Harrowing Halloween Fun

On Halloween my sweet friend decided she would host a party at her house. This particular friend has no children of her own yet. However she ended up with 8 kids and 6 adults in her house. And it was so much fun! My daughter made out like a bandit trick or treating as Elsa... I know, I know... yet another picture of a child Elsa...

I have to give another kudos to my friend though because not only did she host Halloween she made her 2 year old niece a Halloween costume, and I have to say she might be the cutest ghost ever!

My sweet "Elsa"

Baby Tigger

It's a ghost and Minnie Mouse!

Cat woman - who is actually a master entertainer

Monsters in the window.

Seriously considering editing almost all the color out of this to fit the theme of the picture. Thoughts?

Oh baby baby!

This is a selection of my favorite pictures from a mini shoot I did the other night. My baby makes for an excellent subject. I'm learning to make the best of indoor lighting at night because I'm at work during the day. That means a lot of my shots at night have imperfect lighting. However the issues of indoor lighting don't seem to keep me from being able to capture my family's moments in time.

Inspiring color scheme

This is just a  quick post to show a shot that I like purely for the color composition. Inspiration can come in strange places.

I'm starring to see patterns in the pictures that I like to take too: I like very close up shots a lot, but I want to have a good range as well so this weekend I'm going to focus on taking some group shots and wide angle scenery shots to see what I can come up with.

Stealing Focus

This last week has been insanely busy. The kids and I have been hanging out a lot with some new friends, which has turned in to a couple of fun mini photo shoots for me. This picture of my sweet daughter is pretty cool to me because the focal point in the picture is actually the flower in front of her face. It was a good exercise in manipulating the focus of the picture using the manual zoom and manual focus while shooting in aperture priority mode. I find it hard to get the same soft bokeh in full manual, partly because I have a kit lens that does not go very low at all in the f stop settings. Something to think about for my Christmas list.

In the meantime though I plan to keep practicing with the lens that I have and the settings available to me.

Friday Night Fun

On Friday we decided to have a little "camp out" in our living room. We put all the big, fluffy blankets down in the floor as cushions along with every pillow in the house. We watched movies, cuddled, ate popcorn and all slept in the living room together. My sweet 4 year old thought it was a fabulous plan. My husband and I are still sore, but it was totally worth it!

I think the picture of both kids with the giant bear is definitely our Christmas card picture, especially since it looks like handsome baby is getting completely squished by his big sister. I should portray them as their natural selves after all. Hahaha!

I'm actually planning another photo shoot with the bear as the focal point, but he is in more of a supporting role in these pictures.

Abandoning Automatic

This little series of shots are the first pictures I have taken in fully manual mode, where I took control over every feature of the picture. I love that there are indicators in the camera to show whether or not the shot is going to be properly exposed before you ever shoot the photo.

This picture is from yesterday. I have a thing for baby feet!

 

 

This picture was taken this evening. I decided to take a few shots of my kiddo's bicycle. It was more willing to sit still than my sweet girl.

 



Shallow or Sharp? That is the question.

Tonight I played a very little with depth of field. I have a little trouble with varying the depth of field since my lens only goes to f3.5. Its easier for me to move around my subject than to very the aperture settings.

 

 

I also went outside and took some sunset shots. The colors were all beautiful and pastel tonight.

 



 

 

Who touched my bokeh?

Today I learned that the area of a picture that you want to be blurry in order to create a focal point is called the "bokeh." It is affected by the f stop measurement and the distance between the lens and subject matter. This is something that I can only figure out by playing with my camera. Since my daughter was an available model we went on a little walk before dinner and took some pictures.

Eff This!

Today has been a very weird day for my family and me. We have received terrible customer service at multiple places today including from our internet service provider. The icing on the cake is that we got a new modem and nothing got better with our connection. Rather than them doing their best to rectify the situation we now have to wait 2 more days with crappy internet before getting a possible solution to the problem. For the record I have lost my connection 4 times while attempting to write this very short post. This day has officially sucked.

I've worked with the aperture settings today, which are measured in "f stops." Pictures with a smaller aperture setting will have a shallower depth of field which automatically draws the eye to the part of the picture that is in focus. In composition terms it also means that there is a true foreground and background in the photograph. This can be done through the lens on the camera, not the camera itself. For some reason I find that really interesting. I don't know why. The lowest F I can get to with my current lens is 3.5, but it goes up to 32, which makes for really sharp landscape photos but not so good for anything close up or artistic in nature. Portraits are also better with a lower aperture setting.

This picture is of the grass in my front yard. There's nothing particularly exciting about our front yard, so this is probably the best picture ever taken of mediocre grass. I like the focus that you get on the foreground layer of grass while the background is completely, wonderfully out of focus. I'm hoping to apply this concept to portrait photos in the near future rather than just shooting pictures of really small things. 

 

 

 

There were other pictures that I wanted to upload today, but they will apparently have to wait on a less terrible internet evening to be uploaded. 

 

 

 

 

 

Eye-so or ISO

Today I played with ISO settings. Basically I tried several different things today with the camera settings adjusting its sensitivity to light. I sort of wish I knew more of what I am talking about but right now I'm so new at this that I don't know much about the technicality of what I'm doing. Tonight I'm just sharing some of the pictures I took throughout the day.

Speed Demon

Today I learned all about the importance of shutter speed on the quality of the photos. I knew, in the back of my mind that slowing down the shutter lets more light in to the eye of the camera. However I had never thought about the application of that fact though until playing around with the settings on the back porch. The following collage of photos were all taken within a 5 minute period of time. The first picture is with the shutter slowed down to 1/3. I think the last picture was taken at 1/160. I don't remember what the ISO was set at or the aperture. I do know that once I got above 1/160 I had to open up the aperture a little bit to be able to see my subject.

 

 

Once I got done with the literal comparison of the shutter speed I decided to see how fast the camera could really work, so I changed a general setting to shoot continuously and set the shutter speed to 1/4000. I told my sweet daughter to twirl and run in the backyard just to see how much of her motion I could capture. These are my favorite pictures from that experiment. I can't wait to see what this camera can do at a soccer field in the morning.

 



Reading the Manual

I spent my break times at work today reading the manual for my camera. Not exactly a riveting read, but it gave me a lot of stuff to try, things that might make my pictures just a little more "me." I think some of the coolest settings on the camera are the ones that filter for certain colors only, although I'm also a little in love with some of the black and white settings too.

 

 

Not every picture on this blog will be of my kids but they make for good test subjects!

Brand New Camera

Last week I ordered my very first DSLR camera. I've been reading blogs and recommendations on ways to get started on my journey as a photographer as I anxiously awaited the arrival of the box from Amazon. The main thing that everyone said was read the manual and take lots of pictures. I have decided to challenge myself to do a 365 challenge to get in the habit of taking pictures and developing my eye for photography. My main goal is to be able to preserve family memories. However I'm also interested in microphotography and landscape photography. I can't wait to see where this journey takes me.

I call this picture "Dancing Daughter." I'm proud of 2 things with this picture: 1. I got a good expression out of my 4 year old who doesn't always like to cooperate with cameras and 2. I managed to get a shallow depth of field while maintaining the focus on her face.