Lisa’s 365 Project 74/365 – The Perfect Raindrop

Well….this isn’t it.  I need more practice.  I would like to get a pictures of a raindrop or dewdrops with a reflection on something in it…A tree, building, another flower, even me…just something.  I think those are the coolest pictures.  I’ll keep trying.  I guess you can kind of see a reflection in this one but it is not as clear as I would like for it to be. Practice makes perfect…or close to it….so I’ll keep practicing.  We are supposed to get more rain tonight so maybe I’ll have a chance to try again tomorrow.

Lisa’s 365 Project 27/365 – Art Project and Lens flare

I was loving the light coming into my office/craft room window while my daughter was working on her art project so I decided to take a few pictures of her.  I started out on the left of her and then decided to try for a lower angle on the right of her and was pleasantly surprised by the lens flare.  I’m usually not in the habit of trying different angles.  I have read a lot of posts, books and articles say try different angles and now I see the benefit.

I posted both set of pictures.  I ran a sharpen/defog action on the pictures and that was it.  I used my Tamron  28-75mm lens.  I’m pretty happy with how they turned out.

My Lucky Charm

Deciding what to shoot for my picture a day challenge, is becoming a challenge.  But I guess it really doesn’t matter what I take a picture of, as long as I’m taking a picture everyday, learning something new everyday, and building my skills. My last few pictures have been with my 50mm lens.  I’m not used to it because of the fixed focal length, but the more I use it the more I love it.  The quality of my pictures are better, and I just love being able to have such a wide aperture.

Today’s picture…a bowl of my favorite childhood cereal…Lucky Charms.

Just a Sip

Here is my picture for today’s picture a day.  Sometimes it is hard to find time to do the things we really love, but when I got a moment, I took a picture of my little girl chillin’ in the window with her sippy cup.

This picture was taken with my 50mm lens with the aperture set at 1.8, the ISO at 400, and the shutter speed at 1/25.  I really don’t like to use a higher ISO than 200, but I didn’t have my flash on, and it was kind of dark in the room so I needed to bump up the ISO because I could not reduce the shutter speed without getting more blur that you see in the picture.

I just love how she is so laid back in this picture.

Flower Power

Today, for my picture a day assignment, I went back and looked at some pictures we took when we were in downtown Charlotte, and decided to process one of my flower pictures.

I took this picture with my new 50mm 1.8 lens and believe or not, I did not have the aperture set at 1.8.  I set it 2.5.  When I first got the lens I shot everything at 1.8 and soon realized that was not the way to go.

The first picture is straight out of the camera with the exposure bumped up a little.  The second is the same picture, converted to black and white and bumped up the yellows a little.  Then I used the Soulful B&W tints Action, Warm Mist to add a little tint to it.

Hope you enjoy…

Looking Throught the Window – Part II

So I asked some friends what they thought of the picture and got some good feedback.  One of the things they mentioned was for me to move the lens flare to the other side of my daughter’s face since that is where most of the sunlight was shining.  So I did and here are the results:

Looking Through the Window

I’ve been playing with my new lens and playing with some photoshop actions from CoffeShop and MCP Actions and here are the results:

This first picture is SOOC (straight out of the camera)

This was a black and white conversion using MCP actions.

This is my favorite of the three.  In this picture I added lens flare in Photoshop, converted the image to black and white and added tinting from Soulful BW Tints.  I used memories tint.

One thing I have noticed that I need to correct.  When I post my pictures here they seem stretched and narrowed. Not sure if it is something that I am doing when I adjust the size for the web or what, but I need to work on it.

Until next time…

My New Lens

I have had my eye on the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 lens for a while now.  I’ve read some reviews and had mixed feelings about it.  Today, I gave in to temptation and went to my local camera store and bought the lens.  So far I have pretty pleased with the quality of pictures.  The main reason I wanted the lens was because of the wide aperture and the sharpness of the photos.

Here are a few photos that I have taken today with my new lens:

These are yellow tomatoes from our “garden”

Here is my youngest sweetie in the backyard

All of the pictures were taken with the widest aperture for the lens. I think I’m really going to have fun with this lens.