Week 47 good to WOW SOOC Thanksgiving and Monday Rewind

The long weekend was so wonderful, it is hard to get back into the swing of things, but Monday eventually comes and with it Shoot and Edit.  I never did post my edit for last weeks photo on gratefulness (and it only had 3 views on flickr, so I'm sure no one minds), but I thought I would start with it today.

For those that didn't have a chance to see it:

SOOC   ISO 100  f/1.8   1/200 sec   50mm 

Ultimately it came down to me being grateful for many, many things...but that my thankfulness goes to God, the provider of all good and perfect gifts in my life.

First I did my usual edits...fix exposure, take down saturation for this photo, noise reduction, sharpening, and a creamy white vignette.  My theory was it would create something soft in keeping with the sweetness of my little boy praying (even if this shot is actually posed.)

But I felt like it just wasn't quite right and that it had actually lost the mood created by using one lamp (and external flash) to light the scene, so I tried again.

This time I brought up the exposure with an adjustment brush in Lightroom only on his face and the wall leading towards him and noise reduction.  Then I took it to Elements, ran a soft layer--masked off of his face and hands, used Pioneer Women's Black Beauty to convert to black and white, and saved.  Back in Lightroom I added the dark vignette and cropped a tiny bit.  The seat of the rocking chair was kind of glowing through the vignette so I used an adjustment brush to lower its exposure and brightness.

So now that I am caught up for last week...though no one is keeping score...here is my photo for today.

Thanksgiving (SOOC):

I wanted to take more pictures of this scene, but my aunt wanted me to take the plates back to the buffet table and get out of the way for dinner. 









And just to make this post really, really long because that is my favorite thing to do, here are a few more snapshots of our thanksgiving...the ones without brother-in-laws, sister-in-laws, aunts, uncles, and cousins...it is a blessing to have family.

Wednesday extended family dinner at a local Chinese restaurant -- Thanks Uncle B and Aunt H!

Thanksgiving breakfast with Oak's extended family here at our house...No one will play w/ me!

My Dad's Sister sets a beautiful Thanksgiving table

Lots of tasty food--okay, I'm not big on the traditional turkey meal, but the appetizers were superb and my cousin did do an excellent job smoking the turkey.  We brought the green bean casserole.  Almost too easy to count as contributing, especially since Oak made it.

Let's Eat!  Huckleberry said he was thankful that the aliens had not attacked and taken over the planet...then he said, I'm just kidding...okay, I am thankful that hasn't happened, but I'm really thankful for my family.  Most everyone said a variation of family...I said photography.

Pie and whipped cream...the left overs made a perfect breakfast for me Friday.

Time to go home...jammies for Sunflower and a coke for Oak to prepare for the hour long drive.

The next three days were spent with a trip to the zoo, working on pictures, taking apart electronics, playing games (mostly Wii and DS) and basically relaxing as a family...oh, and an experiment in Christmas pictures which should show up next week :)  I love my family.

unThemed Tuesday

Usually I like to tie my pictures together somehow, but I've been doing such random shooting recently in an effort to practice using my new speedlight and absorb what I'm learning in my photography class.  Really it is good to expand my repertoire...really I have more in my life than Sunflower...but I do so like to match!  Hopefully the real artists that visit my site are a little more accepting of an eclectic mix.  Flexibility, flexibility, flexibility...some day I'll get it.

I know we are not the only family who entertains ourselves by taking things apart while Mommy takes pictures.  Many a pleasant afternoon is spent in such a manner.

Of course there is the ever fun Wii games...chewing boy not withstanding...I am the Queen of Mario Party (Okay, maybe Oak/Sunflower won.)

Now my favorite way to entertain myself is by taking pictures...even before reading big books...and Huckleberry spent a cold 20 minutes letting me practice with my new speedlight.  Now just to narrow the 30 or so remaining pictures to one or two since he was standing and smiling exactly the same in every one of them.  I guess I need to practice my posing instructions more, too.

Though telling Sunflower to pose is a useless waste of time.  I can still capture some sweet photos of her, though.  However, in the interest of full disclosure, I am lying down on the little slide with my feet up on the larger slide per Sunflower's instructions "This is your bed, Mama!"  Sunflower is standing at my feet leaning over me with the sun behind her.  I happen to have my camera on me because that is the deal...Mommy will go outside and play IF she can take pictures, too.

Then, of course, I do love playing with photos!  I probably have enough photos to edit I could just stop taking pictures for the winter, but what would be the fun in that?  In the meantime, I did finally have a chance to play with textures because textures are fun!

This is Kim Klassen's Serious Magic, 100% screen.  This photo was taken on our photowalk early, early Saturday morning.  It really was as cold as it looks.

Kim Klassen's Stained Linen, Soft Light 100%, though I circled the bird and ran a Gaussian blur on him to remove the texture from him AND Magic Edges Screen 100%.  Birds don't take posing instructions well, either, but I think they were too cold to move.

The birds did stay really still at times and let me get awfully close to them, making for a few sweet shots.

Do you see the little ripple in his neck feathers?  That was the wind.  We went to breakfast once the wind started picking up!

 

Week 41 good to WOW SOOC Pumpkins

I'd almost finished my post when I had to take my son to school.  I thought, I'll actually be early (for me)!  When I get back from school I can have my post done and linked up by 9:00 a.m. PST.  But then I saw the angle of the sun and the lack of clouds and the millions of dew drops and decided it was a perfect bokeh day!  So I spent an hour taking pictures instead.

And I had fun, and Sunflower had fun playing outside--luckily she has boots to keep her feet dry from the wet grass.  I've gotta get me some of those!  But my focus was off on pretty much every single shot...particularly the close-ups...and there was NO wind and my shutter speed was quite fast, I'd even stopped down my aperture some in order to get a wider depth of field.  Turns out that little circle thingee you can adjust so you can see without your glasses was turned by a quarter.  Doesn't matter if you are taking pictures of bokeh, right?  Well, hopefully we'll have more sunny and dewy mornings, because the great light has passed for today.

My white balance was set on auto instead of cloudy which I have found also makes a difference in my contentment of my pictures outdoors, though I am fairly happy with this SOOC shot of Sunflower.

1/1250    f/1.8   50mm   ISO 100

Do you see my reflection in the sunglasses?  I'm not sure how to edit this, because I'm bound to lose the haze with my usual processes...usually I want to lose the haze.  Maybe just add a little warmth (which would have been there if my white balance had been on cloudy) and dodge her face a little?  Any suggestions would be great!

Now back to my originally scheduled programming.  We saw many, many pumpkins at the zoo Saturday.  Here is my SOOC shot for Shoot and Edit.  I had one identical whose framing I liked better, but the focus was not as sharp.  So I'm choosing the one I will need to crop, but has all the elements I need to make it what I want.

1/800   f/1.8   50mm   ISO 100

The rest of these pumpkin shots I am sharing with Monday Rewind over at Chic Homeschool Mama.

We were greeted at the entry with pumpkins:

But the most fun for the boys was the professional pumpkin carver.  Who knew that was a job option?

They stood there in complete fascination and asked lots of questions.

We were supposed to go meet Dad and Sunflower inside for lunch (Sunflower needed the bathroom), but we lost track of time.  The boys watching the carving, and I taking pictures of all the pumpkins around.

I was apparently quite intrigued by the curve of this pumpkins stem because I took a lot of pictures of it...even switched lenses.

Finally Daddy and Sunflower did come find us and we had lunch and then finished the zoo.  Only to find a few more pumpkins at the end of the day.  By then my camera battery had given out on me--it only lasted 1500 pictures (plus the 150 at home).  Well really.  

So I used my old camera...A Panasonic DMC-FZ3 3mp camera...a very good camera for it's time.  But I do want to gently suggest that the next time someone says "your camera takes good pictures" please ask them how old their camera is before giving them a lecture about food and ovens.  (Not that I don't agree, but some people really do just have horrible cameras that are limiting their ability to ever become good photographers.)  I used the manual settings to try and creatively compose my shots, but changing settings is beyond awkward.  My old camera does have a really fast shutter speed compared to other cameras 7 years old, but I had to run significant noise reduction to deal with the noise produced on ISO 200.  In fact, I'll first show you a SOOC shot so you can see.

1/200  f/2.8  7.5mm (yes, I don't know what that is compared to dSLR) ISO 200

Yes, I know the bad composition is my fault (something my new fancy camera does not fix), but the noise in Huckleberry's sweatshirt, the lack of color range...those are my camera.  Even with 2.8 (widest aperture) the dof is not terribly interesting...right for this photo, but not interesting.  8.0 is the narrowest aperture option.  Those translate to some other number on a dSLR, but I am not going to look them up.

Anyway, after color boosting, cropping, and noise reduction, I was able to produce a reasonable shot.

Actually, one of each child...clearly we are getting tired :)

Next item on my purchase list is definitely a spare battery for my Nikon!

Have a fantastic Monday!  I plan to...after I fold 8 loads of laundry since we were busy, busy, busy all weekend.  Being productive is a joy in and of itself...no matter the task, right?

Bokeh

A few weeks ago, one of the prompts for Scavenger Hunt Sunday was bokeh and I used a photo similar to this one:

I was very excited for the prompt because I love bokeh, and even though the photo I ended up using was one of the first I took that week, I enjoyed taking pictures of bokeh the whole next week.

Water in the sun makes a particularly easy subject. Though I wanted to get more clear hexagons then I ended up with, I had fun trying with different focal lengths and apertures.

The challenge to me was not to find bokeh, but how to make the picture more intriguing than a photo of glowing circles (though those photos are also gorgeous to me.)

So I tried framing, another prompt from previous weeks and exploring with your camera theme.  Ummm, maybe, but I ended up with a photo of Sunflower because really documenting my children and life is what originally caused me to pick up a camera.

Is it my fault that the lighting and bokeh and not my beautiful daughter is what makes this photo one I want to keep?

But then so many people on the hunt that week admitted they didn't know how to capture bokeh.  Some were limited by their equipment (it is possible to capture bokeh with automatic point and shoots--I believe--but I never have.)  Others had the capability of setting manual settings, but didn't know what to do.  It made me sad, because I remembered being there only 7 months before.  I loved photos with blurry backgrounds, selective focus, and those beautiful bits of pretty glowing circles...but I had no clue how to get them.

As I started going through My 3 Boybarians 31 Days to a Better Photo Series and started shooting in manual, I started to sometimes capture that blurry or creamy background and sometimes even the more elusive bokeh.  I even blogged about that exciting day when Sunflower was in focus and the background was blurry.

SOOC as I didn't know how to edit at all when I first posted this photo

At that point I understood depth of focus and that at certain distances and wider apertures the background would be blurry, but how light played into bokeh was a whole 'nother ball game.   I did discover it was easier for me to capture bokeh when I was using my longer 55-200mm lens than my 18-55mm kit lens.  One day, I Heart Faces posted an article "Creating Bokeh with a Kit Lens" that explained why and things started to fall into place for me.

Not that I can always get bokeh--using the more exact definition of bokeh being out of focus points of light--but I can usually get a blurry background...usually...and if the background has points of light or light bouncing off objects in such away as to look like little lights, then I can get bokeh.  Which means I can experiment even more.

When one doesn't have something they want in focus, manual un-focus can be used to make bokeh.

And if at times I get a little discouraged because my bokeh looks a little more like really bad focus than intentional art, I try to remember how little I knew 7 months ago, how exciting a blurry and ugly background was.

And I remind myself that a LOT of the fun of photography to me is the journey and the learning.  If every shot was perfect every time, what more would I have to learn?  I don't want to take 500 pictures and dislike them all, but when I take a photo and know...this is it, I don't need to take more, I still do.  Because what is the fun of getting out the camera to take one picture and what will I miss if I stop too soon?

My husband would argue, what is the point of having 50 pictures of the same thing?  And I do delete a lot of my attempts.  But each photo represents the journey, the experiment, the learning that I am doing.  Next year what will my Ferris Wheel photos look like?  I hope better, if I have to go to the fair.

The spider web above was taken a little underexposed and I had to use manual focus to get a lock on the web instead of the trees behind, but I knew there was more to capture.  I could see it with my own eyes.  It took several angles, manual focus, and several attempts before I captured the glorious creation I was beholding--almost.  (Though while I was trying to capture the rainbow shimmer, I actually really like the almost black and white web, also.)

Granted it would probably be a better shot if the details of the spider was more in focus, but I cannot get myself to care about the spider.

So if you are feeling like I did--I love bokeh, but I'll never be able to do it...don't despair.  If I can learn, so can you.  You don't even have to use manual...it is probably easier to use manual...but aperture priority would allow you to set your lens to your widest aperture and have the camera do all the work of exposure.  Then, as the I heart faces tutorial says, get close to your subject with the background a ways back and watch the magic happen.  I even have a friend who loves the background blurry and doesn't understand settings at all, but she found if she set her point and shoot to close-up and then got in the face of her child (her words) she got some magical photos, too.

Well, I didn't intend to make this a tutorial because there is probably a lot I still don't understand; I would never want to mislead someone.  Plus the people who expressed interest in learning about bokeh aren't reading my blog on a random Monday.  I just wanted to show the pretty bokeh pictures I took in the last few weeks that didn't make it into Scavenger Hunt Sunday--they would have made my hunt way too long!