We spent the whole weekend at the pool chasing Gabi around the playground and watching her do her best backstroke. Made for a busy yet relaxing time.
Tag Archive for 'Photography'
Taking some time to catch up on my photo backlog; this past week was a grist mill of 14+ hour days though the long weekend preceding it certainly helped. Our Fourth weekend was a bir if a bust with rain keeping us from the pool and much else but Gabi managed to keep herself busy.
Usually I don’t get bogged down in any post work beyond tweaking contrast and saturation (I love a saturated sky) but this shot was an exception. I had shot it on my way home from work on a whim, my eye having been draw to it because of the dramatic clouds and the bright and round lettering of the graffiti. The only problem was a pesky telephone cable that stretched through the center of the picture. I tried various cloning methods to try and cover it up but eventually settled on some tight cropping and rearranging of the composition. Here’s the original…
Heavy changes but it is balanced a little better sans the telephone poles and cable. Still learning my way around Gimp, though. It bugs me that I wasn’t able to really blend in the my pasted area. :-/
I’m finally coming around to the conclusion that while I have a patient model in Gabriella too many of my shots are junk when taking them indoors. What I think I need to step it up is a decent flash with a diffuser and, more importantly, a faster lens. The former is nice in lighting up an area and helping bring attention to the focal point of the picture but the latter means I can leverage the natural light and not blind her as she darts about the house.
In the lens department, I had my heart set on an 85mm f1.8 but in reviewing most of my indoor shots they all seem to cluster around the 50 mm range. That’s good news for my wallet as the price difference between the 50mm and 85mm f1.8 lenses is a solid $250+. That said many of the reviewers on Amazon while liking the 50mm f1.8 overall question its build quality and recommend going up a level to the f1.4. Of course they do. That erases $200 of savings but likely will result in a lens that will last years of chasing my daughter around the house.
Time to fillout a requsition with Management.
Scorcher of a day Tuesday with terrible lighting and most of my shots being worthless either because they were washed out or just a crap composition that no amount of cropping would save. Then again, shooting in the middle of the day doesn’t make for the best lighting. Win some, lose some.
I was surprised and slightly concerned when the last batch of images I imported from the camera looks badly decomposed, filled with noise and image distortions. Hopefully, it was just a freak thing and the sensor on the camera isn’t on the way out.
I was shooting in really low light conditions at ISO 1600 in Aperture Priority mode with the fstop around 4.0-5.6 and was alternating between using the flash and not. Three shots in a series were affected with this noise but those before and after are what I expected the camera to capture in those conditions.
Anyways, here’s some lightly manipulated (one converted to black and white) and cropped images of what the camera captured.
From an artistic standpoint I like what happened, especially the black and white image which to me looks like it was transmitted by the Mars Phoenix Lander or captured by Steven Sasson first digital camera for Kodak. Management has expressed her extreme dislike of this series of pictures but then again she is into Realism. 
