Dean's Light Box

Photo a Day: Day 8

On the trip to Guardsman's pass, we spent a few minutes hiking up a trail at the top of the pass which took us through a few nice wooded areas. In one, I found a few details of interest.

Photo a Day: Day 7

Hey Lucy has a reflective moment in Idaho City.

Photo a Day: Day 6

EV likes to paint from time to time and this caught my eye:

Photo a Day: Day 5

This evening while heading down to pick up the trash bin from the road, I snapped this shot of one of the little blue butterflies that grace our hillside.

Any votes for this one?

Photo a Day: Day 4

On that same trip over Guardsman's pass, DD and EV graciously stopped by the side of the road for a few minutes while I took a shot of this meadow with the Wasatch ridge in the background.  Incredible day to see some incredible mountains:

Any votes for this as an entry in the state fair?

Photo a Day: Day 3

A couple of days after my birthday, we had a little excursion to Guardsman's Pass--a partly unpaved road that connects Big Cottonwood Canyon and Park City in the Wasatch mountains.  I took my new lens which was still a bit like a set of new shoes that you're not quite used to yet.  Fortunately, my handy zoom served me well at 18mm for this wide-angle vista shot:

Ok viewers, we've got a state fair competition coming up.  If you're willing to help a photographer that sometimes suffers from tunnel vision when it comes to choosing the best shots for entry, please let me know whether any of the last several posts have a shot at winning.

Photo a Day: Day 2

Sijbrich took EV and I to a rather pleasant nature park in Boise early last week.  The park features a couple of ponds, lots of trees, and a surprising number of animals given it's proximity to downtown.  One of the first things that caught my eye were the dragonflies defending their territories by the pond.  While my 18-55mm zoom is not technically a macro lens I have found that it can focus closer than most other non-macro lenses and works reasonably well if I'm very patient and find a bug that's willing to forgive my presence.

Taken at 55mm, 1/160th of a second, f5.6.  What I learned:  I might need to stop down the aperature to f8 to get the wingtips in focus.  I'll have to work this carefully, however, because then the background might not end up quite as creamy (bokeh, soft focus).

Photo a Day: Day 1

Coming off of our weeklong vacation where I did not check email or answer mobile calls for an entire 8 days, I'm on a photography roll.  I've learned a ton in the last few days about environmental portraiture so to keep that learning up, I'm going to see how long I can post a photo per day.  I don't want to impose a lot of rules and decided that I didn't actually even have to take the photo the same day I post it.  The main idea is to keep learning something new about the photographic process, including the "darkroom" portions (i.e., processing the digital images in Adobe Lightroom).

Here we have day one, another shot of my little sister and brother-in-law:

About the image and what I learned:   An alley-way, downtown Boise.  I experimented with flash, reflector, and natural light.  In the end, I liked the gold reflector look best.  Sometimes it seems that black and white conveys the right mood and the composition and pose seems to work nicely with B&W here.  I used Lightroom 2 to crop (originally they were closer to the center of the frame), convert to black and white, tweak the greyscale color mix (i.e. telling lightroom how to represent each original color with a specific shade of gray), add a slight vignette, and tweak a few other items.  If I could do this shot over, I'd move them to the right so that Mr. P's hair isn't lost in the black bricks.

Sijbrich and Mister P Photo Shoot

Last week we met up with Sijbrich and Mister P (among other family members) for a few of days and worked in a couple of hours for a photo shoot downtown.  Here are a few samples:

I like the new lens quite a lot though I'm finding it a little tricky to get the right aperature/depth of field combination.  Sometimes I capture decent shots in terms of lighting and composition but one of the subjects will have softly focused eyes.  I'm finding that f4.0 and higher is usually necessary.

Lightroom 2 is also very handy--I really like that I can use both of my monitors now and the selective editing is pretty impressive as well.  More to come soon.