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!
I feel like I need to get a post up right now, just to validate the existance of the new blog. I’ll be posting some pictures within the next few days, so hopefully there is something there worth looking at. I haven’t yet invested in Photoshop or another serious photo editor, so what you see at this point is going to be directly from the camera with no modification as of yet. I’ll eventually get there on the photo editing front, but one step at a time, right?
I recently returned from a trip to Utah, and I have a couple pictures from the trip. I honestly did not take as many photos as I would have liked before leaving, but the trip was more about relaxing than it was getting up into the mountains for a photographic adventure… Again, I’ll post some stuff soon.
