My Favorite Photos of 2010 - Number 7 - Lensbaby Flower

I am counting my top ten favorite images of 2010. This is number 7. I took this photo of a fresh cut flower on our table at dinner with a Lensbaby Composer. 

Hope you enjoy! MK

My Favorite Images of 2010 - Number 10 Midnight Flower

I am counting down my top ten images of 2010. This is number 10. I call it Midnight Flower.

The date on this one says 2009, but it was actually taken in the Spring of 2010. I just made an error when I exported from Lightroom.

Hope you enjoy! MK

I will pay attention to my shutter speed. I will pay attention to my...

Remember back in school when you goofed and your teacher made you "write sentences"? Whether it was, "I will not chew gum in class." or "I will not pull Sally Lou's hair.", the combination of punishment and repetition was supposed to help us to remember to avoid doing that wrong again. I've come to realize that maybe I need to be "writing sentences" to remember to pay attention to what I am doing. Here's the problem...I've become accustomed to using the camera's meter to make adjustments to the shutter speed while looking through the viewfinder. While it's good to be able to make adjustments on the fly, with the camera up to my eye, I have found that I sometimes do not pay attention to the shutter speed setting, but only turn the wheel in the appropriate direction to increase or decrease.

Though I won't be writing sentences, I will work on paying attention to the current shutter speed as I make changes. The photos you see here were taken yesterday afternoon as my wife was watering the flowers. The first was shot at ISO 320, f5.6, 1/20 sec. I used a Quantaray 70-300 macro and shot from a tripod.

The second was shot in the same manner, only with a shutter speed of 1/15. Both were imported directly into Lightroom 3 Beta 2, converted from raw to JPEG. No further adjustments were made.

Speaking of Lightroom 3, I have ordered mine but have not yet received it. I hope it arrives before the end of the month when the beta expires.

I'm shooting an event for my employer tomorrow so look for Latino Festival photos in the next few days. This is the third year that I have shot this festival, but the first time that will shoot it in Manual mode. Though I do not look forward to the scorching heat, I am looking forward to photographing all the bright faces and colorful costumes.

Until next time...Adios!

April 3, 2010 - Another flower photo

Here's another flower photo. Taken on a Nikon D300 with a Quantaray 70-300 Tele-macro at ISO 320, F5.6, 1/250 second.

April 3, 2010 - It's okay to cheat a little at first isn't it?

This is my first blog post and I must say it is difficult to know where to start...After a good deal of consideration, I decided to cheat, um.. I mean use all the resources available to me. In July, 2009 I was thinking of buying a light meter and visited Sekonic's web site. While there, I entered a contest and voila, I won a Sekonic L758-DR and an Exposure Profile Target II. http://www.sekonic.com/classroom/histogram_winners.asp
So, since the folks at Sekonic were kind enough to give me a great light meter, why shouldn't I start there?

So here's what I did. I went out in the front yard with my camera, tripod, and Quantaray 70-300 macro F4-5.6, along with my trusty Sekonic L758-DR and Portaflash 5 in 1 reflector system. I placed the black diffuser behind the subject, then took a reading at F5.6 and shot it at 1/250 sec. at ISO 320. It is sunny this afternoon, but the front of the house where I was shooting is in shade at this time of day. The result is shown in this photo.

So what did I learn? First, use all the tools that are available to me. The light meter made taking this photo very easy. The black diffuser gave me a good background so that attention is drawn to the subject. I also learned something about lens selection here. I also shot the same image with a Nikon 80-200 F2.8 lens and the result was not as good. This Quantaray lens was very inexpensive, takes forever to focus, and is not the best quality glass in my bag. However, it did a nice job with the extreme close-up--better than the much faster Nikon lens that cost much more.

Lesson number 1 - Use the right tool for the job. Your most expensive or "best" lens isn't always the best lens for the job. Think about what you are shooting then select the best lens and accessories for the job. As for using my D300 in manual mode...I'm working on remembering that the front dial changes aperture settings and the back one changes shutter speed. I think the biggest part of this project will be that repetition is the mother of learning. The more I use manual mode the more comfortable I'll be with it. At some point, I hope, I'll be able to look at a shot (sans light meter) and say, "I think I'll shoot this at ISO 320, F5.6 and set my shutter at 1/250 sec." Until then, thank you Sekonic.

Until next time...

MK

P.S. I may post some photos from time to time without any narrative. Also, I guess I have Lightroom set to mark exported photos with a copyright, but it looks like I need to change the date to 2010. I'll see if I can figure that out.