Weekend photo fest

Over the long holiday weekend I took almost 500 photos. My friends are threatening an intervention.

Here are a few of my favorites.

Forgive the lack of any real editing. I've even managed to overwhelm myself with the sheer amount of pictures!

Freezing motion

Okay, so I'm getting used to my Av setting on the camera and I've decided to play with ISO. I wanted to really capture the water falling on the stones. It was an overcast day and I think that actually helped some of the color "pop" off of the rocks. I used an ISO of 400 on this shot, and a 1/1600 shutter speed:

After I checked the LCD, I decided to up the ISO to 1600 and see what the result was. This was shot at an ISO of 1600 and a shutter speed of 1/4000. Notice a difference?

More flowers and more play with aperture priority

This time in direct bright sunlight. I'm still playing with aperture priority, but I'm learning that it's really kind of 50-50 for me right now. I did this outdoors (obviously) in bright sun. I'm pretty pleased with how this turned out.

Unfortunately, I did some indoor, night time photos using this setting this week, and let's just say I'm not as pleased. To be fair, I was also playing around with the ISO, so I may try some different combinations this week and see what happens.

I'm so glad these are digital. I can only imagine what I'd be shelling out for developing otherwise!

Creepy or cool? You decide

Yup, still playing with aperture stuff. Life can be pretty crazy for me, so there is always a toy, a pile of something, or just a plain, old, ordinary mess somewhere in my home. Blurred back grounds really help minimize that to a degree, so I'm really practicing.

I have so many mature trees in my neighborhood. They do give a lot of shade, and sometimes too much shade equals moss. Moss can equal an interesting photo, I think, but some may say these images are pretty creepy! You be the judge!

Busy little hands

I took these just the other day. My little one is really interested in Play Doh right now, and I wanted to catch how busy the little hands were creating something really cool. We later made noses and beards for ourselves and had so much fun being silly!

I do wish I had focused this one a little differently. The dough in the foreground is slightly blurry. I do love the blurred hands in the background working on cutting the perfect pieces, though. I want to practice this technique a bit more!

I've discovered aperture priority mode. Someone stop me.

I've been reading a lot (I mean *a lot*) of photography articles, books, pamphlets, notes on cocktail napkins....pretty much anything photography related, I'm reading it. Anyway, I've seen a lot lately on aperture priority mode. I may just be in love with this little Av on my camera dial. Basically, what this does is allow the camera to choose the best shutter speed based on your lighting conditions, but keep the aperture and depth of field you want. I wish I had the courage to try this for the portraits I did recently for a friend. The lighting in the church we were in was challenging since there was a lot of bright sunlight streaming in from many angles. I plan to use this a lot!


Seriously, I may have taken three million photos this morning. Here are a few:

One of the benefits of a week plus of rain is that your grass gets really, really, long and that makes for photo opportunities.

Another rose, because they are still doing fairly well almost a week after I received them:

These beautiful roses were a gift from my husband for our seventh wedding anniversary. I took somewhere in the neighborhood of 810,377,437,316,641,134 pictures of them and this is one of my favorites.

Hello, World!