While waiting for a friend this afternoon, I became intrigued by the light and shadows of some palm fronds covering a patio roof and took three shots looking up. This is my favorite of the three. I like the colors, the textures, the light, and the abstract look of this photo.
Focal Length 300mm
Manual Mode
ISO 100
f/6.3
1/80
WB Fine Weather
SOOC
When I stopped at Raley’s on the way home from the gym this morning, their huge display of wine barrel halves stopped me in my tracks. When I realized that wooden wine barrels would satisfy the daily challenge theme, “starts with ‘W'” I knew I had to photograph them. The sun shines harshly on the east facing wall of this store in the morning but I didn’t want to come back later when the display would be in perfect indirect light so I took out my camera and started shooting. I had to make lots of adjustments. I set my ISO to the lowest ISO available in my camera, 50. I wanted a shallow depth of field so I opened the lens to its largest aperture and watched the meter to adjust the shutter speed. The white balance was set to sunny which returned the perfect color. It was only after I got home and downloaded the photos that I realized I still had exposure compensation set at +2 from yesterday when I was experimenting with Aperture Priority. It has no effect when the camera is set to Manual mode but it is still so annoying to me that I do not remember to check my settings before I shoot.
I focused on the bung hole (half a bung hole) in this shot. This is my favorite of the several I took this morning.
Focal Length 122mm
ISO 50
f/5.6
1/100
WB Fine Weather
SOOC
Another day spent reviewing and editing photos and not taking them. Late this afternoon I sat on the patio enjoying the cool breeze which has since turned into a gale. I saw the hummingbird a couple of times and managed to get a couple of mediocre shots but nothing good. I was having a glass of wine (Sobon Estates Old Vine Zin tonight) and reading Food and Wine Magazine and drooling, anxious to go inside and cook something delicious for dinner. I took a few photos of the succulent with the red daisy like flowers that cascades over the edge of the table it’s on. I just found out that it is called Mezoo™ Trailing Red Dorotheanthus and it was the best shot I took today. The exposure is SOOC, but it is cropped.
Focal Length 300mm
Manual Mode
ISO 100
f/5.6
1/200
Cropped
WB Fine Weather
Ménage à Trois—too much of a good thing? Three’s a crowd maybe, but when it comes to wine, I don’t think there could be too much Ménage à Trois. Today’s challenge is, “too much of a good thing” and a few minutes ago, when I realized that I had been too busy all day to even think about taking a photo and looked at the challenge theme as I poured my glass of Ménage à Trois, I knew what my photo would be. It’s been a while since I featured wine (at least I think it has) so here is tonight’s beverage of choice.
I have to admit that I was more interested in drinking my wine than photographing it tonight after spending the entire afternoon evaluating photos for my last class assignments. I took only three shots and didn’t take the time to attach the camera to the tripod so I could get a decent exposure without camera shake and I left the white balance set at auto. So much for what I learned in class. I edited this shot by increasing the exposure a little more than 2/3 of a stop and applying a levels adjustment.
Focal Length 50mm
ISO 250
Manual Mode
f/1.4
1/60
Auto WB
levels and exposure adjustments.
I am becoming a locavore and so when the Farmers’ Market returned to the parking lot at the Roseville Sports Center today, I was thrilled. It will be there every Thurday until mid September. There were only a half dozen farmers there today but I managed to find red and gold beets, Rainier cherries, and meyer lemon olive oil, all grown and produced within a 100 or so miles of here. My photos today are of the beets and cherries I bought, as well as the onions, carrots, and broccoli, all available this morning.
Except for the cherries, I took all these shots at the same stand; the farmer had placed a large white sheet or something that served as a perfect diffuser so I had wonderful, indirect light. I made a levels adjustment in the carrot shot and an exposure adjustment in the broccoli shot. The others are SOOC.
Focal Length 50mm
ISO 100
f/5.6
1/125
Auto WB
Manual Mode
SOOC
Focal Length 50mm
ISO 100
f/5.6
1/100
Auto WB
Manual Mode
SOOC
Focal Length 50mm
ISO 100
f/5.6
1/200
Auto WB
Manual Mode
SOOC
Focal Length 50mm
ISO 100
f/5.6
1/100
Auto WB
Manual Mode
Levels adjustment
Focal Length 50mm
ISO 100
f/5.6
1/400
Auto WB
Manual Mode
Exposure +2/3 stop
Today I took photos of Faith who will be turning two next month and who needed photos for her party invitations. She is all decked out in a dress made to look like Jessie, Faith’s favorite Toy Story character. Her mother is my friend and personal trainer Noelle. Our photo shoot started at 5 PM and the sun was harsh and beating down on us. I found a shady spot near the goats and started shooting there. I tried to keep in mind all of the lessons from my photography class and made a mental list of things I needed to do for a portrait shoot. I made sure I set up the camera ahead of time so I could just worry about evaluating the scene and deciding on the best locations with the best lighting conditions. Everything went wrong quickly when I inadvertently changed a setting on my camera that set up complete auto focus, a setting I have never used on my Nikon D800 and which I was powerless to modify. I had absolutely no control over which focus points were operative and as a result, about half my shots were not properly focused. I have come to the conclusion that I need to become a hermit and spend about a week with my camera learning every nuance and do absolutely nothing else. I still have not been able to reset the focus so that I can tell the camera where to focus. Shooting a rambunctious two year old is very challenging and I got as many shots of her back as I got of her front, so focus was not my only issue. Despite my faux pas, I did manage to capture a few adorable shots of Faith.
As usual, when I’m shooting Faith, I take lots of photos. Today I took 348 shots and as I mentioned above, many are not usable because of focus issues. I still haven’t evaluated all of the shots and I haven’t settled on which of the shots to use for her “Wanted” poster birthday invitations. It won’t be any of these but I liked these shots from the shoot today. I started using Manual Mode and changed to Aperture Priority. The lighting was a challenge and even though I found areas of nice, indirect light, and managed to get some really nice shots, these shots were made in dappled shade but I really liked them.
Here’s Faith feeding carrots to a pair of goats through the fence:
Focal Length 50mm
ISO 100
f/2.8
1/200
WB Sunny
Manual Mode
SOOC
And, Faith was adorable in her hat:
Focal Length 50mm
ISO 100
f/3.5
1/125
WB Sunny
Aperture Priority
SOOC
Focal Length 50mm
ISO 100
f/3.5
1/125
WB Sunny
Aperture Priority
SOOC
Focal Length 50mm
ISO 100
f/3.5
1/320
WB Sunny
Aperture Priority
SOOC
Today’s theme is “ground” and all sorts of thoughts went through my head: ground pepper; peanut butter; coffee grounds; dirt. Dirt won out and I photographed one of my newly planted tomatoes, a hybrid called Juliet, a cross between a grape tomato and a Roma tomato, which is “in the ground” at last. I’m not certain that potting soil in a large pot qualifies as “ground” but I’m going with it!
Clouds intermittently obscured the sun while I tried to photograph creating vastly different looks from auto white balance; I used manual mode and tried once again to keep an eye on the meter. I finally switched to sunny white balance and the sun stayed out for a couple of shots that resulted in more pleasing colors.
Focal Length 300mm
ISO 100
f/5.6
1/400
WB Sunny
SOOC
“Hit That Jive, Jack” is one of my favorite Diana Krall songs and it popped into my head as I took photos of my newly planted chives. Yesterday, I planted tomatoes (about six weeks later than I usually plant them) and several different kinds of herbs, at the encouragement of Sue, my sister-in-law, who was visiting for the weekend. The chives occupy the top hole of a strawberry jar, and chervil, tarragon, spicy oregano (judgement about the taste of this herb remains to be seen), and Thai basil fill in the smaller holes beneath. That’s the chervil, out of focus in the bottom front of the photo.
As Karen Russell, the instructor of my soon-to-be-completed photography class, advised when class started, our photographs would get worse before they got better. Although class is winding down, my photographs continue to get worse instead of better. I have learned many things from this class and it is among the better photography classes I’ve taken to date, but I know I haven’t spent as much time studying and practicing as I should have and I continue to be experiencing all kinds of problems. Despite my cautious increase in ISO, it wasn’t enough so I still needed a Levels adjustment to correct the exposure of this photograph. I thought I was monitoring exposure but obviously not closely enough. I’m back to shooting manual, the mode I’m most comfortable shooting, but I still continue to struggle with learning the functions on my Nikon D800. I managed to freeze the focus point at an odd place and couldn’t find the release while shooting this morning, so I had to focus and recompose all my shots which does not always reliably keep focus, for me anyway. I focused closely on the chives and with the lens wide open my depth of field is too shallow, so too much of the chive plant, the subject of the shot, is out of focus. I tried various white balance settings, and everything seemed a bit too yellow, including the cloudy setting even though it’s very cloudy out. I should have set a custom white balance but it started to sprinkle and I didn’t want to get my camera wet. I used auto focus instead and felt guilt! So, I continue to struggle.
Focal Length 300mm
Manual Mode
ISO 320
f/5.6
1/80
Auto WB
levels
Mady climbs the stairs umpteen times a day. Whenever I go up, she follows me. Whenever I go down, she follows me. When I leave for the gym, she goes upstairs to await my return. When she’s hungry or thirsty, she goes down. I hear her in the middle of the night, claws scrabbling on hardwood, heading down or up the stairs, with the occasional thump caused I assume by her tail hitting the balusters on the way up or down. When I noticed that today’s challenge topic was “stairs” I immediately thought of Mady. When I watch her coming down, I imagine it is a scary thing to go headfirst down a steep stairwell. But when I beckoned her to the top and photographed her as she descended, she seemed willing. . .at least the first two times I asked her to do it. Then, when she wasn’t properly focused, I had her do it again. She was eager to please and I was sure I rewarded her each time she performed for me. The light kept changing in the entry and I kept being dissatisfied with the results. Then, Sue and I worked in my backyard for three hours, cleaning the fountain and the patio and preparing pots for planting. While Sue took a shower, I asked Mady to perform again. This time, I was met with a little reluctance. But she did it. Here are three of the last shots I took and I had to include the one where she looked at me from the top as if to say, “not again” or “I sure hope this is the last time” and it was.
I was still dissatisfied with the results. On this set of photos, I changed to Shutter Priority so that I could get Mady in focus while she quickly descended. But of course that changed the light entering the camera so I increased the ISO to 500 but still had to make levels and exposure adjustments in post processing because I didn’t consider exposure compensation. These are the last photos on my blog that will feature Mady for a while because Sue is taking her home to Redding later on this afternoon. I’ve certainly enjoyed her visit and her willingness to pose for my lens.
Killdeer are a common sight around the dry grassy fields near marshy areas and they are nesting. This morning when Mady, Sue, and I walked in Mahaney Park, this killdeer tried to distract us from the nest and ran to lure us away. Mady doesn’t usually react to most birds, but the killdeer at her home park taunt her so much that whenever she sees one, wherever she is, she is quickly in hot pursuit. Sue had her hands full restraining Mady while I tried to snap a few photos.
I am chagrined to admit that although I had returned my camera to manual settings from Aperture Priority that I used last evening to take photos for my photography class assignment, I forgot to reset exposure compensation to zero. I think exposure compensation has no effect when the shooting mode is manual but still, it irritates me that I made such a stupid mistake. After taking many shots today, and wondering why some seemed to dark, I realized that at some point I had set the ISO to 50. Now I love low ISO but even to me, using an ISO of 50 has to be a deliberate act. So, despite my baby steps forward, I continue to take giant steps backward.
I included two shots today. They are very similar and I couldn’t decide which I preferred so I included both. At least these shots are in focus but I cropped them and used a levels adjustment to brighten them because of the low ISO setting.
Focal Length 300mm
ISO 50
f/8
1/400
Cropped/levels
Focal Length 300m
ISO 50
f/5.6
1/640
Cropped/levels
I love sunflowers. The two kinds I brought home from Whole Foods yesterday looked lovely in the late morning sun streaming through my dining room window. The brightness of the light on the flowers and the darkness of the background make me think of a Northern Renaissance Flemish still life.
Focal Length 50mm
Manual Mode
ISO 100
f/2.2
1/640
WB Sunny
SOOC