Day 152- Liz

Today is my birthday, and we spent it at Joan and Rudy’s welcoming home their daughter, Liz, who is there for an all too short visit from New Zealand, where she has lived and worked for the last three years.  It was so great to see her- isn’t she beautiful?

I took lots of photos and have to say that, though they weren’t fabulous, they were an improvement over my usual party snapshots (yay- I learned some things from my class!).

And then there is the small problem of leaving my camera bag and all my lenses and camera accessories at their house.  Fortunately, Rudy is a Canon shooter so I know he won’t be messing with my stuff!

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Day 151- The Magic Porch

There is only 1 more week left in our photo class, so Carol and I got together to complete some of our last assignments.  She brought Mady, her brother’s golden retriever along for the day- which was a thrill for the whole family, golden lovers that we are.

Our lighting assignment took the most time (and, although instructive, was the least fun to do).  Finally we did some portraits of each other with Mady on our front porch, which I have decided is magic for getting good light.

Both of these were shot with Carol’s wonderful 50mm 1.4 lens.

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Day 150- Rerun

I’m really working on my portrait skills this week, since I only have a week and a half to finish my class assignments. I grabbed Matt before he went out the door and managed to get a decent photo of him.

This time I stood on a stool to get a better angle.  I swear, my best people photos happen in doorways!

I did a quick clean edit and then discovered the thread sticking up from his collar.  For some reason, I could not get any of the Photoshop tools to work (healing brush, clone stamp, patch etc.).  So it is still there.  It doesn’t matter for my class, because we can only submit SOOC shots (sigh. . .), but I wanted it gone for the blog.

And yes, he had wet hair. . .

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Day 148- Storytelling

If you read this blog fairly often, you know that I am taking Karen Russell’s photography class.  It is fantastic, and I wish I had taken it when I first started this adventure.  It starts at the very beginning, which concerned me- because I am not a beginning photographer.  However, she is so thorough and goes into everything in such depth (with lots of repetition to get the point across) that I am filling in a lot of gaps in my photography skills.  Plus, she answers questions all day long in her forum- and I have had a few!

One of the types of photography she talks about are photos that tell a story (normally in one shot).  Today, I am offering a story in several shots- so follow along:

These were all shot with aperture priority (because I had an uncooperative subject- a Karen Russell term) with varying shutter speeds at ISO 500.

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Day 147- Historic!

My husband has very few items saved from his childhood, but his Hopalong Cassidy mug and Captain Kangaroo cup are prized possessions.  Like most of our family memorabilia, they are housed in the antique dental cabinet in our foyer.  The theme today is history, and these cups are definitely part of our family history.

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Day 146- Georgia Peach

My friend, Georgia was kind enough to offer her house for a photoshoot this afternoon, so that I could complete some of the parts of an upcoming photo class assignment.  I was fortunate to have three friends to practice on, and (272 photos later) I have one part of the three part assignment done plus one photo to submit for the photo critique this week- and lots of good photos of my friends, of course!

It is late (we all went out to dinner afterward with our husbands), so I am only posting one of the photos tonight- so here’s Georgia!  I hardly did a thing to this photo; she just looks this good straight out of camera!

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Day 145- Light and Lines

Almost 5:00 and no photo yet- am I getting burned out? I hope not! I took a bit of time to follow the light around my house (always my last ditch effort) and came up with some interesting shots of light and lines.

Here is the ceiling above my stairs- turned into a black and white to emphasize the lines:

And here is the afternoon light coming through the blinds and hitting a spider plant:

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Day 144- Frank

6PM and totally at a loss at what to photograph, I looked at my Flickr group topic.

SCALE.  I already (of course) had photographed my bathroom scale, and I recently gave my Weight Watchers scale to Goodwill as part of my decluttering efforts.  But then I thought of another meaning of scale- as in size.

Looking around the room, the answer was obvious- Frankenstein!  Frank has unfortunately not survived my decluttering project and is currently sitting in my family room waiting to be taken to Goodwill, since none of my teacher friends want him.  He is an outsized Halloween decoration made by my friend, Lynne, who gave him to me when she moved away.  I used him to decorate my classroom a few times at Halloween, but he has lived most of his life at our house stuffed into a closet.  I’m hoping he will find a good home.

 

Although he would be classified in my photography class as a cooperative subject, this photo would not pass the scrutiny of the instructor.  Although it was properly exposed and white balanced, it had distracting elements in the background (shadows and electrical outlet).  I was too lazy too move him around to find the correct composition, so I lightened and blurred the background in Photoshop. I’m thinking now, I should have darkened it instead.

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Day 143- G is for . . .

GLASS! I went with the topic today- starts with G.  I have had this glass birdie in my greenhouse window for years; I think it is from Bodega or Mendocino. Since the subject and background are both glass (starting with G)- I think I should get extra credit!

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Day 141- Pansy Pot

I’ve been wanting to photograph the CUTEST little pot I received from my friend, Claudia as an early birthday gift- but I was going to wait until I got some pansies to plant in our garden.  Well- with the backyard in turmoil with all the repairs and de- (and re-)construction going on, it may be awhile before I get some pansies.

Hello, geraniums!

The pot is TINY, ceramic, and pierced with itty bitty holes, just big enough for little flower stems.  These flowers would tip over and fall out of a regular vase, but are totally supported in the pansy pot. I love it! Thank you, Claudia!

 

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Day 140- Adventures in JPEGing

One of my photo class assignments is to use the picture control feature on my camera to shoot images in different modes, such as vivid, landscape, portrait etc. This is a feature that is only available in JPEG, since RAW images are just that- RAW, undoctored, just what the camera records. For almost two years, I have only shot RAW photos- and only in manual.  And that is still my comfort zone.

So this afternoon, Lonnie and I went downtown for a little photoshoot.

I felt like I had no idea how to operate my camera. I was also using Aperture Priority with exposure compensation- and went back and forth in my white balance settings, because I couldn’t remember if the picture controls took care of that or not.

And then it was time to upload. Some photos I evidently shot in both RAW and JPEG and others in just JPEG.  I messed up the first upload, so did it again. I still haven’t gotten them sorted out- so I’m flagging JPEGs as I go and will deal with them later.

Unfortunately, my photo of the day was shot in JPEG only (!)- and it had a few issues that took a half hour to fix in Photoshop.  I wonder if a RAW version would have been more cooperative.  I would like to go back and take this shot again- but not today. . .

I’ve been having issues with Aperture and Flickr, so I now export to a folder on my computer again- this time using Photoshop (which is a more complicated process involving sharpening and resizing). Since I’ve spent the last three days winnowing 3000 family photos down to about 400 and editing and uploading them to SmugMug, the last thing I wanted to do tonight was edit photos.

Enough of a rant! I’m grateful I know how to edit. I’m grateful for my camera. And I’m grateful for having a husband who will patiently sit through a pretty boring photo session.

And here he is (and yes, I edited this one- but just a bit)!

 

And here is the other photo I shot for Flickr (with about 8 layers of edits in Photoshop. . .):

 

BTW, we went grocery shopping after our downtown jaunt- and then left all the groceries in the car for over an hour when we got home. We forgot- both of us!

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Day 139- De-Construction

No action- just some shots before the workers arrive.

 

The ladder. . .

I took this one lying on my stomach- yuck!

 

The deck work caused some plants in pots to be moved around, which gave me some new composition opportunities.

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Day 138- Wet

The topic today was starts with C, and I intended to photograph the construction (or rather, de-construction) that is going on in our backyard right now.  We are having some deck and retaining wall repair and maintenance done. I was in and out today- and was also preoccupied with finally selecting and editing photos from our trip to Wyoming. By the time I got out back to take a photo, the deck was being power-washed. So I snapped a couple shots through the window on our way out to dinner. Maybe tomorrow I will be able to get an interesting photo of actual construction.

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