I ordered a 50mm prime lens about 2 months ago and it went on backorder… I finally had it show up at my place, magically, on my birthday! I absolutely LOVE the thing… I can bring the f number down to 1.4 and get some really stunning results with portraits. None of the following were taken in exotic locations or anything, I just took them around the house when Crystal was her for my birthday and Jenny came over a couple days later.
I’m also going to add in a couple different version of the pictures I took of Jenny just to show how proficient I am getting in Lightroom (which is amazing, FYI)! Thanks again to Kelli Nicole for sending me in that direction for photo editing.
A friend was leaving Houston and heading to Virginia for grad school, so naturally we threw a goodbye party! The party planner asked if I could bring the camera, so I obliged.
[NOTE] If you want to REALLY look at each image than click on them to embiggen… WordPress decided to make them look crappy in the formatting? I’ll make sure to more appropriately change the size on my own before uploading next time. [END NOTE]
Some really close friends of mine just had a new addition to the family, so when I went over to meet her I took the camera along. Let me know what y’all think!
I took these on the same day I headed out with Cristy (see the last post).
A friend of mine asked if she could do a photoshoot with me, and 
since I’ve never done it before I thought it would be a good experience. I learned a lot about what it takes to do a decent shoot… I worry so much about being creative, but really it’s all about noticing different backgrounds that naturally catch your eye and then helping your subject feel comfortable. I’d say my first trip out was certainly a success in that I learned a lot, but in general I think there are a million things I could have done better. That’s why we experience new things, right? It’s always a learning experience!
In other awesome new, I have a mentor now! Kelli is a friend of mine with some serious talent, though she is certainly humble about it, so I asked if she would be my mentor and I got a smile as a response. I’m pretty excited to have that relationship setup so I can pick her brain and maybe get involved as an apprentice on occasion (if she’s got a shoot and could use some help). If nothing else, it’s someone else to talk to about my new excitement, which will help keep me motivated! I pretty much talk with Jason about things, and since he and I are both big time novices, it’s good to add someone with serious talent into my circle. She’s already given me one piece of solid advice: try using Adobe Lightroom!
As for my photos to add, here are some shots I took with Cristy a couple weeks ago that I’ve been working on developing a bit. By no means am I done, but these four shots look pretty good…. 
Feel free to share thoughts!
There is a niche within photography called Photo-Journalism. It’s pretty straight forward, the idea is to be able to tell a catch the essence of a story with one or two pictures just as you might see in a newspaper article. This weekend I participated in two different events and I figured it would be a fun opportunity for me to see if I could compose some shots that would accurately tell the story of what was happening. I think one of the keys is to take a lot of different pictures and sift through them to find the ones that have the most character and emotion.
4.24.2009 – National Volunteer Week (@ Northeast Houston YMCA)
We had a blast serving at the YMCA, and I’m glad I took the camera. I think we got some fun shots that will be good memory joggers for the future. It was seriously a fun day.
4.25.2009 – BEEFriending BBQ (@Tanglewood Park in Houston, TX)
Anyway, hopefully these images tell a bit of the story… I thought it was fun taking the camera around, but it’s certainly hard to convince people to ignore you when you’re standing up so close sometimes. I really could use that telephoto lens… But I also want the wide-angle lens (just below a fisheye would be sweet), so I guess it could potentially get pricey to have such a fun hobby.
The weather has been really bad (or great, considering I like thunderstorms a lot) in Houston the last few days, so getting out to do some photography has been a challenge. This morning it was really foggy and not the best for lighting, but I snagged a couple photos that I like. I messed with them a little in Photoshop, the “Obligation” photo much more than the “Spider Lock”.
Let me know what you think. After walking around for a while today, I am wondering if I am much more interested in people as subjects for my photographs… Something about capturing emotion through faces seems a lot more interesting to me. Either way, I need to keep experimenting! They say your first 10,000 photos are your worst, and I have a ways to get before I hit that threshold…
I had some friends over the other day and decided to play a bit with shutter speeds. I bought a tripod over the weekend, so this is the first time this type of shot was even possible without some major camera shake. Once I played with the tripod a bit I really wanted to take a shot like this – and for some reason I even had the main subject in mind. Thanks for playing along Derek!
Anyway, I think I may do a little post-production on this shot because I like it so much and may eventually play with it a bit more. I really should have taken some of these shots in RAW so that I’d be able to modify and tinker in Photoshop w/o consequences…
The shutter was open for about 15 seconds, and I had to do some serious adjusting for the light. I like that it’s a bit brighter (it fits the context of the shot in some ways), but that is one of the areas I hope to adjust once I get a handle on using Photoshop.
I’m a bit slow at getting new stuff up – but I’m trying to do a lot of reading and such to understand what I’m doing better. I also want a telephoto lens and more creativity… 
Again, please share comments.
Here are a couple of photos I took last week that I kind of like. (Click on the image to bring up a full-size shot)
The first is just a monochrome of a flower outside my place. Not the cleanest picture or best composed shot, but it was one of my first real successes with playing with depth of field.
- Aperture : f5.6
- Shutter Speed: 1/40 second
This next image was taken at a friend’s house that same night. I wanted to mess with white balance settings and get a neat blur effect off of the pair playing speed scrabble, while yet allowing some focus on the words they were building. I think I did alright, thought there is certainly a bit of camera shake.
- Aperture: f5.6
- Shutter Speed: .3 seconds
These next two pictures are of the same subject… I LOVE cheesecake, and we had some over the weekend. I thought it would be a good chance to play with aperture again, but to see if I could get a really solid focus on two different parts of the same subject (note that the focus is different between the two images; the first image has a focus on the cheesecake itself while the second has more of a focus on the chocolate chips on top – which were delicious).
- Aperture: f5.6
- Shutter Speed: 1/40 second
- Aperture: f4.5
- Shutter Speed: 1/40 second
Let me know what you think. Again, this is my first batch and they’re unedited, so keep that in mind – but anything constructive is definitely appreciated!
