Summer Fun...

It's that time again...summer is upon us! Over the weekend we spent the day at Mark's parents place just relaxing and spending time with our various cousins. This was a great opportunity to try out the new camera and learn all the controls before our trip.

Plus it gave me more opportunities to try out some of the cool presets that I have for LightRoom! I'd downloaded a bundle a few weeks ago and have been itching to try them out on something. Little M girl above was having a field day with her ice cream.

Since we were taking pictures pretty much at noon time, the lighting was tough. However, Little K was lying on the swing under the pergola so it was a little easier to shoot her. I love the soft and squishy preset that I applied to her pic.

Bubbles were a theme of the day and after a while they figured out that slower was better when trying to make huge bubbles. N was watching little K run around in the above shot. I like the old skool preset - it's just a little boy and his bubbles!

A few of their bubbles were picked up by the breeze and sent soaring - much to amazement of N and K. All in all a very relaxing day spent with family and friends. Now if every weekend could be like that I might just say I'm in heaven!

New Camera...

With our trip to Europe coming up soon we thought it would be an opportune time to upgrade our camera body. We've been talking about it for a long time and just couldn't bring ourselves to spend the cash.

Well, a trip where we'd be spending most of our time photographing things combined with the increasing frequency of errors on our old camera topped off with an unexpected bonus and some over time means we could finally take the plunge. We bought the 50D from Canon with a new walk about lens with image stabilization.

So far we're really happy with it. The 15MP makes a difference as do the higher ISO's, less noise, and better color handling. Plus it has senor cleaning, focal lock indication, and easier to use controls for ISO, white balance, etc.

I could go on for days but instead I'll leave you with this one last picture....From the amazingly fragrant magnolia tree at my neighbors!

TTV What....

So, I've always read about this concept that's called TTV (Thru the Viewfinder) photography. It's where you take an old camera with a large enough viewfinder (Kodak Duraflex or the Brownie I have), construct a light shield out of a cereal box and point your DSLR down the tube to take a pic of what's actually showing in the viewfinder of the older camera.

It's actually a pretty slick concept that yields neat square vintagey type pics of ordinary things. Most folks take the images into Photoshop (or in my case Lightroom) and crop them down then apply fun presets/filters/effects to them. In the few I have here, I didn't actually do much. Just kind of punched the color and cropped them.

I did download a few presets to try but most of them needed some tweeking and I'm actually okay with how they came out without the fun presets. Guess I'll have to find other reasons to use those - what to do what to do....!

Now, I'm still getting the hang of this TTV thing and find that focus is a really hard thing. I have my 50mm prime lens with a 12mm extender on which I may or may not need. I definitley need to play around a bit more with it. The extender tube narrows my focal area and is likely why i'm having trouble with the focus. Regardless, I think these first four came out cool.

There are lots of places on line to find info on TTV and even a bunch of Flickr groups that are dedicated soley to the craft. The most comprehensive tutorial i found was this one: http://www.russmorris.com/ttv/index.html. For all 4 of you that read this, tell me what you think!

Round 2...

Well, the late spring/early summer plants have started to bloom and a walk around the house today gave me a great opportunity to take a few shots (while still in my PJ's..ha). I did a little post processing on these guys just to make the texture stand out a little more. The lighting was pretty nice as it was only 9:30 or so in the morning.

It was everything I had to keep Macie out of these plants so that they water droplets remained untouched. We've had a lot of rain lately and this is what was left on our Peony plants. Pretty cool if you ask me!

Then, right next to the Peony plant was a double bearded Siberian iris (I think that's what it's called..). Not much done to this image either aside from a bit of saturation to the yellows.

Uncle Mark...

This past weekend Mark and I drove up to eastern PA to visit with the fam again and see our awesome little nephews. We lucked out and caught a break in the rainy weather and were able to spend the afternoon outside playing in the grass. Uncle Mark is just a riot apparently since B could not stop cracking up at him the whole time.

I think it helps that Uncle Mark is a jungle gym and amusement park all wrapped up in one. These shots took little retouching, just a little exposure control and some vignetting to pull your eye to the center of the photo.

This one of little K I decided to play with a little more. He was not cooperating and did NOT want his picture take but I did manage to get this one of him all sullen on the rock. It wasn't much to look at out of the camera but is kind of neat with an antiqued look to it.