Givin' Up

On that green. (Yeah, this one.)

These are the last pictures I will take of that scarf, at least when trying to get the color correct:





I think the first one is better. I think. But neither of them are correct, and the real color is kind of between the two. I feel a little bit better, though, 'cause the color on the website (scroll down to Aztec Turquoise) isn't right either.

So I wash my hands of this green!

But not without some fun tags on Flickr. My personal favorite is "stop overloading my green sensor you evil color".

A Step in the Right Direction

The color on that turquoise yarn is still vexing me.  But I think I've figured out the first step in fixing it, which is correcting the saturation.  I was reading about photographing intense reds (related to red yarn, of course, because that's apparently all I take pictures of anymore...) and they mentioned that since the camera has red, green, and blue color channels, if you overwhelm one of them, you can get less-than-ideal results.  I think that's part of what's happening with this turquoise. 

Here's an SOOC shot of the scarf-in-progress:



Ack!  Color overload!

Here's a desaturated version of the same image:



Much better.  The color tone is a lot truer, although it's still not completely accurate, and the brightness of the yarn is gone.  I think my next try will be to take pictures of the scarf with a lot of other colors in the frame, to hopefully even things out.  Cross your fingers!

Composition

I'm not very good at composition, so I often read lists of tips and tricks to try to improve. Most of 'em (like this one, for example) recommend having a non-distracting background, so I try to clear out background objects when possible, especially when taking yarn pictures. But sometimes I think I like 'em better with the background distractions. Case in point:



That's the non-distracting one. Here's the shot I took first, before clearing out the background:



I don't know...I think I like it better with the hose in the background. I think it has kind of a "leading lines" effect. What do you think?

Lens Love

Last weekend, when mom and I went down to see PW, we also stopped by Houston Camera Exchange. I was hoping they'd have a C-Lux 3 in store for her to play around with, but they didn't. She ended up getting a Nikon Coolpix, her very first digital camera! While she was looking at those, I asked the Nikon rep if I could play with some of the lenses that were out on display. She put the 50mm f/1.4 AF-S lens on my D40 and I just about died. I was wearing a scarf/shawl I'd just finished, so I put it on the counter to play around:



Look at that depth of field! Wowza! Do want, very badly.

Also, just for kicks, I did the auto-lighten in Picasa on that pic:



I think it blows out the colors a bit, but shows off the texture more nicely. What do you think?

PW in Houston!

Last year I got to meet Stephanie Pearl-McPhee (The Yarn Harlot). Today I got to meet Ree Drummond (The Pioneer Woman). I can now die and go to Bloggy Heaven! Those are the first two blogs I ever read, back before blogs were something everyone had, back before I'd discovered Google Reader, and so I actually checked each site every day. (Crazy, I know!)

Ree's talk was at Georgia's Market in Houston, a cute place that focuses on locally-sourced food from small farms in addition to carrying more standard organic fare. Ree did a little talk/Q&A and then started signing books. She's so sweet and funny, and very gracious, chatting for a bit with everyone who was in line. I can't even imagine how long it took to get through the line...there were a lot of us! Luckily, mom had pre-ordered our cookbooks from Blue Willow (the bookstore that sponsored the event) early enough that we were in the first signing group, so we didn't have to wait very long at all.

Pictures! (There were lots of Nikon DSLRs in the audience...coincidence? I think not, haha.)

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

A Conundrum

I'm back! (Three months after I said I might be blogging more...nice...) And I have a conundrum, a quandry, a puzzle. I got some yarn in the mail this afternoon. It's cloudy and dark outside (I miss Daylight Savings!) so I thought, it's okay, I can take pictures inside. They won't be great, but they'll be okay. The problem is, two cameras and few different WB settings later, I can't for the life of me get the colors to work.

Look at all these pictures of this lovely yarn:









The problem is, the yarn is not that color. It is sitting on a white background, which appears to be fairly white (on my computer and camera monitors), but the yarn is much greener than it appears to be in the pics. The closest I can get to the true color of the yarn is this:


(I know, it burns my eyes, too!)

That is obviously awful, and still not that close to the color of the yarn.

What gives? Does anyone have any ideas? I know it'll be best to wait for a sunny morning, but I've gotten decent results inside before. Why not this time?

Regardless of the pictures, the yarn really is a gorgeous color. I won it in a contest over at Threadpanda's blog, and I love it. I can't wait to start a Parallel Lines Scarf with it. If nothing else, I'll get good color pictures then! =)

Home Sweet Home

After three months of almost non-stop travel, for both business and pleasure, it's good to be home for awhile. My office may not be fancy, but it works for me, and it's good to be back!

ETA: Interesting...I blogged this from my iPhone, and it kept one of the paragraphs of the email, but not the other. Maybe if I can get mobile blogging figured out well, I can post more often!