hannah christmas pics
today nate and i went to lacrosse to get hannah’s xmas pics! we also went to the rotary lights, which wreaked havoc on my auto-focus and blurred up my glasses so even manual sucked. oh well! we got it done!
up for sunrise
i’ve been meaning to get up early enough to take photos at sunrise for a long time. looong time. we’re talking years long time.
on saturday, i finally did it. i had scouted out where i wanted to take pictures earlier in the month; i knew i wanted to do it along hwy 16 down here in southeastern MN, which is a scenic byway.
i pulled out and drove east on hwy 14 at about 6:35, and the horizon was just starting to get a little dusty. i drove a winding way down to whalan, which is near lanesboro. the topography is interesting: you have pretty tree-less prairie land with occasional hills, which are loaded with commodity crops; then suddenly, you drop into a river valley where the land is nothing but hills covered with trees.
at one point on my drive, i was on a hill on the prairie, and i could see south for miles. fog had rolled in overnight due to the below-freezing temps, and it looked spooky with the hills poking out of the grey-ish white fog in the barely there pre-dawn dark.
(at this point, i was thanking my lucky stars, because i had always wanted to get up in the morning and take some fog pics too.)
i drove to whalan and found my barn, but sunrise was another 15 minutes away, and it would take longer than that for it to crest the hill enough to be visible. i drove out of the valley, just up a gravel road, and parked my car next to a field where i waited for the sun to make its appearance.
sunrise light is beautiful. it makes everything look new and crisp, and with the frost still on the ground, the crops and grass looked mystical.
after i got some photos on the prairie, i went back down into the valley and got my barn pictures. all in all, they weren’t my favorite photos taken that day, and the barn was the reason i drove out.
i drove into lanesboro afterward to try my hand at waterfall pictures (epic fail, and i almost biffed it on some ice), and took about a mile walk on the bike trail, getting flat on the ground at one point.
as a bonus, i was able to take in the lanesboro farmers’ market, which i’d been meaning to check out all summer. small, and i wouldn’t make a special trip, but it was worth checking out. i bought another pie pumpkin and some garlic to plant.
i left lanesboro and the valley around 9:30 and got home around 10. it was only mid-morning and i felt like i’d been up for half a day already. but it was totally worth it.
now that i know what to expect, i’ll do sunrise pictures again.
up at the buttcrack of dawn
more photo stuff (post-processing)
i don’t mind this picture. but it could be better.
my RAW editor settings in pshop:
final edit. could have done more, but this is good.
i took THIS picture with my graduated density filter. it really brought out detail in the sky and clouds while keeping the beans’ details.
so i messed with the basic settings as well as added the graduated filter on my already graduated filter.
cropping does a lot for photos as well!
before and after
75% of my photos are post-processing. case in point:
perfectly fine photo. i shoot aperture priority in my camera in RAW so as much color information is maintained as possible. i figure my cam’s a sophisticated piece of equipment; let it do most of the work.
then i pull it into p-shop’s RAW editor, which *swoon*
up the saturation, contrast, lower the highlights, bring out the red in the tree on the right, and voila.
stars take II
i’m flabbergasted at the light my camera can pick up from the milky way. i also love how you can see star trails even from only a 45-second exposure. make you think about how small you really are.
original:
exposed and color-corrected in RAW editor:
original:
RAW edited:
original:
RAW edited:
photo tutorial 1
here is my attempt at an intro photo tutorial. please note you probably need at least some background in photo terms. i’ve posted my iphoto image info in each photo so you can see what my settings were. the setting i care about the most? aperture. it’s what makes the background blurry or not blurry. a lower aperture, the blurrier the background.
i used two of my lenses for this: my canon 50 mm f/1.4 and my tamron 28-75mm f/2.8. your average kit lens has a f/3.5-5.6, so you can see my priorities when i buy lenses!
so, we’re going to take pictures of apples. fair enough. we can set up a photo and take a pic of apples in front of an interesting background. in this case, mason jars. tada! but, a little boring. the f-stop is set at 7.1, which means there is no depth to the photo. it’s a little still-life-esque.
let’s make it a little more interesting and make some space between the apples and jars. this is a lot more interesting. i set my aperture lower for two reasons here: 1. the lighting in my kitchen at night sucks, and a lower aperture will speed up the shutter and keep my image crisp, and 2. i want a blurry-ish background. going from a 7.1 to 2.8 aperture helped out a ton.
this is an ok picture. it’s still a little boring.
let’s create a little more interest, and off-center those apples. now we’re starting to get somewhere.
ok, even more interest? how about angling the camera so we see more of the jars in the background, especially the tall one on the right. at this point, all the pics but the first have been taken with the 50mm lens at f/2.8.
this photo i’ve lowered my f-stop to the lowest it can go, 1.4. it creates an almost surreal looking photo, with a pinpoint of focus.
but what if we want more of the apple in the picture? unfortunately, this is as close as i can get to the apples with my 50mm before my focus runs out. time to bust out the tamron.
macro time! the tamron isn’t a true macro, but it does great close-up work. for it to work its best, you need to zoom all the way out to 75mm and then get as close as the focus will let you. apparently this photo session, i liked to weight things on the left side.
if there is one thing to be said for the canon, it’s that it does create a slightly crisper image, one that you probably won’t catch unless you’re looking for it. in the image below, the canon is on the left, the tamron on the right. there is a bit of a more defined edge on the canon’s image. the average joe schmo isn’t going to notice.
that’s all i’ve got for now!
zucchini apple chocolate chip bread
it was a lot of stuff to stick in a bread, but i got it done.
[yumprint-recipe id=’3′]
photodump (garden edition)
i realized i need to take more pics. so i went outside and took more pics.
photo dump (chicken version)
pics of chickens i took at the state fair. i took the pics. not the chickens.
oh, and a bunny. just the pic. although i would’ve loved to have taken him home.
