Sunsets...they are beautiful

Just thought I would share one of the best sunsets God has ever let pass before my eyes...

Enjoy!

Converting color photos to black and white

You have seen it. These magnificent photos that are in black and white with great contrast and detail with that dated look that sometimes only black and white can portray.

Well...I plan to post a picture that I will convert to black and white from color and tell you exactly how I did it.

Stay tuned...

Digital Camera Workshop 2.0 2nd Field Trip Notes

I think this field trip was a great success to the Edith Moore Santuary. I had never been and with the weather partly cloudy, we had a great time with Mark showing us all how to take better outside portaits and children's pictures using shade, direct light and reflectors. We had a great crowd and I am sure a number of wonderful pictures resulted.

I will post a few of the photojournalistic pictures I took to capture us all having a great time.

I know that Mark and I received a great number of question from lighting to how to use a certain part of the camera.

One of the ladies attending asked me about converting to black and white. She uses Photoshop Elements and I recommended the book by Scott Kelby that I saw Mark Depew using titled Photoshop Elements for Digital Photographers. I have the book by Scott Kelby for the full Photoshop and it is wonderful how he simply tells you how to set things and get it done. You can always tweak your results, but sometimes getting 90% there is the biggest battle and he can get you there through this book if you need the help.

Regarding black and white, I plan to post a photo I took on this latest field trip, having converted it to black and white with Photoshop Elements, then tell you exactly what I did, settings and all. That way, you can duplicate this on one of your photos, then tweak to your taste. If you don't use Photoshop Elements, then use your software program of choice. They may not have some of the tools that Photoshop Elements has, but you can certainly get your photo into black and white for starters.

One thing to remember, I suggest you do not use the black and white mode in your cameras to get black and white photos. The problem is that if you ever want that photo in color, you cannot get the color information because your camera doesn't record the color information for the photo when you are in black and white mode. Therefore, I believe that you should always shoot in color (you probably do this already) and then convert to black and white in software. You can have the color and black and white version anytime. You never know when a photo may be the "one" and you cannot get color when it was never there.

Stay tuned...

Mercer Arboretum pics (part 2)

Here are the rest of the pics I took. Please enjoy and let me know if you have any questions as to what I did to take these...

Pics from Mercer Arboretum Field Trip (set 1)

Well...as promised, here is the first set of pics from the Mercer Arboretum field trip.

I am a bit ashamed because I do not remember the type of flower this was, but they sure were beautiful. In taking this photo, it begins all with the prep of my equipment. I knew that the photos I sought to take would benenfit greatly from a circular polarizing filter due to the bright and sometimes high-glare conditions from a sunny environment. Also, I used a very wide zoom lens (16mm-35mm) for I like the look of the picture from this lens. This simply comes with your own taste and preference and you will need to determine in time what lens you like in certain situations. I would say I chose this lens because I wanted to practice getting some landscape-type shots (this one isn't like that, but the next one is) that day and the arboretum was well suited for it in some areas. Next, I chose to use my monopod vs a tripod for versatility. You probably saw I was using this everywhere. A monopod simply attaches to the tripod threaded area under your camera (they all have one). This keeps your camera more steady so you minimize camera shake from your hand holding. For this shot, I tilted the camera to get a unique angle. It makes things more interesting to be diagonally positioned. There is some background, but it is blurred to give some ambience to the scene. For camera settings, I keep the camera almost always on aperture priority mode and set my aperture to 5.6 and the camera will choose the shutter speed from there. Also, I used ISO 50. ISO is the same as your film you used to use (remember 200, 400, 800 speed film). I always seek to use the lowest ISO to get the least grain in the picture. The shutter speed set was 1/125 by the camera. Something to note is that a circular polarizing filter prevents enough light from entering the camera to require a shutter speed twice as slow (to allow more light in) as you would get without it. On a bright day, this is usually no issue unless your shutter speed the camera wants to set is below 1/60. Regarding focus, when I am focusing on a field of the subjects I want to shoot (as you see there are a bunch of flowers in this pic), I will focus either 1/3 or 1/2 of the way into the subject. If I had wanted to the front in focus, I would have, but then most of the other flowers would have been out of focus and I didn't want that. Please let me know if have any questions/comments.

This next photo I used the concept of leading lines, framing, repetition, and color to emphasize the subject matter. I hope you were able to guess the subject matter was the bluish plants starting on the left and moving off to the right and away. I was positioned very close to the rock border at the bottom of the photo and focused about midway into the scene. Again, this was aperture priortity with a f/11 aperture setting. This ensures most of the photo is in focus, except really close and really far parts of the picture. My shutter speed was 1/160 and ISO 200. You may ask why ISO 200. Well, if I would have had ISO 50, then that is 2 stops slower, or would have required twice as slow a shutter speed and would have required me to shoot with a shutter speed of 1/40 (160/2=80; 80/2=40). Even with a monopod, 1/40 is still slow and if I can get the quality I want with ISO 200, it is better than a blurry photo. That's about it.

I really liked this plant and just had to take a couple of shots of it. I walked around a bit and got it with the sun at the back and the sun at the front. This one had filtered sun hitting it and had some great shadow effects. You will noticed that when shooting flowers and such, I generally squat down and get almost level with the plants for most people do not look at them that way and it makes a more interesting perspective. You may want to try shooting from under a plant sometime:). For this, I used a f/11 aperture and since the aperture was so small (remember, high aperture number means smaller amount of light, but more in focus), my shutter speed was a really slow 1/13 because the light was filtered and remember I had my circular polarizer filter on to remove any glare and help to get more saturated colors (this is a colorful plant, do you agree?). My ISO was 400 and I still had a shutter speed of 1/13, so you are getting the idea that with the darker areas of this plant, to get good exposure, I needed more sensitivity in my sensor (or faster film for those of you still thinking of film).

Well, here is the last photo for now and it is one of the last I took. It is from just after the office and I tried to use the sidewalk to lead your eye off into the distance. I was sitting on the ground when I took this shot. I used an aperture of f/11, shutter of 1/25, ISO 200 and used the lens at its widest angle to get everything in. I hope you like it.

Please let me know questions/comments and I will post more later.

1st Dig Workshop 2.0 a resounding success!

If you attended the first Digital Camera Worshop 2.0 this past weekend, then you know it was a resounding success. The weather was beautiful, and the Mercer Arboretum was not too crowded so that it was very easy to get around and explore the concepts Mark has been teaching in the 1.0 version of the Workshop.

Thanks so much to Mark Depew for setting this up and Bill Page for allowing us to have this workshop.

I will post some of the pics I took with an explanation of what was behind my mind and settings in the camera for so too often, we see a picture, but are not sure how or why it was taken.

Please feel free to post questions within the comments section and send pictures to me or Mark for review.

We were so glad to see those who showed up and those that wanted to, but couldn't, we are hoping you can show up when you can. There are two more field trips this month: one on March 10 at the Memorial Arboretum just inside 610 on Memorial; and the second on March 17.

Thanks so much for coming and we hope you had a wonderful time.