Portraits

Off to the market again with camera and flash...

I asked this lady to pose for me and am quite pleased with this natural shot. Some minor post processing with curves, crop and removal of a small background imperfection. I like the narrow DOF which isolates her from the dark background which still has some interest, and she looks smart and fresh despite her age. I may try doing some alternate images (in post-processing) for this one...

Digital Photography Practice 1

Well I've enrolled on my new course, DPP 1 and am looking forward to my course material being delivered. I've also put in a large order on amazon so I'll have lots of reading to do in my (non-existent) spare time. Exciting. I'm starting a new blog and it's located here. Please visit some time and see how I'm doing. I'll keep posting the odd interesting (or not?) thing on this blog too.

Deleting Photos

Does anyone else feel a sense of guilt when deleting photos off the computer? I rarely do it, but as our computer has told me it has 1.5GB left of space on it, I have decided to have a cull... I often take a couple of shots when trying to get the right picture, but sometimes can't decide which I like best so just keep them all. I star the good ones and just filter to look at those, so never see the slightly blurry/out of focus/just not right photos. But really, it would be better to look at them all and get rid of the ones that are no good, but I find it hard. I'm rationalising it by saying, well I took it in the first place so I should be able to remove it, but I find it's particularly hard when it's of a loved one for example!

I think part of it is not having a good system for rating photos. I tend to 3 star anything I like and then occasionally give a 4 or 5 star to something really good, but I should use it more rigorously than that, and perhaps delete anything that doesn't get a star at all. I'd love to hear how other people get around the issue of taking thousands of photos and dealing with them afterwards without just buying more and more hard drive space!

However I must admit it feels a little cleansing to start with 150 photos in a folder and whittle it down to 50. It makes the browsing experience much more pleasant certainly! It's probably also good to realise that while it's great to make the most of digital and take lots of photos from different angles of the same scene, it's better to take time at the taking and get it right with one or two shots. Something I'm learning as I progress in my studies perhaps...

But there are some photos that are keepers no matter what technical quality they are... my son must be the most photographed little boy ever (or close to...)

Dress ups

Middleton

I visited the seaside town of Middleton at Christmas, and I captured this image of the open sky and water. It's not much of a landscape as it has no foreground, but I feel like it captures the summer warmth I felt at the time.

Skater Girls

We were at the park today and I had my camera with me with my 70-200mm telephoto fitted, which is quite unusual at the moment. There were some girls on skates who I thought looked very retro and cool skating on the netball courts, so I decided to try to capture them for a few minutes. I have not done much photography at all the last few months so it was a bit like getting back on my bike, and particularly using this lens which is quite different to my shorter (24-70mm) telephoto. Nonetheless, I got a couple of shots which I am pleased with and post below. The light was late afternoon and quite flattering, and formed some nice shadows for the background grass and trees which are nicely out of focus. It felt good to take some photos just for me without any specific purpose except to capture some images.