Happy Valentine's Day!

My husband and I agreed beforehand to only swap cards for Valentine's Day but we both broke our promise! ha! He got me a card plus a HUGE Hershey's Kiss and I saw this sign in the photo above and just couldn't resist. He liked it, too, and it will not stay on the desk. We are going to attach it to our chainlink fence near the front gate where everyone comes in. I am still manually operating my camera except for the auto focus.

Hope everyone had a Happy Valentine's Day!

My Nest

Just a photo of my nest. This is where I go when I have down time. I got some today and am trying to finish my library book. It's due Friday.

I did set my aperture and shutter speed manually, adjust my white balance to indoor tungsten lighting, and used no flash but automatic focus. Then I lightened it up on the computer. I do feel comfortable with the manual settings now and need to study and challenge my self one step further.

Who Cares?

According to Bryan Peterson, the F8 is called the "Who Cares" F stop because you really don't care about whether the background or foreground are focused or out of focus.

As I was soaking in the tub yesterday, I looked all around me for different subjects to photograph. One was this almost dead *sigh* Rabbit's Foot Fern on the window ledge above the tub. (You'd think I would water it before or after I photographed it.) But, anyway, let's get back to the subject of photographing it. I love the textured container, the rabbit's "feet" and the one lone fern frond so I got in the empty tub and decided to photograph it from underneath the frond. It's late afternoon when I did this and today is a cloudy day, southern light window. I wanted to frame the frond in the curved pane of the window (and I tried to place it in a "sweet spot". I decided to shoot 3 shots at extremes and one in the middle. The top photo is the Who Cares F stop at F8. I am manually setting the F stop and then turning my dial until a correct shutter speed is indicated on my camera, focusing and shooting. Shutter speed was 1/6.

In the photo above, the F stop is set at F 3.5, the biggest opening possible for the lens and ISO (400) I was using (on my camera). The correct shutter speed was indicated at 1/125. So the shutter didn't stay open as long as the top photo and you can see it is a little darker and you cannot see the texture of the plant holder or rabbit's feet as clearly. I'm keeping all other factors the same in all three photos - ISO 400, 18 to 24mm lens, auto focus, white balance on cloudy daylight.

Now this last and darkest photo was set at F27, the smallest opening possible with the other conditions I have with the camera, so the camera indicated a correct shutter speed of 1/10. It almost looks like a silhouette. Not much light came into the camera.

All three exposures are "correct" but I got different results and more freedom with creativity to get the effect you want. Then there are other factors that could be used in this as well such as a different lens length, different lighting and white balance, different ISO, etc.

Which of the three do you like the best and why? (Now I will go water the fern :)

A Bubble Bath

As I'm trying to keep my commitment of posting a photo every day in 2009 AND I was told I had strep yesterday, I decided to take my photos in the bathtub! Isn't THAT unique?!? ha! I had been lying around studying how to manually operate my camera and I finally figured out how to operate and set the aperture and F-stop manually and how the camera shows the combination as a correct exposure. I had never figured this out before. At first I played around shooting every correct combination of the two at 400 ISO lying in bed last night. I also was reading about depth of field so decided that in the tub, I would go from one extreme to another. I started with the "blue" photos above. No, folks, these are NOT photos using a filter! This ended up being more of a lesson in white balance than anything else.

In both sets of photos, the ISO is set at 400, no flash and the top photo of the blue set has settings of F-22 and 0.3 seconds, the bottom with F-3.5 and 1/90 seconds - extremes in the F-stop for 18mm lens. In the bottom (more true to color set), the top photo is set at F3.5 and 1/90 seconds and the bottom photo is F-22 and 0.3 seconds. On my camera, both of these settings were shown to be correct, not over or under exposed. I cannot see any difference in the depth of field but boy, oh, boy was there a difference in the white balance! This tub is right under a window with no curtain where a north/northeastern light comes in. I did not have a light on because it was mid-afternoon. After I took the "blue" pics, reviewed them and saw that they were blue, I investigated my white balance and it was set for tungsten light. So I first adjusted it to daylight, then noticed I had daylight but cloudy day and set it to cloudy day (because it was a cloudy day) and look at the difference!

But I kind of like the blue effect. It's soothing, goes with a bubble bath and artsy. What do you think?

NOTE: Do you see any difference in the Depth of Field (the crispness and clearness of focus from just below my knee to the tip of my toes and beyond to the wall, door, etc.)?
SECOND NOTE: I did use my automatic focus. (These "old" eyes, you know!)