Finally Week of Class

I found this lesson actually really really interesting. The discussion about the different ISO settings and the higher the number the more pixels you would see if you blew it up was interesting. Let me start by saying that I am currently in Florida on vacation, so I had to use my father-in-laws Nikon D90 and he doesn't have the camera set up the same way we learned in week one. He is interested in taking the class for sure so I sent him the link. I had to change as much as I could in the manual mode, but I struggled with getting the spot metering, since I didn't pay attention to the Nikon portion of the settings video. Regardless... here they are.

I started outside, they a retaining pond in their backyard, to get some pictures of the fowl that hang out in there. So I found a quite ugly bird sitting on top of a house, I think I spooked it. I set my ISO to 100 since it was so bright and then went to work metering. Here is the series of me getting closer to the bird.

I did change the Fstop a few times to show the difference in what would happen with the sky. I then went inside and my wife was giving my daughter a bath so I figured what a perfect chance to take some indoor pictures with the highest ISO in the camera, 3200!

The lighting and tiles have a yellow tint but I did struggle with getting it metered just right in that light. Off her check, it was perfect so I am wondering if it was just the reflection of the tub, tile, and paint.

The most interesting part was when I went to look at them on the computer and I would zoom in on the ISO 100 and it was VERY CLEAR. I could zoom in and crop whatever I wanted and it seemed crystal clear. But with the higher ISO, as seen in the one picture I cropped, I was very limited in the amount of cropping I could do because it was suddenly get grainy.

I am VERY happy to have that knowledge about the higher ISO so I can know from now on if an indoor picture gets blurry when cropped thats why. It would have driven me NUTS!

Thanks Amber!

Snow in Rochester?

We finally got some snow in Rochester, well under our average, and my almost two year old has a favorite set of pajamas that have snowmen on them. So we built a snowman, her first time ever seeing a real snowman, together!

Snowman finished and now time to see her reaction!

She scratched her nose and face up today at day care but I think the expression is still really good!

If I had more time, I would have put these in PhotoShop to make one image out of the three but as we all know, time flies!

Week 2 of Photography Class

So when Liz and I were blessed with Blakely, we decided to get a new camera and had a great photographer come over take 6 months pictures of Blakely. Our photographer, Amber, was a high school friend of Liz's and was very open the numerous questions I was asking about photography. In the midst of our discussion, Amber mentioned that she was planning on starting an online class to answer the exact questions I was asking. A year later, here I am in week 2 of this very informative class. Visit www.fifephotography.com is you need a good photographer and are in the Oklahoma area!I would have liked to blur the background a bit more in this photo so it would be less distracting. It was on f5.6 so this is what I got! This week I would crank it down to 2.8 cause I like the bokeh effect.

This weeks class was focused the composition principle of Breaking a Pattern. It seemed like a lot of the patterns shown where of brick so I struggled to find another pattern to break. When I finally settled on my daughters crib, it was dark out and there was no natural light. I decided to bring up my fish tank light for the first attempt but the images all had a blue tint to them because one of the lights is blue. I waited until the second day to try to take the images when it was a bit more natural light and I am pretty happy with the image.