baby photos

I was at an event tonight where a very good friend of ours won a very big award.
Her daughter and granddaughter were also there and I was trying to make the baby smile.
She gave me the strangest little looks so of course i had to take some photos.
I wanted to be in fairly close so used a 35mm lens. I wanted a shallow depth of field so i set the lens to f2.0.
In a recent little lesson i gave, i talked about deciding how you want your photo to look before you take it. I have talked about doing that alot on this blog and this photo was just another example of that.
If my camera had been set to program mode instead of manually setting the exposure, my flash would have popped up, my fstop would have probably been 5.6, and the background would have been black because the camera would have chosen a faster shutter speed. And i would not have been posting that shot on my blog.
Take the time to play with your camera, learn how to shoot in manual mode, and i promise you will enjoy your photos a whole lot more.

church two

another photo of my church excursion.
No photoshop on this one. Went pure photo on it.
I did do some work on a few images tonight i had shot awhile ago for a magazine cover.
I will post them when i run out of church photos.

Cathedral walk

I got a chance to go for a little walk the other morning with some friends and took a couple photos around this church.
I did nothing to this shot other than expose properly in camera and crop it a bit.
Two more shots in the que for the next couple days.

window light

I have been away, so to say.
Now I am back.
I will post photos.
Today and the next day.
I setup a light stand with an off camera flash and a large umbrella tonight to take a nice photo of my daughter, and then i did not use it. The light from the window was very, very nice. I wanted to shoot it at f1.8 for a nice shallow depth of field with an 85mm lens. That aperature in the end was too shallow however. The eye on the left was nice and sharp and the other eye was way too soft. I increased to f2.8 to bring in the other eye a bit and was satisfied. In photoshop i desaturated, applied a vignette, and dodged and burned the eyes to bring up the contrast of them a bit. When you burn use a low tolerance, like 7, and set to shadows. When you dodge use a low tolerance, like 7, and set to highlights. A few passes over the eyes and you will notice a nice improvement.
Its good to be back.