April 30, 2010

There were some fake leaves sitting on the little table on our porch.  Not sure why, but  decided to photograph them . . .

April 29, 2010

Played with HDR a little bit -I had the flowers sitting by an open window with an aluminum top as a reflector.  In the back, I had a large piece of black fabric to null the background a bit.  I think I need to try the HDR on a proper landscape . . .

April 28, 2010

My wife let me use her as my subject today.  I need to learn portraits, and this one has been one of my best so far!  I was using my 50mm wide open, which is still my favorite lens.  I just love using the manual focus - it feels like I'm really taking the picture.  I won't knock auto-focus - it's a lot faster, but it's not as much fun!

April 27, 2010

It was a cool day, but the youngest was enjoying the swings anyway. I wasn't too happy about the focus-  but the shot wasn't planned out, so I can't complain too much!

I've also noticed that it's the time of year to start breaking out the Hoya r72 filter.  I had a problem with some odd banding across my IR pictures, but read somewhere to cover the  eye viewer to cut down on excess light bouncing around inside the camera.  Turns out that it works!

April 26, 2010

Not much to say about this one - the skeletons are made of wood, and the doll heads will make some nice zombies when I set them up.

April 25, 2010

For a lazy, (mostly) rainy Sunday, I put together wood puzzles with the kids.  We did a giraffe, a skeleton (I have three more to do), and this biplane.  They are a lot of fun, and they go for 2-3 dollars each at Michael's crafts.

I've been playing with aperture mode,but not in this shot. I should have gone out to maybe f/2.8, but I love that narrow DoF in f/1.7 so much!

April 24, 2010

I went and purchased fabrics for backdrops.  Then I played with them a bit, seeing the effects different lights have.  My small LED flashlight brought out the blue in the red sheer fabric reminiscent of disco - I'll have to avoid using it.  Actually, I was surprised how well the fabrics looked in full light .

April 23, 2010

Okay - not my best picture, but it's more of testing  a concept.  I did a panoramic shot on my tripod.  Colors are awful, but it still worked out nicely.  I can't wait to try it out properly out at Dawes' Arboretum.

April 22, 2010

It seemed like such a nice day, and I had my little skeleton guy out and about with me, and these pretty flowers were there . . .
Or maybe it was a perfect day to begin the Zombie Apocalypse . . .

April 21, 2010

A quick shot of the lamp outside our house - we stuck a bug light out there hoping that it might work.  It did a pretty good job last year.

I had taken a bunch of pictures of downtown outside my sunroof (there was a bit of stopped traffic).  They didn't come out so well - any other time, you see a grat vantage point of the downtown skyline and think, 'that would make a nice picture.'  Maybe traffic didn't stop in the right place . . .

April 20, 2010

Jenny and I played with water and bubbles in a big bowl of water.

April 19, 2010

Just sittin' there, thinking - what kind of trouble I'm going to cause today . . . .

April 18, 2010

This is the assembly for a video I want to put together.  The song will be 3 minutes of Beethoven's Allegretto from Symphony No. 7 in a Major, Op. 92.   I'm thinking a kind of 'Faust' meets 'Wake Not the Dead' (with marshmallows) . . .

April 17, 2010

A bit of plumbing makes a late-night run to the hardware store a necessity.  Just for fun, I try getting a wide angle picture in the dark.  It was overcast, so  it appeared really dark out.  To be fair, it was also about 9.40p at night.
I will say this - there is no such thing as a single trip to the hardware store.  No matter what you are working on, the project will require at least two trips and cost a minimum of $200.

April 16, 2010

Something a little different - my phone (Motorola Android) has an app that will take a photo and convert it to ASCII characters (which I've always liked).  Along with the image, the app generates the HTML version as well.

I know this post is a day late, but technically, I took the picture on April 17.

April 15, 2010

The children have dream catchers in their bedrooms - Rachel has a rainbow-themed one that hangs in her canopy.

April 14, 2010

A small tunnel of flowering trees on the OSU campus.  I was running both the SD4 filter and the polarizer, which may have been a bit much.

April 13, 2010

It's a flower!  It was a bit windy, so I took some pictures rapid-fire and took the best one.  I'm really happy with this one - it's pretty clear for hand-held on an old manual focus lens!

April 12, 2010

Ever since I started this little project, it seems that I spend a lot of time noticing my immediate surroundings.  At first, it was in an effort to find that 'shot for the day.'  This year, it seems that spring is literally exploding with color, and this is the first time I'm really noticing it.
I took this picture in our front yard; there is a bush that straddles the property line between ours and our neighbor's house.   I walked around the bush for a good 5 minutes, taking near 50 pictures of the little flowers at different apertures.

April 11, 2010

I baked up some cinnamon chip white-chocolate-chunk cookies today.  Lots of really good vanilla and cinnamon here - only thing missing was a tall glass of milk!