Saturday Morning Shooting

It has been forever since I went out JUST to take pictures. I left the house at 6:15 this morning with my gear bag and found out a few things:

1. 28 degrees Fahrenheit might be warmer than most Saturdays have been recently but it's still damn cold.
2. My shooting is way out of practice
3. I really need to practice shooting with my zoom lenses again.
4. In general, I really have to watch my shutter speed and focal length and use my tripod more. Using the 50mm at home under lights has gotten me too confident in handheld shots when I got back outside using a zoom lens.
   
5. I still love photography and need to get back to it outside of the kitchen.

Water Hazard
Yellow golf ball frozen in the shore of Lake Loudon. I like the shot but should have used the 50mm/1.8f lens.

Martian Landscape
Actually is the exposed and frozen clay shoreline.

I loved the color in this shot, the sun was just peaking over my shoulder. I HATE the focus. I had been shooting manual focus before this shot and wonder if I thought I had switched back to auto. I don't know but this could have been a great shot.


High and Dry
I like the stratified layers of color in this shot, but it's a bit washed out in the lightest layer.



Lost Summer

This stump of a post embedded in concrete caught my eye because of how the water erosion has etched the natural rings of the wood out. I should have used the tripod more to get cleaner shots.

Dang, I have long legs at 7 in the morning!

The ONLY shot I took all morning that I really liked. At least it's the only one that didn't make me think I should have done something differently.
As disappointed as I was in the pictures, I feel like I learned a lot, or more to the point, "re-learned" a great deal.

Tinted Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs

While picking up a few things at Lowe's Home Improvement stores today, I found these cool colored CFL's from Sylvannia priced at $4.97 each. I couldn't resist.

I posted this black and white candle holder a few weeks back and it has become my favorite model because it looks cool and gives a great reference point since it is white and black. I've got to come up with a name for him. I was thinking "Face" or "Floating Head", but haven't decided yet. So the face is white and the back drop is yellow card board in all of these shots.

Anyway, here's one with just black light.

One back lit in red.

Back lit in red, front lit with green.

Another one back lit in red.
Again, back lit in red, front lit with green.

I had fun trying these out. I know I won't use them often, but they do give me an interesting option.

Perdido Key at Night

I took this shot of the water tower from the condo (in-laws, not mine) we are staying at this week. It was at night but the 1/1.3 shutter speed brought out a lot of the available light.The Perdido Sun, where we are staying. Hurricane Bait. This area took a direct hit by Hurricane Ivan in 2004, causing substantial damage to Perdido Key, Orange Beach, and Gulf Shores. They rebuilt it. It will come again.

Ordinary life....

...isn't all sunsets and rainbows.

Food Porn

This is a shot that I took this weekend for my food blog (Pan seared scallops with golden shrimp sauce...and a bit of sriracha heat!) but it is soooooo purty that I had to post it here too! Not only was it nicely executed from a culinary standpoint, I was proud of the styling, the composition, and color from a photography standpoint.

I'd have to say it's one of the top 10 food shots I've ever created and taken!

Friday Night Shoot Out

I have been promising for two or three weeks to participate in the Friday Night Shoot Out over at Chef E's TMI blog. Every week I've had a good excuse as to why I couldn't. I couldn't bear to leave another "next week" comment so when I found out this weeks subject was "WATER"....

I was rather bummed. I have been chasing sunsets over water for the past three evenings but have gotten clouded out every night, just when I think I was going to get a purple, orange, pink masterpiece.

So instead, I scrolled through my SD chips and found a few suitable ones from earlier this week when I took Trevor to the park.

Not a great shot because of the exposure, but I love the look on Trevor's face as he is having a ball with some new friends he met.
Speaking of exposure, when I framed this shot, I was thinking how romantic of a shot it was with the couple sharing a moment together. It wasn't until I got home that I noticed the butt cleavage. Sorry lady.....it's still a nice shot though! Volleyball anyone? Trevor lake side. So see Chef E? I'm not a total lame butt this week:)

Trip The Light Fantastic

My back deck was bathed in gentle shadows late this afternoon when I found a firehose of light being splashed on one spot.

One of my hobbies other than photography is cooking, but especially BBQ (See the little green guy over there to the right in my side bar? That's my food blog.) For 25 hours straight this rainy weekend I was smoking chicken and pork so the deck was a wreck! I was cleaning it up, taking down my EZ-Up cover when the brilliant beam of sunlight reflected off my neighbor's window like the ending scene from Raiders of The Lost Ark.

I chased it as it moved from my pile of thin sliced hickory.....

To the batch of bok choy Alexis is growing....

Then I went out front and chased Trevor around the maple tree....

He's my favorite model....

But I have a technical question about lighting for all you photographers out there. Here are two action shots I tried to take of Trev the past two afternoons.

Yesterday with an external flash (SB-600) to light up the shadows on the front side of Trevor. I could have started to work on the exposure but since I'm firing a D-60 with a maximum shutter sync speed of 1/200th of a second I won't be able to stop the blur while using a flash.

So today I tried just using no flash and a shutter speed of 1/320th. The blur is better but the lighting is not good. I need a light source from the front.

So what do you think? Is it just an issue of my camera being too slow of a sync speed? Or is there something else I could try?

Class Field Trip #2: Cades Cove

That post title sounds like a bad sequel, doesn't it? Kind of like "Revenge of the Nerds Part II: Nerds in Paradise".

This morning was our photography class' rescheduled field trip to Cades Cove. Don't expect pictures of cute deer, black bears, and mountain shots. Today was about portraiture and testing our exposure control, mostly. I don't have releases from any of the models to post their photos so that leaves me with just my throw away shots, but you're not missing much. Truth is, I was awful today. Out of 202 shots about a dozen were acceptable to me.

But you know what? That's fine. I learn from that too. I'd be lying out of my arse if I said it didn't frustrate me, but I'm trying to keep a positive focus on it. Some of today's lessons learned are:

• Quit dropping my f-stops (opening aperture) to the lowest levels just to keep a decent shutter speed in lower light situations. My knee jerk reaction to fix slow shutter speeds is to drop my f-stops to the smallest number I can get on a lens. That results in blurry pictures just as much as a slow shutter speed due to the shallow depth of field. Move the ISO up to gain a couple of stops. Here's a perfect example. I shot the blurry one from a tripod but had a 5.3 f-stop. The second was an 8 and see how much better the depth of field was.
• Don't rush. I know the fundamentals now and need to practice them. But all of my awful shots today, I KNOW how to correct them. But today we had a group of 40 people trying to take the same shots, from the same angle, using the same resources (models, assistants holding diffusers/reflectors, etc). I was constantly either shooting between two people or had 6 people in line behind me and I felt like I was holding everyone else up. Today was and exercise in the EXACT OPPOSITE of what we were taught in class last week and in the article by Fred Pritchard about walking around and carefully observing the subject before you even get your camera out. Today was more like "Hurry up and shoot then get the #*@( out of the way".
  
• I REALLY REALLY need a better tripod.
• I need to practice portraiture methodically in a non-rushed situation.
• I'm not ready for the Fundamentals II class yet. I need to practice the basics from Fundamentals I this next semester, shooting often, and then take the summer Fund II.
  

One of the bright spots of the day was getting to ride with Colby McLemore and Jill Barber, who are both several orders of magnitude better photographers than I am. Just being able to be a part of the conversations about photography with them was a learning experience for me today.

Texture of the chimney at John Oliver's cabin.
Self portrait in window at John Oliver's cabin. I was trying to get Greogory's Bald (mountain) reflection but kept seeing my self so finally said, "screw it......self portrait!"
Texture - wood shingle tile roof of John Oliver's cabin.
I prefer links of sausage but these links contain more than 100% of the US recommended daily allowance of iron!
Old tractor tire

This wagon wheel reminded me of the REM song "Can't Get There From Here". Which one is better, wheel 1 or 2?
I just liked how this dude was looking at me after I had followed him from limb to limb along the fence line. Which one is better, bird 1 or 2?
On the way home, I stopped at the parking area where the road splits to Gatlinburg or Cades Cove. I sat on a stone and just listened to the river crashing and rolling for an attitude adjustment. It was a beautiful day. I needed to appreciate it. As always, I have a hell of a lot to be thankful for.
Pebbles at the edge of the river. Double click on the pic and look at all of the colors under water. I couldn't quit staring at them.I'm going out in the morning to shoot again, but this time it will be at my leisure and of whatever inspires me. I really missed that this morning.

Don't forget I'll need your help in the next few days to help pick my Final 4 shots for Wednesday nights final showing. Please check back by Tuesday.

Blue Sky Saturday

“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child -- our own two eyes. All is a miracle.”

Thich Nhat Hanh - Vietnamese monk

A week of snow, ice and single digit temperatures gave way to a miraculous blue sky Saturday. I threw my gear bag over my shoulder and snuck out of the house while the family slept. My first stop was Rocky Point at Concord Park.

The only photoshop work was resizing all of them and I cropped three of them. Nothing else was altered.

Arriving Flights

I made a friend, although he didn't look so friendly as he charged towards me. I've had two Weimeraners and I swear all other Weimies know it because they always come running to me. I gave him a friendly pet and his owner called him back. A few minutes later something nudged me in the back as I was squatting, taking pictures of the geese. He just had to have my attention. He kept coming back every few minutes as if to say, "What are you doing? Doncha wanna play?"

Sticks and Stones

Camera Shy

Marina Mania

In class, we have been focusing on (camera puns kill me) using aperture and shutter speed to achieve a neutral light meter just for mechanics but Tom has kept emphasizing that is just for now for learning purposes. There are times where that is NOT what you want. I think I stumbled onto one of those times this morning. There was some haze early on.

"Properly exposed" subject:
"Purposed underexposed by 2/3rds stop" subject (I think 1/3rd stop might have been perfect):
Other shots from the marina

Oh Bouy!

Trevor and I went back to the park later today but the conditions had changed and most of the shots were for our family albums. However, I liked this one.

I Think We've Been Disconnected...

I snapped this shot of Trevor through a 12" long drain pipe that was stacked by the side of the road, waiting to be installed.

I thought I'd end with the last shot of the morning session. What a great morning. Hope yours rocked too.

Peace !