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.

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.

 



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.