Baby Toes...

I love baby toes.  Love them!  They are just so small and sweet and perfect.  I could chase her around all day trying to capture them.  Or eat them in all of their tiny, perfect deliciousness.

f/1.4 - 1/200 - ISO 500

Hall - facing living room

f/1.4 - 1/320 - ISO 500

Hall - facing front foyer

Positioning...

I love the positioning in this picture.  It was caught on accident as I photographed her scooting around.  It is hard to pose those babies.  For some reason, they just don't care where you want them to be.   It would be a great picture if Caroline was not looking at me like "I am going to bite you with these eight teeth if you don't stop taking pictures of me."

f/2.2 - 1/125 - ISO 500

Living Room - Early Morning

Aperture Oops...

My lesson from Tuesday (which is pretty obvious in hindsight) - when you add a second person to the picture, you need to close your aperture and adjust shutter speed accordingly.  Unless they are statue like and will stay at the exact same depth of field.  Which won't happen with children.  Especially mine.

f/1.8 - 1/1250 - ISO 11

Early afternoon shade

f/4.0 - 1/250 - ISO 100

Early Afternoon Shade

Aperture Fun..

Matt asked me what Aperture was when I was explaining the new camera to him.  "It controls how wide the opening to the lens is."  Blank stare.  "It also controls how much depth of field there is and what shutter speed you need to use."  Continued blank stare.  "It also controls how much bokeh there will be"  I lost my audience at this point, so I did a little experiment for him to help explain.  I thought the results were neat, so I replicated it to share here.

The first two shots in this series also do a pretty good job of showing the differences between f/1.4 and f/1.8 - a question that gets pondered a lot since those are the two most popular versions of the 50mm lens.

Thanks to sock monkey for being a perfect model.   I knew my favorite go to models would not be up for this task.  All of these shots were taken with a 50mm f/1.4 lens in late morning with sidelight.  I metered the light off of the monkey's face to get the correct exposure and started at f/1.4.  You can see that for every time I made the aperture opening smaller, I moved the shutter speed the same number of steps so that the exposure remained the same each time, even if the background focus changed.    I like them all up to f/2.5 and then the fence starts getting too much focus and it takes away from the monkey.  Which is your favorite?

f/1.4 - 1/8000 - ISO 100

f/1.8 - 1/5000 - ISO 100

f/2.5 - 1/2500 - ISO 100

f/3.5 - 1/1250 - ISO 100

f/5.6 - 1/500 - ISO 100

f/8.0 - 1/250 - ISO 100

f/11 - 1/125 - ISO 100

I probably should have gone one more advance of a couple of f-stops in my experiment to get a totally focused fence, but Kylie was getting impatient and by the time I realized I stopped short, the lighting had changed so much that I could not recreate it.  It gets my point across and now my husband understands aperture without my technical explanations!

Favorite Photo - 04/19/10

50 mm f/1.4 lens

f/2.8 - 1/1250 - ISO 100

Front lit - late morning

Welcome...

This is my adventure into a second blog. I already have another blog. It is all about our family. Well, let's be honest, it is 95% about our kids and 5% about my husband and I. I needed a space for me. Heck, I needed a hobby for me.

So, I turned 30. My husband bought me a fancy camera. I love it, but I really want to learn to use it. This blog is a journal for me as I learn to do so. Why a blog? Well, I don't remember anything if I don't write it down anymore (Mom brain), so I am hoping to record some of my experiences to eventually get to the point where I really learn how to use it. Capture. Remember. Or else you'll forget. At least, I will.

I am not a professional (which really will be more than obvious). I am learning as I go. I may use the wrong descriptors, be totally off base, and some of what I say may be flat out wrong, but I hope to grow with practice and I will correct myself. This is a brand new adventure to me and I think it will be a fun ride.

Here are a few shots from the first day playing with my camera. All were taken with a 50mm f/1.4 lens and natural light. Some notes about what I learned - Love the f/1.4, but very hard to shoot a baby with - didn't have as many problems with my toddler. Depth of field is obviously extremely shallow and babies are fidgety, so they can quickly go out of the focal range. The prime lens (one that does not zoom) takes some getting used to, but I loved the look and feel of the pictures it produced.

f/3.5 - 1/160 - ISO 250

Early morning light

f/2.5 - 1/1000 - ISO 100

Mid afternoon light

f/1.4 - 1/320 - ISO 500

Afternoon in our front foyer