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!

Exposed.

Before I get to spot metering (don't worry, Melissa, I haven't forgotten!), a little bit on exposure. Not for any particular reason, even though spot metering has to do with exposure, this isn't necessary info, it's just that I haven't taken any spot metering pics yet, and have taken these. ;)

The other day, I was photographing a bunch of finished knitting projects for my knitblog and to update my Ravelry projects page. Normally, I keep my D40 set on +0 EV, which means that it doesn't over- or under-expose the images. It just does its best to properly expose them. Usually, this works really well. However, that day it was being cranky. Here's the +0 EV picture, taken in A mode, so I picked the aperture, and the camera picked a shutter speed to match:



Um...not fabulous. It looks a little dark, even though it's supposed to be properly exposed. The exposure histogram (from Picasa) confirms this:



Since the peaks of each curve are near the middle of the histogram, it's pretty well exposed, although there is a little bit of underexposure in the red channel, as evidenced by the small red peak on the left side. (Do I sound like I know what I'm talking about? Because I don't. But this is what I've read...so yeah, one day I'll actually understand these histograms. Just not today.)

Here we see the beauty of digital cameras - I could see immediately on the view screen that the picture looked dark (cranky camera!), so I bumped the exposure to +1/3 EV, which means that the camera automatically overexposes the picture by 1/3 of a step. (I don't know what this translates to technically...and the internet doesn't seem to be much help...so if you do know, please share in the comments!) Here's the slightly overexposed image:



Much better! Now, just for kicks, let's bump it up another 1/3 of a step and see what we get:



Yep, at +2/3 EV, it's definitely more overexposed-looking, as anticipated.

I ended up using the +1/3 EV image for the project page, because it looked the best to me.

Changing this setting, called exposure bias or exposure compensation, can be useful in other situations, too. Here's a good article from Digital Photography School: Using Exposure Bias to Improve Picture Detail. I've used it before in similar situations, when the camera was, e.g., exposing for the bright part of an image, but I really wanted to see details on the dark part. I'd set the camera to overexpose, so the dark part would be more visible.

Uh...so, actually, I was wrong, way up there in the beginning...this does tie in to spot metering. Now that I know how to spot meter, I would probably spot meter in a situation like that. Hmm...the question then becomes, when should you spot meter, and when should you use exposure bias...I think it would depend on the subject and composition of your photo...I'll have to investigate further!

In the meantime, while I think and research, go play with the exposure bias on your camera! Even most point-and-shoots have an option for this, in my experience. That's when it can really come in handy, because on an SLR, you can always just go to full manual mode and expose how you want by controlling the aperture and shutter speed. You rarely can do that on a compact camera, but you can change the exposure bias - giving you more control over the picture, which is a good thing. If you try this, let me know how it works out for you! And if you have any questions, ask away. =)

Some pictures!

So...I have literally taken multiple thousands of pictures in the past few weeks...at some point, I'll get them edited and posted...maybe...but in the meantime, here are some of the first. Mostly because they didn't need editing, and are ok SOOC. ;)

From a visit to Kansas, gorgeous flowers from the Saturday morning farmer's market:

(Purple and gold, natch!)

And a supercute Honey Bee (or something like that) latte:

I learned a new trick - spot metering! But the only good demonstrative pics I have are of my bro, and he's not too keen on being on the blog, so one of these days, I'll take some different ones and show it off. It's really pretty easy, and you probably already know how to do it, but I was very excited. To be continued... =)