Today I harvested a dozen Juliet tomatoes. I ate two before I decided to take the photo, and I cut one of them open in keeping with the daily challenge theme, “open.”
Despite paying attention to the camera’s exposure meter, the photo was still slightly underexposed so I increased the exposure by a third of a stop.
Focal Length 300mm
ISO 100
f/13
.8 second
WB Fine Weather
I was taken by the look of a couple of dead trees whose snaggy bare branches made an interesting pattern against the blue sky. I used the Sunny 16 rule as it was indeed sunny outside (ISO 100, F/16, 1/100) but the photos were lackluster despite the brilliant blue sky. I decided to apply a Lightroom preset and chose “aged photo” and liked the effect on both of the trees.
This morning I sat on the patio enjoying a cup of Vaneli’s Vienna roast coffee along with the morning cool that I knew would not last more than an hour or so. Of course I had my camera at my side and when the hummingbird flitted about chattering that I should leave to let him bathe in his fountain in peace, I decided to wait him out. And, he waited me out. He won but I got my photo for the day. Today’s theme is waiting.
I bumped up the ISO to 400 because the area where he perched was in deep shade and I cropped the shot and made a few exposure tweaks as well.
Focal Length 300mm
ISO 400
f/5.6
1/60
Years ago, my late husband and I went to an estate sale, which estate sale was liquidating the possessions of a very-much-alive and vibrant octogenarian who was moving from her beautiful home in Fair Oaks, California to an assisted living facility and who wanted to advise every buyer about the history of every piece they were purchasing. She was a delightful woman and when Ron expressed an interest in an ornate mahogany chair with caning, she was quick to tell us that it was a Louis XIV chair, and she lovingly described the chair as if The Sun King himself had settled into it a few hundred years before. In actuality, it was manufactured in the Ohio by the Stomps-Burkhardt Chair Company sometime in 1920’s. The chair was a wedding present she told us. Of course we were enthralled with her tales of the chair and brought it home with us.
I took several shots of the chair’s worn caning because today’s daily challenge theme is “patterns” and I love caning and have several chairs with caning, this being the most beautiful and well crafted of the caned chairs I own. When I turned the chair over to see how to spell the name of the furniture company, I decided the label was a more interesting shot than the caning itself. And, when I downloaded the photos, I realized that the 90 year old plus paper label is crackled making a more interesting pattern than the caning. So I photographed the label with its crackled finish and with the caning mostly blurred in the foreground.
Focal Length 300mm
ISO 100
f/5.6
1/5 second
WB Fine Weather
Cropped
Yesterday’s daily challenge theme was multiple choice. As I pondered that theme, I stared at a 3-lobed red onion I bought a couple of days ago at Granny May’s Strawberry Patch. I think that this onion could fit that theme. One can choose which of the triplet lobes to slice. After I took a few shots, I realized that my ISO was set to 1600, a setting left over from the photographs I took inside the roasting room at Vaneli’s Handcrafted Coffee yesterday. So, it occurred to me that I should compare shots using the ISO 100 that I prefer with the 1600 that I already shot to see the difference in the noise. Since I used a tripod to capture the shot, that was an easy adjustment to make. So, here is a second choice to make: which shot is clearer with less noise? I took both shots using timed release, a focal length of 300mm and f/5.6; the shutter speed varied with the ISO, faster for the higher ISO. If you click on the photograph, then click again to enlarge, you can see more detail. I think the second shot is clearer when enlarged but at the same size, there appears to be no difference. What do you think?
ISO 1600:
ISO 100:
Today I got to tour the roasting room at Vaneli’s Handcrafted Coffee in Rocklin. Nick, the roaster, showed me some Colombian and some Sumatra beans, still in their unroasted, green state but the incredible aroma of the already roasted beans in the facility’s huge roaster was a smell I won’t soon forget. And, as Nick opened tub after tub of French Roast, Vienna, and Italian blends, roasted earlier in the day, the heady fragrance of these just-roasted beans almost made me swoon. I was lucky to go home with packages of four different coffee blends. How wonderful it is to know that these artisan coffees exist practically in my backyard.
The challenge for me today was the lighting. The light fixture in the roasting room cast an orangy-yellow glow and the photographs I took accurately reflected those colors. But I wanted the photos to look as if they were taken in ordinary light so I adjusted the white balance to about 2000K in post processing and also changed the tint and saturation before the photographs were acceptable. All shots were taken at ISO 1600, either f/5.3 or f/5.6, and a shutter speed of 1/60.
Unroasted Columbian beans:
Unroasted Sumatra beans:
More unroasted beans:
The City of Roseville has hired a goatherd and his flock of goats to eat the weeds (actually only the goats will eat the weeds) that are becoming a fire threat in the fields around Mahaney Park. I noticed the flock this morning as I left the gym so I returned midday to photograph them. Of course that’s the worst time of day to photograph something outdoors so my group goat shots are pretty “contrasty.” The closeups show a few of the curious goats who approached the temporary fence erected around them as I shot and a couple of them put on a little display of territorial bravado for me.
When I went out to get the paper this morning about 5:45AM, the almost full moon surrounded by haze beckoned me and my camera so, out we went, my Nikon, my Cullmann, and me (in bathrobe and with a nod to Paul McCartney’s version of “We Three” on his newest album) to the driveway. Only two cars drove by and there were no neighbors in evidence. I really wasn’t howling, just mumbling to myself. I took one shot then set the camera to timed shutter release, forgetting it was set to take five shots in quick succession. I thought it was interesting that this, the first timed shot, was perfectly focused and the subsequent four shots were blurred because the camera had not completely settled down from the previous shot. So much to think about when you’re trying to get something in focus. Even a tripod doesn’t always solve the problem.
Focal Length 300mm
ISO 100
f/16
1/15
WB Fine Weather
Cropped
This past Monday, my dear friends Chris and Susan gave me a Minolta SR-T101 SLR film camera that had belonged to Chris’s late father. I was thrilled to be the recipient of this old SLR because I have been thinking about trying my hand at film photography even though Kodachrome is no longer being manufactured. This Minolta model was produced for about ten years between 1966 and 1975. It came with a 200mm 3.5 Zoom lens, a 35mm f/2.8 lens and the kit lens is a 58mm f/1.4 so it appears I have some nice, fast lenses. My preliminary research shows that this camera features full aperture metering, which automatically compensates for the speed of the lens fitted on the camera and according to one website’s information, it is a feature that took Nikon twelve more years to figure out how to accomplish.
This is a photo of the body with the kit lens attached. My digital camera picks up so much detail that dust particles I hadn’t noticed when I took the photograph show prominently on the edges of the lens. The camera and its lenses need a thorough cleaning so I rendered it in black and white, added grain and a vignette to give it period feel and to camouflage some of the dust and dirt.
Focal Length 300mm
ISO 100
f/16
.6 sec.
WB Fine Weather
I have nothing too exciting to post on my blog today. It’s my birthday and I took only a few photos today, not because it’s my birthday but because I was too busy doing other things to think about photos. This is a glass block window that I thought made an interesting composition.
Focal Length 135mm
ISO 100
f/8
1/125
WB Fine Weather
SOOC
Or maybe that should be fences in need of mending. This is a close up detail of a fence at a friend’s home in Christian Valley near Auburn. I was intrigued by the wires and the lichen attached to the aging fence board. The temperature was well over 100° when I took this shot mid afternoon today so proper exposure was not forefront in my mind. After downloading the photos, I realized it was very underexposed because I was standing in deep shade, camera focused on the fence with a bright background behind it. As a result, I had to increase the exposure by a full two stops before it looked right.
Focal Length 250mm
ISO 100
f/5.6
1/160
WB – Auto