Happy Valentine's Day! Thinking Spring!

Just a quick post today to wish you all a happy Valentine's day and to share springtime thoughts. What a gorgeous day it was today! I am seriously getting Spring fever. To share that Spring fever with you I dug back into the archives to find a photo of a tulip tree in our backyard, taken in March 2009.

This was well before I started the Manual DSLR Project, so I cannot explain why I shot this as I did. It's almost embarrassing. What was I thinking?

Anyway, this was shot at ISO 1600, f18, 1/160 sec. It was shot with a 300mm macro lens. Oh my!

How would I have approached this differently today? It was shot in the afternoon so I might use ISO 320 or 400 and maybe open up the aperture a bit (probably to f 6.3 on that lens) and use an appropriate shutter speed based on those settings. Oh well. That's why I started this journey almost  a year ago, so I could learn and be better today than I was then.

I did apply a develop preset in Lightroom 3 called PH Soft and Dreamy with a goal of softening it a little.

So happy Valentine's Day to you. All the best...Mike