I was pleasantly surprised this evening when I saw all the blooms in my yard – it’s been just 2 days since I was out of town and it just feels like a long time.
All the peonies were in full bloom and I couldn’t resist myself with shooting Sarah Bernhart Peony for today’s post. Just followed the same procedure as detailed in my earlier Peony posts to shoot this.
Today is theme Thursday and the theme is Flight.
As my wife and kids are leaving to India this weekend on an early summer vacation, doing a photo post with Flight theme turned out quite easy.
Basically I started collecting materials for the past 3 days – my daughter had a world map she had got from Subway with her meal. I used this as a base. Then used the e-tickets, motion sickness chewables, and my little boy’s toy to put this together.
On a related note, I used flash based Picnik (online photo editor) for editing this – since I am traveling this week, I am traveling lite and didn’t want to load CS4 on my laptop. I was amazed at the features Picnik offers and it’s free 😉
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 😉
Time for another macro challenge. Identify these and post your comments.
I will post the answer tomorrow evening.
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.
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 😉
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.
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!“
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?
It has been quite some time now since I have shot a subject with long exposure. So for today’s post I tried long exposure on catching the light from a USB hub.
Put off all the lights in the room and had this USB hub powered by a laptop. I had set the hub sit on a black cardboard to avoid any reflection.
Then played with different exposure – 10sec, 15sec, 25sec, 30 sec. On anything past 15sec, I thought there was a “burn out” feel. So settled with 15sec exposure for today’s post.