin, much as I'd like to get a family photo there. We may have to wait until we are back home on Sunday for church.

In the meantime, I'll leave you with a shot of the last rose of summer. The Girl picked this last week because of it's sheer size. It's a Peace rose and measured nearly 7" across. After several nights of below-freezing temperatures, the fall rose display is finished for the year.

 

Exposure, Focus, and the Miracle of Friendship

This week's work was centered around using the exposure meter, overriding it if we want and switching auto-focus points. I learned a lot....I think. And in all honesty, I have become increasingly frustrated with how my photos look on the blog here. They aren't quite true to the colors I see when I print them out...they seem a little greyed-out. Ah well, you're just going to have to take my word that things look how I say....really, lol.

Again we have the brow-beaten Girl as model. We were supposed to post a camera-recommended exposure and the post what we think is the proper exposure by being the boss of the exposure meter. These are the 2 photos I submitted for that part of the assignment.

It has long been my contention, that my camera slightly over-exposes photos, causing my kids, especially The Girl, to look really pale and washed out. So I will often under-expose by a click or two, to get more saturated colors and what I feel are better skin tones. You tell me your opinion. The top photo is the camera's suggestion and the bottom is mine and is slightly underexposed.

Next we were supposed to do a shot in full Manual mode that we felt was properly exposed.

I had moved The Girl around the house a little for this one. I like the skin tones here. I like that she's not scowling, and I think it's fairly well composed.

And lastly, we were supposed to twiddle with changing our auto-focus points. That's something I'd never done before, so it was a cool technique to learn. I changed the focus to the right side of the grid, so The Girl is in focus (and look! She's smiling....the miracle of having a friend here) and her friend (who came over very willingly to help with this assignment) is not. I can also change the focus to the left side.

See? Magic.....

 

Aperture....and the Cooperative Rose Bush

I will warn you right now that this post contains lots of pictures...all of the same 2 subjects. One of them was good as gold. The other had to be coaxed, cajoled and pled with to sit for photo practice purposes. This lesson required two subjects, one slightly to the side and about 2 feet behind the other.

Here are my two subjects....my lovely daughter and the rose bush seen just to the left of her shoulder there. The object of the lesson was to start with a narrow aperture and gradually take pictures while opening the aperture wider. You can see what happens to the rose bush in the background. As the aperture gets bigger, the background gets blurrier. Yes, you can watch what happens to the rose bush, but perhaps a little more interesting are the expressions on The Girl's face.

We start out pleasantly enough. And yes, she really is that pale in real life. It's the Scandinavian genes.

And we ended with this one. Happy, happy girl. You might notice the little circly light things in the  left side of the photo. Apparently that's a good thing.

I almost lost her when I said I had to do the whole thing over again standing 10 feet further back. Notice the "gritted teeth" smile.

This was a real light bulb exercise for me because it showed me that aperture isn't the only thing that determines depth of field. Distance from the subject matters as well.

Hang in there, Girl!

I actually really like this one, even though I submitted it as one I could improve on. I really like the natural smile here (seen rarely enough as it is) despite cutting off one of her hands and the slight merger problem with the branch and her head. I had really tried to put her in an area of open shade, but when she tilted her head back, we caught the full effect of the sun/shadow on her face. Still,  I like it because she's smiling. And here's the "creative" focus photo. I know you were anxiously waiting for it.