I love light. I love trying to take pictures that I’m told I shouldn’t take. I’ve frustrated myself rather this afternoon, after seeing this awesome shot from my newest photographer crush on instagram. View this post on Instagram @me_and_orla: "Shooting into the #light again! Oh what a lovely light. It took me a long time […]
I’m starting to wonder what I can do with my pictures after I’ve taken them. I’ve a few ideas, but in order to implement them, I’m going to have to learn a bit more about post processing. Today’s effort, just using the lasso tool in paint.net shows how far I have to go, but also […]
I don’t know that I need a better camera after all if I can get pics like this with my PowerShot. What do you think?
I love this time of year in the garden. Promise of fruits to come. Glorious colours in flowers – a french marigold I’m told. And hidden treasures. This was behind where I took out a bunch dead plants bearing berries, after the toddler thought they might be food. (They weren’t. I don’t know what they […]
Apologies for my brief absence. To make up for it, four photos today. Another revisitation of the tulip – so bright that you can see the teeth marks almost 😉 A lilac shot, chosen because I was pleased to have the focus in the middle of the picture, rather than at the front. Good to […]
I was standing in the kitchen the other day when something caught my eye. And when things catch my eye these days, I grab the Powershot 🙂 So this. Which was pretty cool. So I played around a bit, trying to catch the light a little differently. I don’t think this quite works, but there’s […]
Part of the reason I want to improve my photography is because on my other blog, Making it up, I do product reviews. And I want my pictures to be pinnable and beautiful and for me to enjoy writing up the reviews and sharing the pictures. So we did a product shoot in the garden […]
We went visiting the other day. Interesting to go picture hunting in someone else’s garden. I couldn’t get the picture of the blossom blowing from the tree – it looked like a blizzard, but shooting motion isn’t something I’ve got into yet. So instead, I grabbed a picture of this little guy. Given how he […]
There’s just a hint of pink to the tips of this daisy’s petals. There are no hints to this marigold. Also known as Mary’s gold, we started growing these after Tim’s stint in the garden’s at Kentwell Hall. The leaves are good for bites, burns and stings, much better than dock leaves. They’re prettier than […]
I took 40 pictures in the back garden. What did I learn from this? Children move faster than flowers 🙂 I don’t think I’m ever going to want to get into portrait photography. But I do want better snaps of the kids. Which, it turns out, is quite hard. But is slightly easier when they’re […]
Comments welcome. I have no idea what I’m doing. Does it show?
Couldn’t resist the title, but I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.
We have a selection of ornamental poppies self seeded around the garden. I prefer my poppies red. These ones are pale pale orange, and within minutes, it seems, of them flowering, they fade, and look like bleached orange paper.
But I discovered that close up they’re quite striking.
You may need to tilt your head.
And with a teeny bit of editing
I’m not actually sure which one I prefer. The editing is problematic at times, I’d like to get the shots without having to worry too much. No cropping on either of these, and only a little enhancement on the brightness, reduction on the contrast. Or was it the other way around?
Anyway, I’ve decided I quite like them close up. What do you think?
In a friend’s garden the other day, now really beginning to experiment with the settings. So, pretty much full sun, mid to late afternoon, lying on the floor taking repeated pictures of seedheads, just tweaking one setting in between.
We’re at F/3.5 ISO80 and we’re keeping those unchanged. The only change between these three pictures is exposure time.
So this one got 1/1000 second.
This one 1/800 second
And finally, 1/640 second.
Interesting to see what the differences are. Otherwise unedited, as what I’m looking at here is what the different camera settings can do. I *think* all of this was completely manual, although I get to edit exposure time in Av too, and have been playing around.
Which one do you prefer?
*A note. I’ve added Flattr as a sharing option. It’s not quite a sharing option, it’s a social microdonations site. You load up your account with as little as you like per month, and go round clicking the flattr button. At the end of the month (or whatever the cycle is) what money you had in your account, is divvied out between your clicks. A way to give back to content creators. 🙂
So I went out in the back garden yesterday, just as the sun was dropping, and visited my tulip.
And there was a bit of this going on.
Which I thought was rather good. And I scrambled around and shot it from some slightly different angles, and only gradually realised that I was shooting on manual instead of Av.
Which probably doesn’t seem like an awful lot to you photographers out there, but given a week ago, I couldn’t do the depth of field trick to save my life, I was feeling quite impressed with it.
Now, my Canon Powershot is quite friendly – it has a display on the side that shows you how well you’re balancing everything up. And at the moment, I’m being really technical – keeping the F as low as it will go (which is around F2.8, although sometimes it bottoms out higher – no, I haven’t figured out why yet) and balancing it out with a bit of ISO fiddling and some spinning of the other number. Yeah, like I said, really technical 😉
Anyway, I also took this.
Which is quite nice, but isn’t quite the right colour balance for what I saw – I guess I wasn’t compensating well enough with my settings for that evening glare. So I’ve had a little fiddle in Paint.net and now I have this.
What do we think? Am I getting there?
I don’t want to be doing massive amounts of playing about in editing software, but at the moment everything is a balancing act. I’ll get better yet I think at balancing things on the camera, and maybe I won’t need to touch up too much. But all in all, I’m quite happy with the joint effect there.
Yesterday on a walk to the library we saw all sorts of fascinating things along the roadside.
I loved this explosion of colour.
I did spend a little time in the editing software on this, tweaking brightness and so on. Which led to a discussion about where I want to spend my time and money. Not on software. I *know* that you can do awesome things in photoshop, but I’m much more interested in doing awesome things with the camera. I don’t have the time or money to go on a training course right now (sad really, as I got a press release this morning about Jessops offering courses, such as this one, ah well!) But I *keep* looking at slightly better cameras. Ones with dedicated batteries. Sigh.
Anyway, more about colour.
Or in this case, more about contrast.
The shadows here were fascinating. I don’t think I’ve quite got the focus where I wanted it, but it’s not far off.
And finally, the queen of flowers. The rose. They are just so glorious.
The colour and feel of this one evokes velvet, don’t you think?
Something a little different today, reflecting a pensive state of mind.
Nature is glorious, but matter of fact. New growth alongside, replacing the old. It’s more difficult to come to terms with that in relation to human life. A small part of my childhood, and my children’s childhoods, died this week. And it has caused me to turn inside, to consider relationships, to think about mortality.
And also the fleeting nature of beauty.
I don’t have the skills to capture the blossom falling in the wind yet. (I suspect I need a different setting to Av for that, and I don’t know what it is!) But it was so beautiful. This will remind me.
Morning light is a little different isn’t it? I went out in search of dew, but I was too late for that, no festooned spider webs to be found. Perhaps if I’d tried the very first time the small child woke me, but never mind.
I did find flowers, just beginning to wake and show their glory.
And just the daisy head.
I’m starting to quite like some of the pictures I’m getting – I was ambitious enough this morning to drift off the Av setting and try some full manual. I find the manual focus window on the SX110IS a little difficult to work with, but I’m beginning to think that’s partly my eyesight. And on my wishlist for the perfect camera, along with batteries that last a little longer (although the twice charged 2500 Tronic NiMh from Lidl seem to be working better than previously this morning) is a viewfinder, instead of just a screen.
My shots into the light just didn’t really work at all, and I think that was mainly because I couldn’t see what on earth I was doing!
Although, now I’ve had a bit of a play with this one in a photo editor, it’s growing on me. What do you think?
This isn’t the daisy picture I wanted. The one I was taking had the in focus daisy in the bottom right, and then an out of focus one behind it to the top left. Nearly this picture, but not quite.Â
But as I focussed on the daisy, a little hand came down. And even though I told him not to, the toddler picked the background daisy. And crawl around as I might on the damp lawn, I couldn’t find another two positioned as beautifully.Â
Sigh. So it’s not only weather, light, wind and failing batteries that conspire against me. Two year olds get in on the act too.Â
The batteries thing is one of the biggest reasons that I look at other cameras. (Other than all the complaints previously stated about whether I can do what I want to do with this camera.) My Canon Powershot SX110 takes AA batteries. And no matter how expensive a rechargeable I try, they last single figure shots if any. A decent set of non rechargeables might do me a day. But often they struggle to do that if I’m being particularly experimental. If I get around to upgrading, it will be to a camera with a dedicated battery. And a spare.Â
More photography in Av mode. My head is beginning to swim with what feels like contradictory advice – move in close, move back and zoom. I’m sure this is mainly me misunderstanding the advice rather than actually been told to do it differently.
I quite like this tulip in full sun – I can’t quite get the shadow clear though.
And it turns out that flowers are beautiful from the back.
Would probably have been even better fully focussed.
Ah well, guess I’ll just keep on trying.
a beautiful blog 