Trains Planes...and HW

As some of you know my life is pretty full/busy and these last few weeks have been so incredibly busy...I haven't had the time to take as many pictures as I would like...Or the ability to take my SLR with me.  But trusty little Canon S500 was by my side. Photos from the plane.  I set the camera to manual mode and played with the exposure to get the following shots.  Sitting by the wing I think takes the best pictures...why? You get perspective..of the wing and you get the view of everything else.

Things to remember:
1. Never be afraid to try even if you think technically it might not work...sensor noise or light blur...etc.
2. Never use a moving object (like a plane) as a stabilization tool.
3. Remember to do your homework, dope!
4. You should try cropping better...to emphasis what you want.  The second photo would probably work better cropped to be a landscape photo instead of a portrait.
5. Try to make your horizons more straight please.

Have you ever seen something from afar and thought it was amazing, down right magical in fact?  Then you actually get there and it's not at all what you expected.  Well, these photos sum an experience from this last weekend.  There's a store that sells these these faux flowers that light up in the center.  I've never been in the store, only seen it from the outside at night.  I thought this store was amazing and it was filled with all these glowing orbs of floral wonder.  Flash forward to the day time and most of the store is knick knacks and random things, with only a handful of these flowers and the flowers seem so fake.  Here where photo magic happens.

Photo one: shallow depth of field to blur out the details of the flowers and lights.  Best way to describe what I wanted to do was an impressionist painting...capture the light, massive amounts of color and contrast, but ignore the details.

Photo two: I wanted to capture that essence of entire room filled with antique, warm, glowing, inviting flowers at night...you know the magic...like a scene from Ferngully or Tinklebell the Princess Story or something like that that I got when I saw the flowers before.  I found an old mirror in the store with a few of the glowing flowers in front of it.  I took a photo of these flowers and it's reflection inorder to double the amount of flowers and lights I had and to use as a sort of frame for my flowers.  I had to lean over a table to knick knacks to get this photo and try to hide myself from the reflection.  I underexposed this photo a little too by shortening the shutterspeed.  I wanted to recreate that sense of night and wonder that I always get walking past that shop.  I wanted to get the top of the frame in there, but if I did I would have cut out the yellow flowers at the bottom or smashed into a statue of a angel or fairy or fairy angel.  This would have been a good time for a little wider angle lens (I don't have one though).  But i think the photo does alright without it. 

Any thoughts?  If you've been to that store (it's the one on the pier in Monterey) what do you think?  Does it capture the store?

Flying High...

After a fun photo weekend, I just wanted to remember a few things about taking photos of birds.
1. Wait for it...it doesn't so much matter where in the shot they are as a matter of what they are doing.  Post crop is your friend.
2. Duals to the death are always interesting.
3. Use Shutter Speed Priority mode and set your shutter speed to be fast.
4. Never be afraid to get too close, the worse thing you'll get is a photo of a bird flying away from you.

Cost Plus World Market

This is what happens when I go shopping...or actually go anywhere when I have my camera. I come back with photos of random things. This is a photo of random paper flowers they had in clearance at Cost Plus World Market. I like the shallow depth of field on this because it hides the shelves behind the flower and gives the whole photo a dreamy field of flowers feel and it hides their unnatural-ness a little.  The effect didn't work as well on the other picture...I had to increase the aperture (make the iris of the camera smaller) to increase my depth of field to get the whole of the flower in focus.  So the shelves are visible in the back.  

Fat Asia

This post is in honor of milk tea and s2000s.

Camera: Canon T2i
ISO: 1250
Lens: 50mm f1.4
Shutter: 1/60
Flash: None
Lighting: Upper Left Parking Lot Light, Horizontal Right Neon Open Sign

Mental note to self: Always have a back up jacket in the car.  Shots WILL be blurry if you're shivering from the cold.  Also, no photos with license plates please.

It Lives!!!

So...I was in a slump...I felt creatively defeated after my last outing to take pictures...I didn't know what was wrong...I saw the pictures I wanted to take...composition wise they looked great to me, and then I would snap the shutter and it was epic fail moment. It's been that way for the last few weeks. But today, I felt that bug again. Why? I read this. I knew that a lot of what I had previously captured was luck.  This morning, my chore was to water the plants.  I knew I wanted to also capture it's growth.  So out popped the camera.  I knew composition wise I wanted a tight shot of the kitchen "jungle".  I wanted to get the metal bucket at an angle to create interest and draw the eye around the photo.  I knew I was going to get morning back lighting, but I had ambient track lighting from the kitchen.  I positioned the plant so it got overhead from the track and backlight from the window.  I manually focused off some interesting leaves and snapped.  I knew I wanted shallow DOF so I let the aperature out to 1.4.  I had a feeling that 1/200 would be a good slightly underexposed shot, but it was little too much for my taste so I dialed it back to 1/160.  I wanted to slightly underexpose to really make the light on the leaves pop and pull them away from the shadows and the dirt.  I set ISO to 200.  I hate the noise you get with high ISO and I know people say that with digital cameras now a days it looks so great, but I set to 200 to limit the noise, but I know it was indoor, so I bumped it up a little.  It's not the best picture in the world, but I like it...and I feel like it's my own.  I thought it through.  I didn't just snap until I got lucky.  I made something.  Any who, lesson to future self.  Think then do, not do and hope it ends up okay.  Sometimes we get lucky and sometimes we work to make the probabilities higher.

And just so you (future I) will remember, even when you feel crappy, you still took pictures...so never give up and never stop trying please.

 

PS.  When you have extra time, and you feel like learning about photography tricks and lighting: youtube.com>snapfactory