Photo Challenge: January

As promised, I'm back with the results of a photo challenge. I didn't post for the longest time because I never actually finished the challenge. I thought about taking all the pictures I hadn't taken and presenting them as if they were taken over the course of the month instead of one day. I thought about not posting at all. But I want to be honest and I think what happened is telling of how things usually go with me: I get very excited about a new project, get halfway involved, and then lose focus. I want to improve on that and finish what I've started.

This is just a small personal goal, but it means a lot to me. So to hold myself accountable, I'm posting what I've got and I'll try to do better next time.

I started a photo challenge that is similar to a scavenger hunt. I was to take a picture each day, using a list I found on Pinterest as a guideline. The link back to the original website was lost somehow.

30 Day Photography Challenge

Day 1 - 1/4/12: Self-Portrait

I know it's cliche to have a picture of your eyes as a self portrait, but this is me. No makeup. Lots of new freckles. And right now, I'm self conscious about pretty much everything except my eyes.

I got pretty lucky with this shot as I just pointed and shot, but I was still in manual mode. I used my hand to meter off of and then did a few test shots. The only lens I have right now is a 50mm, so even though I was holding the camera at arms reach (which is no small distance, as I have a 6-foot "wingspan"), it's a close up. This is SOOC (straight off of camera - meaning no editing).


Day 2 - 1/5/12: What you wore today

Today was my 25th birthday. I had a really wonderful, low-key day. Little Man and I went for a run in the park in the morning, and I spent the day cleaning the house. It may sound really boring to most people, but I really did have a great day.

The weather was a gorgeous 75 degrees and sunny all day - yes, on January 5 - so I was wearing one of my favorite pairs of running shorts. They make me feel cute. Note the lovely food stains. That's something I wear every day, now. ;) This is SOOC.


Day 3 - 1/6/12: Clouds

This was taken on another outing to the park with Husband and Little Man. I made some corrections in post-processing. I corrected the white balance and increased the contrast a little.


Day 4 - 1/7/12: Something Green

I thought it would be too obvious and easy to have a picture of a plant. Nothing wrong with that, but I really wanted something a little out of the box. I also wanted to show something meaningful to me. I ended up going with a photo of something I use every single day and am always paying attention to at night: the baby monitor. The green means a sleeping baby (or at least, a baby not making noise). Ahhh, green.


Day 5 - 1/8/12: From a High Angle

This isn't the best shot. I was a little crunched on time here. I was hoping to do a shot of Little Man upset and then a follow up of him happy, but it wasn't quite that easy. Of course, I never like to see him sad but I think he's so cute when he's crying. I snapped this fairly quickly and then went to comfort him. Technically it's not the best shot, but it met the daily category requirements.

Also, I usually like to take baby pictures on or near the same level as the subject because if you're looking down at a baby it makes them look like a toy. But in this case I think it works. If I had a little more time I would have tried to not crop out his foot, but I already felt like a bad mom for letting him cry in the time it took me to take this photo.


Day 6 - 1/9/12: From a Low Angle

This is Bella, the dog. She's an Italian Greyhound and can run more quickly than you'd think. I wanted to take a picture of her from a low angle, but the problem is she's only a foot and a half (or so) tall, and my lens really couldn't accomplish that close of a distance. Also, she moves. So I put her on top of the bed.

I like how her eye looks in this. I also added this one:

because it showcases her "Dobby ears", as Husband calls them. (That's an elf from Harry Potter, for those wondering.) This is pretty indicative of her nature. She's bug-eyed and tends to situate herself under blankets and pillows and then pop up when you least expect her to.


Day 7 - 1/10/12: Fruit

This is a dwarf pomegranate from a tree that my dad is growing. He brought it over out of curiosity to see what's inside. I waited a bit too long to cut it open, and so it got a bit rotten in some places. It looks just like a larger pom inside, but the arils are white. I'm not sure if that's because it didn't ripen, or what.


Day 8 - 1/11/12: A bad habit

This is what a typical night looks like in our house lately. Once the baby is asleep, Husband plays a video game and I'm online. Yes, it's a bad habit. It's not every night, but there are a lot of screens and electronics in the house and I'd like to reduce the time that we use them. As I type this on my computer.


Day 9 - 1/12/12: Someone you love

Easy peasy. Husband and Little Man. Two for one. When they fall asleep like this, it just melts my heart. I have about a million pictures like this, but they never get old to me.


So that's it. In a "30 Day Photo Challenge", I got 12 days in. Believe me, I was really tempted, even just now, to just take the rest of the pictures and pop them into place. No one would know. Except I would.

That's ok. I'm starting again, and even though it's already February 5, I'm going to do a February Challenge. If I don't finish it, I don't finish. The point is to get me more used to my camera and to take pictures more often. So there.

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Today is Super Bowl Sunday, and I have absolutely zero interest in the game. None. I only ever really watched it for the commercials.

As I type this, Little Man is happily putting blocks into a plastic bin and taking them out again. He's started to babble recently, seemingly out of nowhere. He was fairly silent (with the exception of crying) for months, and then out of the blue he started saying "da-da-ya-ya-ma-ga-pa-ra-la". Where did he get all of those consonant noises? It's hilarious; he'll be sitting somewhere just doing his own thing, and then look up and very matter-of-fact, say a "sentence" to us. It cracks us up every. time.

I've given up on waiting for crawling. He's been so close to it for so long. He rolls. He tumbles. He rotates. He inches. He reaches.

The thing is, I gave up on babbling. And then, babbling happened. So now I am *officially* giving up on crawling. ;)

Husband is upstairs cleaning out the game room, otherwise known as the room where you put everything that doesn't have a place. For two years. He's finally going through everything, and it's making me fall in love with him even more. Men, take note: chocolates, flowers, and jewelry are just fantastic. But if you really want to find your way into a woman's heart, clean her house for her. True story.

It's pretty embarrassing. It's a work in progress.

The other part of this is it's Husband's man cave. He desperately needs space and is being smothered by junk. The fun part about going through it all is finding things you'd forgotten about. It's easy to get distracted reading books you haven't seen in a while, playing with ebooks you lost a year ago, and looking through old photo albums.

And then there's the random old toys.

How was your weekend?

Photography: Basics

For my 25th birthday, I got a tripod for my new camera. This was most welcomed, and fairly necessary. :)

I have only very recently discovered the world of photography. And by that, I mean I know almost nothing. I've been reading a lot of blogs and equipment reviews, and I've been reading a few photography instruction books, as well as studying others' work.

I do not claim to be knowledgeable on this subject. I know I have a LOT to learn. I'm sure it will take years to get where I want to be with it, if I ever do. But I've got time, and it's fun. :)

I took the advice that I got from almost every resource I looked into, which was: "Just set your camera on full manual and go take pictures!" So I did.

Every single picture I've ever taken on my camera has been in manual mode. This means that I decide the ISO (sensitivity to light), the aperture (the diameter of the lens opening), and the shutter speed (how long the aperture stays open when the image is being made). These three must be balanced in order to make the correct exposure.

A high ISO generates a brighter image, but at the cost of creating more of a grainy (or "noisy") image. So ideally you want to keep the ISO as low as possible.

The shutter speed also determines how much light is coming in. The longer you leave the shutter open, the more light is available to make the image. So you want to have a longer shutter speed (exposure time), right? Not necessarily. The longer your exposure time, the more opportunity there is for blurring to occur. To get a sharper image, you want a fast speed to capture the image that's "happening RIGHT NOW!" (That's how I think of it - like a little hyperactive man inside the camera going "Right NOW" when it's a fast shutter speed. Yes, I know I'm a bit strange.)

Shutter speed is important in another way, though - it can determine the feel of your image. For example, let's say you're trying to convey movement and you want to show a person on a moving bicycle. If your shutter speed is really fast, you won't catch the blur from the movement. You'll get a picture of someone on a bicycle that looks stationary. (Of course, you'll know by looking at the picture that the bicycle is moving because of the person's stance on it and how it is positioned vertically (v. leaning to one side) and other context clues from the picture. But bear with me.) So to get a picture where the bicycle is a little blurry and obviously passing by the rest of the world so quickly that it can't be bothered to get photographed, you need to slow down the shutter speed a bit. Of course, when you do this to capture the movement of the subject, you also risk catching the movement of the photographer (you). Even the shake of the camera caused by your finger pressing the shutter release button can register on the image and make the whole world blurry instead of just the subject.

This is where the tripod comes in. If you use a tripod as a stable surface from which to take the picture, then there will be no shaking of the world, and only your bicyclist will be blurred, as you intended. Here's the shocker, though. Even after that huge description, I'm really not a huge fan of this style of photography. Maybe I haven't found something to draw me to it yet.

So, on to aperture. Here's where it gets funny again. Not funny-ha-ha-funny, but funny-I've-read-a-million-articles-and-books-and-it-still-confused-me-until-I-actually-picked-up-the-camera-and-started-shooting-funny. I'm not even going to get into the details, as I've already given the disclaimer that I really shouldn't be talking this much about things I don't know that much about. So.

Aperture is the diameter of the opening in the lens when the image is made. If the opening is bigger, more light can get in and the image is brighter. If the opening is smaller, less light comes in and the image is darker. But wait, there's more!

Aperture determines your depth of field. This is the distance between the nearest and farthest things in an image that are in focus. If you have a wide aperture (measured in a low f-stop number, such as f/1.4 or f/2) then whatever you focus on, just a little bit in front of and behind that focal point will be in focus too. The rest will be blurry. This is how photographers get that "blurred background effect", the aesthetic quality of which is referred to as "bokeh". This is a shallow depth of field. This is desirable for many reasons, one of which being the isolation of your subject. If there are distracting things in the background, such as major highlights and lines or patches that are different, it will distract the viewer from the subject.

If you have a small aperture (measured in a high f-stop number, such as f/22), then you will have a large depth of field and nearly everything will be in focus - what is nearby and what is far away. This is typically used more often in landscape photography, or when you want to tell a story by showing what is in the foreground and the background of an image.

The hard part is balancing all of these things. For example, I'm trying to take a picture of Little Man. He's 8 months old, and quite the mover, and I'd like to get a nice, crisp photo. So I need a shutter speed that's preferably faster than 80 (1/80 of a second). I also would like to have most of his body in focus, so I'd like to use an aperture setting of f/2 or f/4, but I can't make it much smaller than that (with a larger f number) because I'll lose the light. The problem is the light. Even with all the windows open, I can't have the aperture I'd like with a fast shutter speed. There's not enough light to get the right exposure. If I have a longer exposure time, it's blurry. If I open the aperture more, I lose depth of field and it's much more difficult to get the focus point where I want it to be. It also creates a different feel to the image than I'd like. The only other factor is ISO, and I hesitate to make that higher as it creates noise in the image. So for now I'm confined to taking pictures outdoors or having slightly blurry/underexposed or grainy images indoors. At least, of things that like to move.

There's a LOT more involved here; I haven't even scratched the surface, really. Again, I know almost nothing about photography - I just jumped in.

So. Tripod. :)

I got a tripod for my 25th birthday. And I'm in love with it. It's one of the ways to get more light in the image, as I can take a longer exposure and "catch more light". (The other way would be a flash, but not the kind that's built on the camera. That tends to create a bright subject and a dark background, and in my opinion it can be quite ugly. I need some method of diffusing that light, and honestly I have my eye on an off-camera flash.)

About an hour after I brought it home and got the baby fed, bathed, and tucked into bed, I pulled out my tripod and started messing with it. About an hour after that, I was standing out in the middle of our street (11pm now) taking pictures of the sky.

Here's the results of messing around with it in the living room. Husband was happy that I was so excited about it, but he was kind of "meh" about the whole thing until I showed him that we could now make this sort of picture:

And then he got the idea to play around with a flashlight:

Here are my night sky results. I edited them to correct the white balance. Making the clouds white makes the sky very blue. These are all 30 second exposures, which is the longest I can leave my shutter open. There is a "bulb" setting, where I can hold the shutter open for as long as I'd like to, but this requires a remote shutter release (otherwise my shaky human hand will create a blurry picture, even on a tripod).

The tree is red from the color of the streetlamp light reflecting off of it. This next one is unedited.

The tripod also allows something I almost never get: pictures of me with my son! Husband is happy to take them for me, but of his many talents, one of them is not really photography. It's always too far away or too close, or there's a tree "growing out of my head". So now I can set up the shot using him as a subject to meter off of and then stand where I'm supposed to while he pushes the button. Sure, they're staged while I prefer candid, but oh, well. :)

Here are some from the park last week. Oh, and before you freak out about what we're wearing, keep in mind it was 75 degrees outside. In the evening. On January 6th.

Yes, I know, I cut off his elbow. As I said, lots to learn. I used this photo, though, because I love their expressions. And it's really not easy to get a shot where the 8 month old and the 30 year old are both looking in the right direction in the right way at the right time.

Little Man was making a lot of funny faces that day. Husband dubbed this one the "John C. Reilly".

One last one to leave you with: he looks worried, but it's the first shot I was able to get with his eyes really in focus.

Next time I'll have some results from a 30 day photo challenge I'm doing. Until then!

Recent Developments

So it's a little belated, but Happy New Year!

I'm trying oh so hard to be better about blogging here. It will help things along, I think, now that I have a beautiful Nikon D90 (whoop!) with which I can (hopefully) begin to become a better photographer. I know I have a lot to learn, and this is a good place to showcase my work, for now. If I can ever figure out how to make my website look put-together. :/

We had a wonderful Christmas, although we received the sad news about Husband's grandfather passing away. We naturally went to be with the family, and it was a bittersweet time. Good to see everyone, but of course we were all missing the patriarch of the family. Even so, I felt as if he were still there with all of us. I could sense his spirit in the gathering of the family and the happiness that everyone felt with seeing each other again, despite the reason for the gathering.

We all gathered, reminisced, laughed, and cried. We mourned the passing of a great man.



As has been the long running tradition, Little Man played the role of the go-to comforter.

And did he ever do a lot of visiting and comforting this past week!

There's just something about being around a baby that makes your heart a little warmer. Whenever we get together, we always find ourselves just staring at him. Maybe it's the opportunity for a fresh new life. Or maybe it's the sweet way that they fall asleep in your arms.

Or maybe their little cheeks that you just want to nom.

Ok, so in case you haven't picked up on it by now, there will be a gratuitous amount of baby pictures on this blog. Don't worry, I'll branch out... occasionally. But for now, it's my blog and I'll do what I want, nnyah! :)

Little Man is rolling everywhere now. You put him down somewhere and a minute later he's halfway across the room. He can rotate, get up on all fours, and get down from a sitting position without free-falling backwards, but he's not quite there with the crawling yet. I keep saying "soon, soon" but it's hard to believe he will. It will be one more step away from my tiny little cuddly newborn (sigh).

Still... rolling, rolling.

Also, we're fully into the "solid food" era. Fruits, veggies, meats, pasta - you name it, he loves it.

But his true love is currently the banana.

There were many many toys brought by Santa this year. Interestingly enough, the biggest hits were the simplest ones. Case in point: the maracas.

Loves 'em.

Also favorites: the peg and hammer set

and the ring stacker (a classic)

...Not to mention the puzzles. Ok so I know I'm a bit biased, but I thought it was pretty darn cool when we (ok, I) started putting together a puzzle in front of him and he picked up a piece and put it on the board. Whoa. Needless to say, we went out immediately and got a few more puzzles. :)

We all loved watching (and controlling) the remote controlled helicopter.

Most of all, of course, we enjoyed just being together. This was the last time for us getting together like this for a while, and my father-in-law had to soak up every last bit of Little Man's company before heading out for a few months to his big project in Africa.

So that's all for now. A brief update, some shameless showing-off of baby cuteness, and a promise to return with another post soon. I want to try my hand at a few photo challenges. :) Oh, and yes, I do realize my photos are all different sizes. Believe me, it's bugging the crap out of me. It's one of the many kinks I'm currently working on. :(

Until next time, I'll leave you with this.

And just one more that makes me happy: