Depth of field

I may have said this before - taking pictures is helping me learn about photography basics more than sitting down with a book! Here's why... I found my crayons while unpacking this morning & decided to indulge in some artsy coloring. It doesn't take much now-a-days for me to decide to take pictures. These pictures were taken on auto mode - I use a canon A530 powershot to take pictures and didn't see the manual aperture adjustment (am I missing something?) on it.

So here's some color in my life! If you will, pay attention to the subject in focus and how many parts of the picture are out of focus due to the low depth of field...
And here's the art... a top view.
Then I decided to try another angle - a very low one. Here the camera has decided to put everything but the middle portion of the picture out of focus. If you look at the next picture, the bottom part is out of focus while the rest of it is in focus.A low depth of field throws most of the stuff, other than what it thinks is your main subject, out of focus - a great way to do portrait/ people photography. But if one wants everything in the picture in focus, a high depth of field would be necessary.

This one would have turned out to be a fine photo if not for the bottom out of focus part. Oh well...

Some recent photo expeditions

There has been a lull in my photo expeditions lately. I have moved recently and had to take care of a lot of work before moving. Plus I hate packing & unpacking - which means I take more time than necessary to do these things. I do, however, have a few pictures to share - couldn't let nice summer weekends go to waste, could I?

First stop - Black Moshannon State Park in central Pennsylvania. The main attraction here is the bog that gets its name Moshannon from the local Indian name "Moss-Hanne" meaning Moose stream. The 'black' in the name is derived from the color of the water which, although clear, appears black because it flows through moss & other plants and becomes colored because of plant tannins.
I also recently attended the Central Pennsylvania Festival of Arts in State College, PA. Among a lot of other pictures, here's a picture I took of crayons being used by two street painters.A flower I saw walking down the arts fest... a regular automatic shot, but the day was really bright - almost too bright - and that almost gave a flaming quality to the flower which I really liked. Next stop - Flume gorge & Mount Washington in New Hampshire!All in all... not a bad month :-) And guess what? Summer is still not over... who knows where this weekend will take us!

Flower power

I was telling somebody about how I love taking pictures and mainly - macro photography. Then that person asked if I specialized in flower photography and I denied it completely (I didn't think I wanted to be typecasted as a "flower person")... But maybe I do like macro - flower - photography... Flowers are just so beautiful and friendly :-) Here in the U.S. it seems like they are more colorful than their counterparts back home, or maybe its just that I'm paying more attention now...

Anyhoo, while coming back from a meeting this morning, I saw a nice garden and couldn't resist taking some (read 134!) pictures. Here are a select few that I really love...Somebody had recently mentioned to me that they like a little bit of cloud cover while taking pictures. Today I found out why! It is awesomely warm and sunny and bright today and so I thought pictures will come out great. But seems too much brightness was undermining the color of the flowers... I'm going to have to delete a lot of the pictures because they are too bright! Oh well...

More pictures here.

Orchid in a flash

Here's the point - I'm a firm believer in sunlight and sunshine... so taking pictures indoors has always seemed tedious and I've never been good at getting good pictures indoors - especially people pictures! There's either too much flash or not even light. So when we arrived at the ag arena today for the Orchid show, I was immediately put off because the flowers were inside the arena & not outside as I was hoping.

Result? I took 258 pictures in about 45 minutes - and almost 75% of them are either too grainy or too flashy such that you can't even make out the detail. Call it lacking skills or whatever... but I wasn't happy. And then this brilliant fluke came along and made my day! Perfect amount of flash... Thanks to a friend (here's a shout out to you Nagesh!) who showed me how to click such pictures with examples from his brilliant collection - I can finally say - this is a keeper - and it 'll go in a frame :)

Flowers behind bars

Since I was a little kid, I have been notorious for taking up projects and quickly losing interest in them! I am happy to report that my so called "passion" for photography has survived for the past few years. "Macro" is my thing... I long for the day when I will be happy enough with a picture I take to frame it and put it up on my wall. Call it high standard or low self-esteem, until now I've always found something lacking in most pictures I take. But thankfully, that has not weaned my enthusiasm for taking pictures.

When I set out for school today, the day was cloudy & I almost left my camera home! But look what I would have missed! I call this - flowers behind bars...

Digital enhancement

I have always been a little resistant to digitally enhancing a picture (although I've tried it for my first post). For example, most of the photo editing softwares enable users to change color, contrast & tuning of pictures along with giving special effects such as Sepia or soft focus or saturation among others. Looks like a lot of people make use of these features after they take pictures. But I always feel like I'd be cheating if I did that... But then, I take pictures with a digital camera anyway, isn't that cheating too? Most serious photographers too use different kinds of filters et al on their cameras. So which side should I be on?
Here's a picture that I did some "work" on. The first one is the original copy and on the second one I enhanced some shadows and increased saturation. Which one do you think is a better picture? The original but not so good looking one or the one that saw some cosmetic
enhancements?

The beauty of macro photography

Even after deciding to write every week I'm coming back to this blog after 3 weeks. I took this picture moments ago with my digital camera. I was on auto & macro settings. I tried a few times with manual setting by changing the fstop (aperture) and shutter speeds (exposure), but somehow I still don't have the hang of those! The picture keeps coming grainy - I guess that's my clue to fiddle a little more with shutter speed. I should keep trying - as my digital photography teacher keeps saying - but I haven't done that yet. Maybe this'll give me a good practice.So, coming back to my love of macro photography - even without the auto-macro setting or manual changes, I've tried to take these kind of pictures. I think I like macro photography because it shows the inner workings - its as close as you can get to your subject! With a bigger, better & meaner camera I guess this picture can be taken even without the macro setting. But I'll only know more about this if I keep clicking :) So here's to the hope of doing/learning/achieving something other than what I will call "work" in my life!