July 18, 2009

I was just driving, minding my own business when the westbound road I was on turned north. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the colors beam through my car window. I immediately made a right turn onto the nearest county road and this was what I saw. I just happened to be by the southwest corner of our county, which is industrial. There was a cool haze on the horizon which added to the industrial feel.

In RAW I just stepped my exposure down 1/2 stop because I like the silhouette look. My correct exposure tried to shed some light on the foreground. My internal light meter does not think the same way I do, unfortunately.

*Click on picture to enlarge

July 17, 2009

Well, today just wasn't my day. I wasn't really happy with any of my shots. Today was just a ho-hum day. I took some sunset shots but they just didn't turn out right. I saw some really beautiful sights as the sun was setting, which is what's going on behind me in this shot, but I just couldn't capture it the way I wanted to.

The long time exposure blurred the irrigation ditch in this shot. Increasing the contrast slightly helped this bland shot, haha. Better luck tomorrow.

*Click on picture to enlarge

July 16, 2009

Today I took a drive with Lauren into Wyoming. We stopped along the way to take this shot. Steph was kind enough to tell our daughter we could flatten pennies if we laid them on the tracks. Needless to say that was all she wanted to do that afternoon. We'll have to go back tomorrow to see if we squashed them.

Just a little black and white conversion and I increased the contrast. Amazing what you can do with just the Canon utilities that come with your camera. In RAW you can bring this shot from color to B&W and back again just by selecting from a drop down menu since it has all the data stored in the RAW file.

*Click on picture to enlarge

July 15, 2009

This is a very early post because this nice pilot decided to buzz our town at 5:45AM. My first thought was to grab my camera. My second thought was to roll over and go back to sleep. I decided to jump out of bed and run after this maniac. He was only about two blocks away dusting some corn. I have about 600 shots of this guy, but this one fits best. If you look closely you can see the pilot.

Minor color saturation and contrast adjustments made. Unfortunately, the sky is very bright, but I will play with exposure levels in RAW and post anything that may look better.

Okay, don't judge. After much deliberation I've decided to post the honorable mention photo of the day. My eye is drawn to this one so I had to post it after I decided that the first post was THE photo. The first photo really shows you what's going on, but this one just pops to me. He was actually flying over me and I had the camera held vertically. As I looked at it I decided it looked better when viewed horizontally. This photo was taken about an hour after the first one. The pilot refilled his tanks and came back to wake up everyone else in the hood.

*Click on pictures to enlarge

July 14, 2009

Ben loves his new scooter. He's not real comfortable riding it yet, but he love to push it. Sometimes he'll go all the way down the block, realize how far he's gotten, then leave his scooter and run home.

The image was done to mimic a lomo photography shot, which was a Russian company that made a camera to saturate colors and slightly blur the photo. I didn't want to make it a full-lomo, but just enough to bring out the colors.

*Click picture to enlarge

July 13, 2009

Well, here's shot number one! After snapping about 300 photos I picked this one. The one thing I'd like to work on is photographing nature. When you photograph kids you accidentally end up with a good shot, almost always. I could have taken this shot about 5 million different times and it would not have changed. The challenge is getting your composition right, which is my biggest problem. Hopefully, I will improve over time and get criticism from others to help guide me.

I have some macro lens screw on attachments to help magnify the shot. The problem with the attachments is getting the correct distance from the object being photographed. There's a very shallow depth of field and there's only a small area near the center of the shot which is in focus. Actual macro lenses would have made the shot easier, but are expensive! So, I'll just learn how to use what I've got. Some minor tweaking in photoshop to increase contrast and sharpness...no big color adjustments.

*Click on picture to enlarge

The Beginning

Hello all! While cruising the internet I've run into several blogs with an interesting theme, A Picture A Day. The concept is to improve your photographic skills by taking one picture per day and post them for all to see. I've seen some very interesting pictures, so I thought I would give it a shot.

We have a family blog for posting about the various things we do as a family. Some of the photos I take don't involve the family, so I wanted to start a new blog to incorporate those. I'm going to try to pick out one picture I take from the day prior, which was the theme for that day. So, if I would have started on Saturday the picture would be of my son's broken tooth. Poor little guy. Although, I do realize some days will not have a major event, so I will just pick my favorite shot of the day.

The majority of the photos will be of my family, but this blog will also allow me to venture outside the norm to include nature and abstract shots. I hope to learn a lot of this experiment and I look forward to posting. I also hope that everyone will participate in any comments/critiques they may want to share...good and bad.

Charley