June 10, 2009 - Kindergarten Graduation

I could post a lot of cute graduation pics. All of the kids were ADORABLE, and they put on a show! They recited the names of all of the presidents. They said bible verses. They sang songs, not kids songs like Jesus loves me. They sang Hail to the Chief. They read from books. They did mental math. They dressed up like kids from other countries and gave short speeches describing their country. They had to have a costume change to put on these robes. I got my money's worth :)

Sony A350
Lens: Tamron 70-200 f/2.8 Macro
Shutter Speed: 1/125 second
Aperture: f/2.8
ISO: 400

June 9, 2009 - Sense of Motion (275)

The boys were pretending to race, and they were quite serious. It was fun to watch.

Sony A350
Lens: Minolta 50mm f/1.5
Shutter Speed: 1/160 second
Aperture: f/8
ISO: 100

June 8, 2009 - Feline (97)

Just as I was leaving the park, I came across this cutie. The gal holding the cat was trying to find her a home. The girl's Dad was adamant that she could not bring the cat home, because they had four cats. She had already tried the humane society, but they were full. She was meeting a friend that she hoped to entice into taking the cat. I love cats, but my family is allergic. It was an adorable kitty, though.

The fstop was still at F-11 from the previous shots. The cat is adorable, but I probably should have softened the focus on that arm a bit. I brightened the cat's eyes with coffeeshop's powderpuff action and used coffeeshop's color pop action. I love both actions. The colorpop action has a fantastic sharpening feature (I like it more than unsharp mask.) and a nice the vignette.

June 7, 2009

Yesterday's photo came out of the camera very nicely. I messed with it a little, but it was genuinely a good photo with nice exposure. Comparatively, I went to a park less than a mile away and took a photo within five minutes of the photo in yesterday's post and the clouds were completely blown. What went wrong?---a litany of things. The main thing is that, with the first shot, I used my histogram. My interpretation of the histogram can lead me to overexpose sometimes, but more often than not, I get a better exposure with the histogram. When I moved locations, I wasn't thinking. I didn't use the histogram. I just snapped. If I would have thought about it, I would have known the bridge and shadows were going to be a problem for the auto metering. When I looked at the photo, I could tell the clouds were blown, but I didn't have time to figure the shot out. It turned out to be salvageable, but I'm most gratified when I take a good shot, not when I create one. I blended exposures creating different exposures with my raw settings. This usually works out better for me than taking different photos with different exposures. Can you tell along the tree line? I'll answer that, yes, you can tell along the tree line. It isn't the most natural transition in the world. I guess I could do better if I would have taken more time, but, as it is, this photo has probably taken up half my life not to mention the longest post in history :) Would I ultimately get a better product if I took different photos with different exposures rather than working with the same photo?

This one enlarges

June 7, 2009

Here is the original photo without processing. I used this one for the exposure of everything except the sky.

June 6, 2007 - In My Neighborhood

We have a community open space where I take lots of photographs of my kids. Since the clouds were so pretty today, I thought it would be a good day to get a shot of it.

Sony A350
Lens: Minolta 50mm f/1.5
Shutter Speed: 1/100 second
Aperture: f/11
ISO: 100

June 5, 2009 - More Angels

More experimentation...

June 4, 2009 - Angels (11)

I tried a couple of different things here. What is your preference? With this blog, I can never tell if the photo will enlarge or not. Hopefully, they will enalrge when you click. I can not figure out for the life of me why sometimes the photos enlarge and sometimes they don't. I have experimented uploadeding in small, medium and large. Now, I just upload in medium and it's hit or miss.

Sony A350
Lens: Minolta 50mm f/1.5
Shutter Speed: 1/4000 second
Aperture: f/3.5
ISO: 200

June 2, 2009 - Shell

Challenge - Shell

Sony A350
Lens: Minolta 50mm f/1.5
Shutter Speed: 1/640 second
Aperture: f/4.5
ISO: 100

My children LOVE snails. They always have several snails in a shoebox.