October 6, 2009 - Beauty amidst the rain

1/200

f8

ISO 400

55mm

RAW

I know it's been a while since my last post, but I hope this one is a treat!

Today I went out during lunch after a light rain to try to get some water droplet photos, and this time I think I found a real keeper. These were odd little flowers (all of the blooms are half-circles), but were beautiful and vibrant.

I shot them hand-held with my 18-55mm IS lens, which makes for a decent macro lens in a pinch (or on a tight budget, like me). The sky was still overcast, but there was plenty of light to get a good shutter speed and small-ish aperture (to increase depth of field), all while using a good ISO to avoid graininess.

Having shot in RAW, I loaded it into Photoshop Elements and used Adobe Camera Raw to do some post-processing. I actually lowered the exposure by a quarter and bumped up the vibrance to saturate the colors a little more.

Then I did something I usually don't do — instead of raising the clarity to help sharpen the image, I lowered it to make it appear softer. Then I sharpened just the water droplets in the focus zone to make them really pop out. By being selective with the sharpening, I kept the blurry areas nice and smooth (the sharpening affect would have made these more grainy). For the final touch, I put a vignette around the frame, darkening the edges slightly to bring more attention to the brighter center of the photo.

I like this photo a lot. How do you think I did? If there was one thing I wish I had done a little differently, it would have been to capture the photo at a little bit of an angle instead of being so 'straight down' on the flowers.

September 23, 2009 - Church volleyball

1/500

f2.0

ISO 1600

50mm

RAW

Getting a photo today was a challenge. I was busy all day, and then had a church youth group meeting after dinner. But when I showed up they were getting ready to play volleyball, so I pulled out my camera.

I quickly figured out, however, that the lighting in our church's simple gymnasium was pretty bad. I had to use my 50mm f1.8 lens, open all the way to f2, in order to get enough light (at ISO 1600) for stop action photos.

To make matters worse, this lens doesn't have a quick autofocus, so many of my photos were out of focus.

Here is one of the few acceptable ones I feel I got. It was taken during the serve and I cropped in on it to focus on the concentration on his face and the blur of the ball as it was hit. This blur really helps add a feeling of action to the shot.

Because of the light colored room divider behind him, the camera was fooled and it underexposed the photo a little. That is why it is so grainy. When shooting at high ISO's, it is vitally important to properly expose the photo during the shot. This will help reduce the graininess of the photo. The more you have to fix the exposure after the shot with your photo editing software, the worse the grain will be.

The lighting was also casting a horrible color that was really hard to nail down in post-processing. Due to being so behind in my posts, I didn't spend much time on it.

August 16, 2009 – Movie night

4 sec

f4.0

ISO 200

25mm

RAW

Last night the girls were crowded around the TV watching Coraline, a claymation movie that reminded me a lot of Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas. Thanks to the spooky nature of the film, my youngest snuggled up to her older sister, and my next youngest grabbed one of her favorite stuffed animals, Bedtime Bear.

I turned out all of the lights and set up the camera on a tripod right beside the TV. I took a bunch of shots (since the TV was putting out varying amounts of light, depending on what was being shown in the movie) in order to find a few goods one where the kids didn't move.

I used a low ISO to avoid noise/grainyness, and purposefully picked a shot that was a little underexposed to reinforce the idea of watching a movie in the dark. Finally, I cropped it to a wide 2 to 1 ratio to emphasize the kids and eliminate most of the distracting background.

In all, I like the photo. But others may think it could have been better if all the girls were sitting side by side. I wasn't going to pose them, however, because I wanted to capture more of their natural tendencies. Some may wonder why my 9-year-old is sitting off by herself on the right. To me, it fits here independent personality perfectly.