Photo 365: Day 135 – Fix me bad!

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That’s a picture of my little boy having his hair cut this noon. Somehow we didn’t like his hair cut from last time. His hairstyle started looking more like a “bowl cut” – if you want to picture this, think of Moe’s hairstyle in the 3 Stooges 😉

So I was on a mission to fix his hair this noon. Typically I don’t take my Nikon D70 to stores. But decided to do so this noon and I’m glad that I did. I just talked to the hair stylist if it was OK to take pictures and she was quite OK with that idea. So I started snapping pictures – as I didn’t want to scare other customers in the store, I decided not to use flash. So I had to bump up the ISO to 800+ to take the pictures.

Back on my little boy’s hair style – it doesn’t look like a mushroom cut or bowl cut  anymore. We will give it couple of days, and he will be cutest kid on the block 😉

Photo 365: Day 134 – Macro Challenge

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Time for another macro challenge. Identify these and post your comments.

I will post the answer tomorrow evening.

Photo 365: Day 133 – Karl Rosenfield Peony

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Yet another rainy day in St. Louis and a perfect reason for me to take a picture of Karl Rosenfield Peony indoors where I can have much control over the lighting and setup.

Here is how I shot this.

Every house has at least one spot where there is ambient lighting – in our house one such spot seems to be the dining area by the patio door and bay windows (need to explore more to find other sweet spots). So had the vase seated on a black card board and had this lit by the natural lighting coming in from the bay windows. Used a white foam board as a reflector to lit the shadows on the right side of the bloom – as this happens to be facing the interior of the house.

Then had the camera mounted on the tripod and “spot” metered the bloom using Av metering – since I wanted to bring out the details, had the camera set to f/11. Then switched to manual mode and adjusted the light speed  until I found the right amount exposure – the first one, as originally suggested by the Av metering was over exposed, so had to cut down the light.

Later used RAW/PS to pop up the colors – used free actions that I had downloaded from PW blog.

Photo 365: Day 132 – Little People

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Another busy Wednesday evening. Had to take my daughter to her math class and go visit a friend this evening. By the time I got home it was almost 9:00 PM and didn’t have much inspiration for today’s post.

The friend whom we visited this evening had gifted “Little People” Noah’s Ark to our little boy and coincidently, we had watched Evan Almighty past weekend. In this movie, Evan gets a visit from God,who instructs him if he really wants to change the world, he needs to build an ark and prepare the world  for the flood. So thought I should do something with my son’s new toy/animal set.

So had the toys set-up on white board and shot this using bounced lighting from trusty Nikon SB-600 flash. Not a great shot – with shadows and composition but overall I’m satisfied 😉

Photo 365: Day 131 – Array of colors

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Another experimentation with light…

I have this small portable LED mini fan which flashes a colorful pattern when the wings are in motion. For today post, I intentionally had my camera out of focus and took multiple shots of the colorful pattern. I call this array of colors.

There is a bonus picture for day 131 -> here

Don’t forget to check out other Twitter Tuesday posts on Tasra365.

Photo 365: Day 131 – Array of colors (bonus picture)

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Another experimentation with light…
I have this small portable LED mini fan which flashes a colorful pattern when the wings are in motion. For today post, I intentionally had my camera out of focus and took multiple shots of the colorful pattern. I call this array of colors.

Photo 365: Day 130 – Festiva Maxima Peony

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It’s another rainy/windy day here in St. Louis and as I already planned to post Peony for Day 130 had to shoot this indoors.

Used couple of black cardboards for backdrop and had this shot using the window lighting. To lit the shadows, my wife helped  me with holding the home-made reflector (crinkled aluminum wrap stuck on a cardboard) at an angled towards the window/peony. I really liked the way it turned out.

Photo 365: Day 129 – Mother’s day muffins

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Mocha muffins – that’s what my daughter and I ended up baking for my wife for this mother’s day. Long time ago I used to write recipes and you can find the recipe for the muffin recipe here.

The sweetest thing was my daughter’s note. She wrote “Mom you are very nice! You are sweeter than cake!“

Photo 365: Day 128 – Cousins?

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Alright the title is a bit misleading or inappropriate for this photo…may be it would be apt to put it as D70 Vs D90 – well they’re cousins anyway 😉

One of my good friend visited me this evening and brought his newly bought D90. So we ended up testing few shots this evening under almost similar settings. I know D90 excels D70 in many ways and it does exceptionally well in high ISO. But I wasn’t really interested in testing “well known’ facts but rather interested in testing it at ISO 200.

I rummaged through our pantry looking for subjects with different color tones. Then had it set up such that these are well lit with natural window lighting. Then had my D70 with Nikon 50mm prime, set to ISO 200 and shot this in RAW with manual mode at f/5.6 and exposed it for 1/13sec. Then repeated the same setup with D90.

To be honest, I was really impressed with the aesthetics and large LCD on D90. Then had these downloaded and converted to JPEGs (with no PP) to compare side by side.

Now here is where I need my blog viewers (that should be you) help.

Take a look at the photo above. Which one do you like? To make it simple, do you like the one on the left or the one on the right?

Photo 365: Day 127 – Photo-in-Photo

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A fun post for day 127.

It was quite a windy day this evening and I had to restrict myself to shooting something indoors this evening. So thought I should try something for fun.

As my 2yr old was playing with his play dough, I set my Fuji P&S on a gorillapod and set it to focus on him. Then I had my D70 set on tripod, and I focused my D70 on the P&S’s LCD screen and shot this picture.

Mission accomplished: One of my goal with this 365 project is to make use of my photo gears that I have been accumulating for over the past 10+ years and tonight I am a happy camper, as I utilized my 2 tripods, and 2 cameras 🙂