More Wedding Pics

I've decided that a dSLR is the perfect wedding date. People think that it looks "professional" (Ha! If only they knew!) so they'll let you sneak in front of them to get good shots, and don't bother you when you're taking pictures. (A great excuse not to talk to people that you don't want to...I mean...not that I would ever do that...) Also, since the shutter delay is practically non-existent, you can get great candid shots. Some of my favorite pictures are of people who are not looking at the camera and don't yet realize they're being photographed. Like the one above of Heather, and this one of Sean and Heather watching their video slide show:



Also, a dSLR doesn't whine about the food or the lines or the long drive. ;)

Here's a pic of the happy couple on their way out the door:



And most importantly, Sean had the coolest groom's cake ever:



WHOOP! =)

Congratulations Sean & Heather!

More photos to come...soon, hopefully! =)

Merry Christmas!

I hope you and yours have a safe and happy holiday!



I must share a Christmas Eve story. I went to Walmart today to pick up some last minute things as a favor to my mom. I had 24 items, four too many to go in the express lane, so I headed to the regular lanes and started waiting. It took 35 minutes to get through the line. But I didn't much care, because I was so sad for the people in front of me. They were trying to get some groceries with their WIC voucher. Well, the store was out of the "correct" size cereal boxes, so they had two boxes of cereal in a smaller size. But since it wasn't "correct", they couldn't get it. The manager had to go exchange it for a different cereal in the "correct" size. Now certainly they were grateful for what they got, but sheesh, don't you think they could get what they want in a smaller size and it wouldn't be a problem? They also couldn't get the milk they wanted because it was the wrong size. Same thing with sliced cheese. You might think "Oh, why didn't they get the proper size?" As a fellow shopper, I can vouch for the fact that the store was barren. Empty shelves all over the place. Undoubtedly, they just didn't have the "correct" sizes in the items they were trying to get. I offered to buy the milk and cheese for them, but they politely declined. Maybe that wasn't the right thing for me to do, but I felt so bad that they couldn't get their food. If you're the praying type, please say a prayer for that family and their kiddos, that they may have a blessed and bountiful Christmas!



Then pealed the bells more loud and deep
"God is not dead, nor doth he sleep,
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail,
With peace on earth, good will to men!"



Peace to all, and Merry Christmas!!!

It's a...

...beautiful day!



Look how blue the sky is:



Seriously. I didn't do any color correction. It really is that gorgeous today.



The flowers are even glowing:





I think the weather is celebrating the fact that finals are over. ;)

Tree Lighting!

Today was the annual lighting of the LSU Christmas Tree:

Before:


Snacks:


Army of Chocolate Santas:


And the Snowmen to back them up:


Bet you've never seen Purple & Gold Christmas decorations:


Nutcracker Preview:

(Sorry she's blurry!)

Lens Envy:


Memorial Tower:


Chancellor O'Keefe, about to push the button:


After!:


Closeup:


Bokeh!:


Now back to work!

(I figured that since I finally gave in and got Flickr Pro, I'd give them a try for hosting blog photos, especially since Picasa/Blogger's been a bit wonky lately. Any thoughts?)

(ETA: I had to widen the field of the posts to fit the pictures at this size, but I don't know how to widen the background image - I'm CSS-impaired, despite my attempts to learn - so please bear with me until Christmas break when I can learn CSS and fix it! Gracias!)

Picnik

I found a fun new website today! It's called Picnik, and it's an online photo editing site. You can do normal photo editing stuff (color correction, cropping, etc.), but the coolest part is that you can add stickers/shapes, thought bubbles, text, etc. Hopefully I'll have some time to play around on it a bunch over Christmas Break, but for now here's a fun one:



And another:



Hehe. Too fun!

Meme'd

I got tagged for a meme by Nin the other day, and I'm really excited - my first meme! One problem, though. I have to say eight things that are weird about me. There are so many weird things about me that lately this has been my motto:



Hide the crazy, Ashley!

So I'm working hard on the meme, trying to come up with eight sufficiently weird things (hopefully with photos to match) that don't scare y'all into never reading again and blocking me from commenting. Stay tuned. ;)

My first published photo!

Ok, well sort of published, but still. =) The past five summers, I've worked at Philmont Scout Ranch, in Cimarron, NM. It's one of my absolute favorite places on Earth, and the source of many of my favorite photos. There is an organization called the Philmont Staff Association comprised of current and former staff members that exists to support the Ranch and the current staff, and to keep former staff in contact. They maintain a website that has a photo masthead that changes with the season. The webmaster was looking for photos to use for this winter, so I submitted a few, and one got picked!

Here's the original:

(as always, click to embiggen!)

And the screenshot of the page:


Woohoo! I am so excited! I took the photo, along with many others, when I visited the Ranch for New Years Eve 2006/2007. A huge snowstorm had shut down the state (literally) and so my travel plans were...well...slightly different than planned. Flights canceled, roads closed, hotels overbooked, etc. Luckily, when I finally made it, I was rewarded with some awesome scenery. It pays to persevere. =)

Cool dSLR Feature #98393878

Burst mode! Burst is a setting on dSLRs where you can hold down the button and the camera continually shoots photos until (a) you stop pushing the button, (b) the buffer fills, or (c) your memory card fills. I just experimented to see how many shots before I got to (b) or (c). I got bored sometime after 80 and quit, haha. (It did slow down for a bit around 45, but then picked back up...it was probably emptying the buffer...) It's tons of fun to shoot on burst; in fact, I almost never turn it off. I feel like the paparazzi...clickclickclickclickclick...

My camera can take about 2.5 pictures per second; fancier cameras shoot more quickly. My point-n-shoot even has a psuedo-burst setting: it will take 3 frames in a row, giving you a bit of help in the constant battle with shutter delay.

I love playing around with this feature at sporting events. Here are some images from tonight's LSU Men's Basketball game:









Neat, eh? Interested in more info? I have to bow out for now (big quantum test Friday...), but click here for lots of details! =)

e.t.a. - Apparently the pics weren't working...but they should be there now...

White Balance

I realized the other day that I've mentioned white balance (also known as color balance) a couple of times, but never explained it. Getting a proper white balance basically means balancing out the colors so that they are true to life, instead of distorted by the lighting conditions. You know how regular indoor light bulbs often give everything a yellowish tint, and fluorescent lights tend to give a bluish tint, but your eyes/brain adjust so you know what the colors really are? When you have proper white balance in a photo, you compensate for this tint. Your whites look white and all your other colors look accurate. What got me thinking about this? I was photographing a sweater I'm working on, and the first photo came out looking like this:



Ick. (This is one reason I love digital photography - when something is wrong in your photo, you know right away.) The problem was that my camera was still set to white balance for Shade conditions, from some pictures I'd been taking previously. In the D40, there are eight different white balance settings. Six of them correspond to the type of light you're shooting in:

Incandescent (most regular indoor bulbs)
Fluorescent
Sun
Flash
Clouds
Shade

The other two are Auto and Pre. Auto is what it sounds like it should be (automatically adjusts based on what it thinks the light source is), and Pre is used when you want to get a really accurate reading. Basically, you take a preliminary picture of a colored (often grey) card (like this one, for example) and the camera uses that data to get an accurate color balance in the following pictures. (I've never actually done this...never really needed to for the photos I take...)

You can certainly just leave your camera on Auto and forget about it. The software seems to be sophisticated enough that most images will turn out okay. Here's the Auto version of the purple sweater:



It's much better than the Cloud-balanced shot, but still not quite accurate. I was taking these pictures inside near a window (generally the best indoor place to take pictures of knitting, assuming it's sunny outside), and from previous attempts I knew that setting the camera to balance for Sun would probably work best:



Yep. It captures the color of the purple very well, and the white collar looks white, not blueish or cream. Just for kicks, here's what it looks like when set on Cloud:

Close, but not quite. Both on the camera's LCD screen and on my computer, the Sun-balanced shot looks the best.

The Auto is good enough on my camera that I usually leave it on Auto for snapshots, or when I'm going to be in multiple different light conditions in a short time period. However, if I know my lighting will be consistent for awhile, like when taking knitting photos or taking pictures at an indoor sporting event, I'll set the white balance to match the lighting. It only takes a few clicks, and it's usually worth it. My old point-and-shoot has white balance settings as well, although by the time I learned what it was, I already had my dSLR, so I haven't played around with it much. Point is, if you have a digital, you can probably adjust the white balance. Try it out. Let me know how it goes. =)

To learn more about white balance, you can check out:
Ken Rockwell
Cambridge in Colour
Wikipedia

A related topic is monitor calibration. I know pretty much nothing about this, as I cannot afford a monitor calibration system. Based on the tests at that site, I think mine's okay, and I'm not too concerned since I just take pictures for fun. =)

Shutter Speed, and Bubbles!

Note: I've created a photography glossary in the sidebar with links to definitions of terms I use often, like exposure, depth of field, aperture, etc. I feel silly linking to the same things over and over again, so if you see a term you're unfamiliar with that isn't linked, check out the sidebar! =)

So, a few posts ago I talked about aperture and how it affects depth of field in addition to exposure. (In my mind, the exposure effect is intuitive; the depth of field one is not.) Today, a similar discussion on shutter speed...

Again, in my mind the effect of shutter speed on exposure is intuitive: the faster the shutter speed, the less time there is for light to enter the lens, the darker the picture. A slower shutter speed would then lead to brighter, more exposed pictures. The non-intuitive effect of the shutter speed is its effect on capturing motion.

This is more intuitive than depth of field...follow along with me...warning: science and math!

A basic formula of the physics of moving things (aka kinematics) is that:

speed = distance / time

We can rewrite this as:

distance = time * speed

For the purpose of most of the things we take pictures of, the speed is relatively constant, so we don't have to worry too much about that term. What we can control is time, via shutter speed. A faster shutter speed corresponds to a shorter amount of time. This corresponds to a smaller term on the right-hand-side of the second equation, and thus, since the right- and left-hand-sides must be equal, the left-hand-side must be correspondingly smaller. But the left-hand-side is distance, and so in our shorter time span, our moving object moves a shorter distance. So we have

fast shutter speed -> shorter time -> less distance

The same reasoning works for slow shutter speeds:

slow shutter speed -> longer time -> more disance

The distance the object moves is the effect we see in photos. Fast shutter speeds "freeze" moving objects, while slow shutter speeds lead to blurrier motion. Either of these effects can be exploited to get the photo you want, using the shutter-priority or full manual modes.

I was taking some photos tonight for my knitting blog (for a post on blocking and its magical effects) and decided to play around with my shutter speed as I was taking pictures of the "fill the sink with water" step. Check this out:



Bubbles!!! (Reminds me of this guy!) The shutter speed is 1/320, with my maximum aperture of f/3.5. (For an explanation of the numbers of shutter speed, click here.) I had to turn a flash on (it's dark outside and I was too impatient to wait until daytime to take pictures...). Since I was shooting in full manual, I could adjust the flash level, a dSLR feature that I love. Normally I adjust it down, but for some reason I decided to play with adjusting it up. (This picture was shot with the flash at +1.0.) Since I had the flash on and up, I could use a pretty fast shutter speed, and still get a bright image. Want a closer look?



Here's another fun one, same camera settings as above:



I like how the motion of the water is frozen into the wave forms. (I'm taking grad quantum 1 right now...I can't get away from wave forms...)

As a counterexample, here's a photo taken with a much slower shutter speed (more time!):



See how the water is just a blurry stream? Unfortunately, I can't tell you the exposure for that one, although it was around 1/50. (In addition to playing with flash levels, I was playing with shooting in RAW. Well, it turns out that Picasa, my editing program, can't pick up the EXIF data for RAW files, so I lost the record of all the settings. I've never had any problems with JPEGs, so I will just return to that and keep my data.)

More experienced photographers than myself can do even cooler things with shutter speeds:

Slow shutter speed:


(Image used under terms of CC License. Photo by Flickr user www.ericcastro.biz)

Fast shutter speed:


(Image used under terms of CC License. Photo by Flickr user chomp_on_that)

Neat, eh? =)

Monkshood...

...is another interesting flower. They line the stream beds in the French Henry area and bloom during the second half of the summer. I like the shape of the bloom, and how it's separated from the leaves; I think it lends a dramatic flair to the flower. Does the shape of the bloom remind you of something? Like a monk, wearing his hood? (Also, they're poisonous, so don't eat them, mkay?)

As for photography, do you notice how the flower is normally lit/colored, but the background is very dark? You can see the same thing in this shot, of Mountain Bluebells:



Obviously y'all are smart enough to know that the reason for the lighting differences is flash. It illuminated the flowers, but not the relatively empty background. Now, some people are very anti-flash. I don't love it, but I don't hate it either. I generally try to shoot without it, but will turn it on when necessary. I actually really like the effect in the first photo, because I think it draws attention to the flower. I don't like it as much in the second photo, but it was too dark to get a clear shot without a flash. (Obviously I just need a better lens with a wider aperture, so I don't have to use a flash if I don't want to...or a tripod...or both...)

So yeah...flowers are pretty, and flash isn't evil. =)

(Please forgive the lack of real content in this post, and the sporadic updates lately. Midterms stole all my time...)

Eye-Candy Friday

This was taken one afternoon during Camp Director training this past summer. We'd had an afternoon thunderstorm, and the clouds started to clear away as the sun was just beginning to set. The effect on Tooth Ridge was awesome - it was literally glowing!

Philfolk - Don't you just love the first sentence of that Wikipedia entry? Do you think Ranger Bus Tour is an appropriate citation? =) Bonus points to whoever can name the CD in the foreground...