12 weeks to better photography: the color of light

This weeks lesson is on the the color cast that various conditions emit and how to minimize them using the white balance setting on your camera. Outdoors, it does not matter as much, but indoors light can take on a yellow/orange color which makes photos (especially people) unflattering. Ok, so I have never changed the white balance setting on my camera before, so this was all new to me. I usually just shoot using AWB- or auto white balance. This is what happens when you use auto white balance:

Notice the color cast? Ok, so in order to tell the camera that the auto setting produces a bad tint with my indoor lighting, I had to tell my camera what white should look like. So, I took a picture of a plain white piece of computer paper and set that as my custom WB setting- then I got the picture below. Much better right?

12 weeks to better photography: ISO & shutter speed

Week 2's lesson is about ISO and shutter speed. ISO is essentially film speed- or a setting to determine how quickly an image will be captured by either the film or digital sensor. The setting of ISO you select depends on how much light is available in your shooting environment. If you are outside and it is a bright sunny day, you can set it to 100-200, but if you are inside in low light, you will want to increase it to 800-1600 to compensate. Now, there is a tradeoff for shooting with such a high ISO, that is the higher the ISO, the more digital noise- or film grain is captured in your picture. Since the camera is capturing the image so quickly, it does not have time to be accurate so the image will not be as sharp. Shutter speed is how quickly the shutter opens in front of your image sensor. You will want fast shutter speeds to freeze action- like if you were shooting at a nascar race, you would want to ramp up the shutter speed to 1/1000 of a second to freeze the car in action. You can use a slow shutter speed to depict the motion of an object against the stillness of its surroundings. There are lots of cool photos out there of cars driving though NYC or Vegas for example, and all you see are the headlights of the cars, but the building, bridge or whatever the main focus of the picture is, is clearly in focus. The important thing to remember is that all three things - aperture, ISO, and shutter speed - control how much light is let into your camera. The goal is to balance these three things to find the correct exposure and capture a great image!


So for my examples, I shot water at 2 different shutter speeds from the kitchen faucet. I kept the ISO at 1600 since I was indoors and don't have much light in the kitchen.

Here, the shutter speed was 1/60 of a second. As you can tell, it is not fast enough to visually stop the flow of water

This one was taken at 1/1000 of a second and you can see here that the water droplets appear to be frozen since I was using a fast shutter speed. The examples illustrate this better I think

1/60 of a second- flowing water

1/1000 of a second- frozen water

I had never changed the shutter speed on my camera before last week, so this was fun to try out.

Farewell Dinner

Saturday night, we had a few people over for drinks and apps before going to dinner to toast our friends Laura and Jeff farewell since they will soon be moving to Atlanta.

John experimented with a few signature cocktails for the fellas and I made some concoction with Prosecco for the gals. I blended some strawberries and honey, put that in the bottom of the champagne flute, added Prosecco and topped off with blueberries. It was my attempt at 4th of July in a glass and it turned out pretty good I think.

We walked to Lulu for dinner. Love living so close to such a good selection of restaurants that we can just head up the hill and choose from a handful of local places.

Not sure why "hill" is always spray painted on the road- isn't it obvious you are heading up a hill?

We had taken in a few drinks by the time we got there, and were probably a little louder and obnoxious than usual. John saw "pate" on the menu and started asking us what "pate" was only he pronounced it "pait" like rhyming with bait- he was joking of course. Anyway, Laura bet him to ask our server about the "pait" which of course John did. We could barely keep a straight face, but our poor waitress fell right into it, and kept calling it "pait" just for us. John came clean at the end of our meal and told her it was a bet, he knows it's not pronounced "pait" but it was still pretty funny.

Laura & Jeff

Sam & Sam

Botham & Callie

Us

And our candid of the night:

12 weeks to better photography: aperture basic

Ok, so I have had my camera almost 1 year now, still love it, but wish I spent more time practicing. I found a "12 weeks to better photography" tutorial online here and decided to give it a try. I am using this blog to document the process and to hold me accountable.

Lesson one is on basic aperture training. Aperture and depth of field are the main reasons I wanted an SLR, I love the look of blurry backgrounds and sharply focused subjects, so I wanted to master this first. Aperture is probably the one thing I am most confident at but I still have a lot to learn.

Basically the size of the aperture, (or f-stop) of a lens determines how much of your photograph is in focus. The f-stop numbers refer to how open or closed the aperture on the lens is. The wider the opening of the lens, the greater the amount of light that enters your camera- which means that when your aperture is wide open, your focus will be shallower and fewer things in your photo will be in focus. The smaller the opening, the smaller amount of light that will enter which means that your focus is deeper and more of your photo will be in focus.

It is confusing though because the smaller the f-stop, the wider the aperture opening. So, f/1.4 would mean the aperture is wide open, whereas f/22 would mean an almost closed aperture.

The way I remember this is:
Lower f/stop means less photo in focus
Higher f/stop means more photo in focus

Onto the examples. I decided to use Morgan's Kong as the subject. In the first example, I had my aperture as far as my lens would open- which is f/3.5. You can see that the Kong is in focus- you can even see some evidence of Morgan hair on it, but you can't really tell what the background is.

In the second example, I had the aperture half open and you can start to make out some of the background, but still very blurry.

In the last example, I had the aperture almost closed, and you can clearly see the fence and even our neighbor's house in the background.

f/3.5

f/9

f/22

I learned most everything I know from a few online sites: here, here, and here are my favorites so far.

Catching up...

Since it took me about a month to get the trip recaps finished, I now need to get back to the past few weeks! Right after we got back from Europe, Paul and Retta came for a visit on their trip back up to Michigan. I made dinner Friday night and on Saturday, we took them around uptown. Several new things have come to Charlotte in the last year or so; the Betchler Museum, the NASCAR hall of fame, the Cultural Campus, and the Epicenter. We walked around and rode the light rail from one end to the next (not far at all, but I had never ridden the light rail before!). The NRA was also going on that weekend and Sarah Palin was in town, so uptown was actually pretty lively for a Saturday.





We went to dinner at Loco Lime on Saturday night, and then they were off bright and early on Sunday morning.


Memorial Day weekend, Russ came to visit from San Francisco. Unfortunately, it was raining most of the day on Saturday, but we had a nice day on Sunday. We went to the Whitewater Center and went rafting and rock climbing.








Well, I should say that I tried rock climbing. Didn't actually make it very far. Those little "rocks" that you grab really hurt your hands so I did not make it to the top. At least I tried and realized it wasn't my thing! Crossed that one off the list. I loved the rafting though. We have gone several times, and we had the best guide this time. We told him we wanted an adventure run so he was always holding us back behind others so we could head back into the rapids a second time. John and Russ both ended up falling out one time. I kind of wanted to fall out because it was so hot, but never did. The other note worthy event that took place on Russ's visit was that Russ bet John he could not run a 1K in under 3 minutes. We took the car to a nearby neighborhood that has not been developed yet and drove around until we found a perfect 1K route. Russ clocked the run on his iphone and I had my flip recording the run. At first I was doubting John, but he surprised both of us and ended up finishing in just under 3 minutes. I tried to load the video here, but kept getting an error for some reason.


We went to Cuban Pete's for dinner so Russ could try one of John's favorite burgers- the burger with chorizo. There was some fight on tv that night that Russ wanted to watch but surprisingly that is not my thing, so I think I ended up just reading that night. I regret that I did not get any pics of John and Russ, I got them in the video, but not on my camera!



The next weekend, we headed back out to the whitewater center. They were having a dog's day sponsored by the humane society so we got to bring the little miss along. We met Nate, Noelle, Libbie, Dixie, Sam, Sam, Jud and Izzo for lunch and then took the pups over to the dog area. It was so hot, they had a pool for the dogs, but Morgan did not want to get in.

Finally got one with all 4 dogs looking at the camera!

They also had an agility area setup. It was so hot that the dogs were pretty lazy. Dixie found a mound of ice and just plopped under the table and sat on it. Smart dog!





We did not stay too long, but I think the dogs had fun. And I got to snuggle this little one, so I had fun too.

I've got the power!

Actually I don't, but I wish we did. Yesterday, John got home before me at 6:30 and said the power was out. No big deal, our power infrastructure is probably 50 years old, so we frequently have outages for a few hours. It's kind of nice being forced to be unplugged actually, usually I just head out to the front porch with a stack of magazines and some citronella candles and I am good to go. I got home a little after 8, and we still did not have power though. We found out it had been out since around 3 in the afternoon when a storm came through. I took Morgan on a walk around 8:45 and it became pretty obvious then why our whole neighborhood was out of power..







So by around 10 pm, we just decided to go to bed and read with a flashlight. It was 93 degrees so I just got cold washcloths and put them on us. It was still so hot. Neither of us slept much at all, I kept thinking that it would come back on any minute, but it did not. I showered in the dark this morning and went to work with wet hair.

It was inconvenient for sure, but more than anything, it made me realize how much we depend on power for everything. I am complaining about being without power for one night, but for some people it is an everyday reality. I even remember when the power would go out when we were growing up and we would have to call "time and temp" to get the time! Thankfully we have our cell phones now, but even our cell phones had run out of battery by the morning. It was amazing how quickly I was ready for work when I didn't have the Today show to tune into or internet to check!

I am just hoping they have everything fixed by tonight, I have learned my lesson about not taking power for granted.

Some flip from the trip- Bruges canal