Tag Archives: photography

The Best Medicine

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"The best medicine in the world, without any side effects, is a smiling face."

We are hoping this saying holds true.  I had the privilege to photograph some of my favorite people this week and we had a blast.  Lots of smiles and laughter during the session.  Some more sober thoughts and lots of prayers while editing.  You see, the pictures of these beautiful faces are going to be hung in their father's ICU room, where he is in critical condition.  Visits are limited so we bringing a little bit of home to him this way.  I would ask you say a prayer when you see this post for a gentle man and the woman and children who absolutely adore him. 

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Covenant

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"And God said, 'This is the sign of the covenant which I will give between me and you…'" 

oil spot
Rainbows aren't always overhead, in sun-splashed parting clouds. 

Very often they are right there underfoot, in the midst of our messy spills,

the sticky spots.

You just have to look for them.

Sharing a moment of grace with the ladies at Suscipio this week:
"They were there, these moments of grace. They may have been fleeting and the noise and demands of life may have tried to drown them out, but they were there."

Housekeeping

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dollhouse
Her room was put in beautiful order, to her closet and shoe-bag, and she even stopped to put a clean cover on the bureau and dust nicely, to show she had not forgotten a single thing. The halls and parlors had to be thoroughly dusted now, but as none of them needed sweeping it did not take very long, and there was still time to go to market.

dollhouse

 

The mother looked around her. "Everything is very nice," she said. "The sink is clean, and so is the pantry, and so are all the dishes. The range is bright; the dish-towels are washed; the dining-room is in order. I noticed as I came through the other rooms that the bedrooms, bathroom, and parlors have all been looked after to-day, too. Margaret, I do believe you are as good a housekeeper as I am already."

dollhouse Feb 2012 dollhouse abbie web

Margaret laughed as she took off her apron. "But I just love to do things," she replied, as she went up-stairs.

– A Little Housekeeping Book Caroline French Benton, 1906

Weekend Photography Tips – zoom and lens distortion

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Chances are good that if you have a compact or an entry level camera you have a zoom lens either built in or that came as part of your kit.  Most of us love the flexibility of a zoom lens.  It does a lot of legwork for us.  Understanding the perks and pitfalls of your zoom feature can really improve your photos. 

First let's address the two kinds of zoom on most compact cameras – digital and optical. One is good, the other is to be avoided.  When you use optical zoom, your camera lens is extending to its fullest focal length.  This is a good thing.  It can greatly improve the composition of your pictures, drawing attention to your subject and eliminating distracting backgrounds.

When you continue past that, the digital zoom kicks in.   This is a bad thing.  Digital zoom basically crops your image and enlarges part of it. You lose quality with every increment further you zoom in as seen here.  When you get that image onto your computer you will see more pixelation and less clarity.  You want to take advantage of your optical zoom and avoid the digital zoom. 

Here is another good reason to become familiar with the various lengths of your camera lens: lens distortion. The best example of this is found in self portraits, where the camera is held by the subject.  Things can appear a little wonky.  Noses become predominant.  You may notice this as well in pictures taken of children when mom gets too close with the camera.  

The reason for this is that most compact cameras and dslr kit lenses have a very wide angle at their low end.   Mine came with an 18-105 lens originally. 18mm, its widest focal length, is not much different from a fisheye lens if you are close to your subject.  You can see examples of that here. 

A wide angle is really nice for taking in a sweeping panorama.  It is really awful for taking a picture of a person within a few feet of your camera.  Better to back up and zoom in a bit than to be physically close when shooting wide.  

lens diptych

Weekend challenge:

Get a willing volunteer to sit for you take the same picture of him/her from very close and zoomed out.  Then step back and zoom in a bit more with each shot, trying to keep the same amount of person in the picture each time.  Got to the end of your optical zoom with this experiment.  Then upload your pictures and see what you get.  

 You may have heard that the camera doesn't lie.  Well, it does. In fact the camera records the same image quite differently at different lens settings.  

This page gives a good visual comparision of the effect of various focal lengths.  50mm is usually considered to be 'normal' perspective.  It is pretty darn close to what the naked eye perceives.  The further you zoom OUT (lower number, lens is pushed back to camera) the more pointy and narrow the face appears.  The further you zoom IN (higher number,lens protruding out of camera) the more the facial features flatten out and become more flattering to the subject.  Most zoom lenses perform best somewhere in the middle of their range. 

 

 

Tiny Worlds

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Our theme at Snapshots Around the World this week is Reflection.  It's actually been a personal theme of mine for a few weeks now.   An article I read recently made the point that if you take the obvious shot, chances are it's been taken countless times already.  Now, if you are traveling, you are going to want the obvious shots anyway for memory keeping's sake.  Still, it's a good visual exercise to also look for less obvious perspectives.  

A good for instance was this pipe we passed while wandering around waiting for my husband's race to finish.  It was a rainy day and I just caught this pipe out of the corner of my eye.  It stuck straight out of the ground and was full of rain water. 

Dec 2011 tree pipe reflection web

Looking closer I realized it also contained a perfect teeny tiny image of the very large tree it sat under. 

Dec 2011 tree pipe reflections close web

We'd love to see what you notice this week.  Come play along! 

Weekend Photography Tips – starting with what you’ve got

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Increasingly, the letters and comments coming in here ask about photography.  What gear do you recommend?  What books should I read?  How do you….?   If you frequent the blogosphere you have probably run across some stunning images on many inspiring sites.  You may have dreamed over capturing your home and family in similarly breathtaking vignettes.  So you start surfing, start experimenting, and often hit a wall.  

I am a linker more than a writer and I don't like to reinvent the wheel. So if I can point someone to available info I do.  But I noticed that most of the tutorials out there focused on manual photography and presumed a lot more background knowledge than most people just opening the box on their camera possess. There are workshops available, but those often run several hundred dollars and fill up quickly.  And those workshops also require a dslr camera, often with a prime lens.

Many moms writing with questions don't have fancy cameras nor the time nor money to learn to use one. Most people are pointing and shooting.  And that is ok!  There is good news and bad news for wanna-be momtographers.  Let's get the bad news over with first. 

The pro-mom-tographers online are by and large shooting with some pretty amazing gear.  Most pro photogra-bloggers have fullframe digital cameras, the two most popular being the Canon 5d mark II and less often, the Nikon d700.  Some, like Pioneer Women step it up even further with the likes of a Nikon D3X.  Some of the most popular lenses used by photographers I know are the Canon 50mm 1.2 and the Nikon 70-200, just for general reference.  Are the dollar signs adding up? they have been for me over the past several years.  But wait.  That's not all. 

Most of those images are edited with software like Photoshop CS5 and Lightroom 3.  (That changes annually.  The photography community is abuzz with discussion of the new Lightroom 4 upgrade.) Often those images are also processed with photographic actions and textures which can run $30-130 per set.  In order to ensure everyone is seeing the same colors the camera/monitor/printers are calibrated using software running a couple hundred more. Those gorgeous photography flash blog templates run $100-300+.  Someone needs to install and personalize them.  The list goes on.

There is an old saying that it's not the camera, it's the photographer.  This is true.  And false.  A master photographer can totally rock out a point and shoot shot, largely because he/she knows the principles of exposure and can use light, angles, and the compact camera's tools to their highest potential.  However, there is no getting around the fact that good glass (and all the rest) does make a difference.  Pro's aren't investing $1200+ per lens for kicks. The technology is improving all the time and today's equipment can produce images only dreamed of years ago. So, assuming you know how to use it, yes, better gear can mean better images.

Does that mean you need to break the bank to capture beautiful pictures of your life?  Nuh uh.  

A periodical I read as a young woman used to run a column called What is in Your Hand?  It challenged us to look creatively at what God had already blessed us with.  Are we using all our current resources to their fullest potential?  Do we know our gear inside out?  Are we tapping into all the tools available on free or near-free online editors? Very often a friend will complain about her pictures and a quick look reveals a simple fix. 

Advanced imaging gear may or may not be in your future but you can probably be taking better pictures with whatever you have right now.  Case in point, my son's friend who sold black and white images taken on a disposable camera. 

So first things first.  Get out the manual your camera came with. You don't even need to read it all right now. Start with a few basics.  Check your file size and quality.  Are you set to Large for size and Fine for quality?  Start there.  Anything else is not going to look great when you print.   We had a string of bad pictures from the point and shoot on trip once and realized it had been set to email attachment image size. 

If you have ever played around with settings, or have children who may have,  be sure you know how to return to the camera's factory default settings.  Again we had an instance when I first started to learn manual photography where I went a long stretch with underexposed images.  After much desperate surfing I realized that I had hit the exposure compensation button and it never resets by itself. I hadn't yet memorized the icons on my LED screen and had no idea it was even on anymore.   My manual told me how to reset the camera and we were in business again.  So go ahead and experiment!  But know how to start fresh again. 

More to follow.  Come visit next weekend. : )