The story of 7 letters and a board

Do you Scrabble?

Well, you ought to try... I am slowly getting the hang of it and it is so much fun! I am perpetually stuck with letters such as A, E, L, and R! The scrabble gods hardly ever smile in my favor (and having a geeky opponent who is really really good at this doesn't help my case either!). While these As and Es help me form good words, they hardly ever make a good score because they all count as 1s! So I end up losing most of the time... but its still fun :P I think the competitive spirit in me keeps me going. Apart from a good vocab, I'm also learning that scrabble needs a lot of thought, patience and strategy...

7 letters & a board - think of the possibilities!

This was our board yesterday - WALTZ and QUIZ were both my words! Yay!
A missed opportunity of a good score? Perhaps. But the game was awesome! ... and guess who won this time :D... Yours truly indeed...

P.S.: The red triple word score square with everything else discolored in photo # 3 - thanks to the Color Accent feature in my Canon Powershot A530.

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!

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!

Noticing the beauty in patterns

I took this picture in Pittsburgh this past Thanksgiving when we drove there to see some friends. A trip to Mount Washington was planned for my roommate who accompanied us on her first time Pittsburgh visit. While other were enjoying Pittsburgh in a nice (cold!) afternoon, I was busy looking for patterns! I've tried to do the same with umbrellas in a row or even decorative lights in rows, but never really succeeded to bring out the beauty in them! Here - I like the way the lights seem to grow shorter and almost appear like pins on paper! Not the greatest of shots with so much cloud cover, but I like the concept of taking such pictures...

Btw, I joined an informal class to learn photography - well digital photography and today we had our first class. Our teacher talked about aperture, exposure, speed and the like - some basics before we get into the real stuff :) After years of oohing and aahing at pictures taken by others I've decided to spend some time and put some effort into this. My husband kept reminding me to stop complaining about not being able to take good pictures and register for the class :)! Its amazing that when I see a bridge its just a bridge - a pretty mundane sight - but when I see pictures of that same bridge taken by others it bowls me over... So now, I'm getting into the magic of photography!