Archive for the ‘Family’ Category

Birthday Portrait – 34

Since I don’t get be in a lot of the photos I take, I’ve started a little tradition where I do a self-portrait each year on my birthday. Self-portraits can be difficult and time consuming, but I like the challenge and try to use some of the techniques I’ve learned throughout the year.

The pose I chose was due to the fact that I’ve spent a lot of time this past year in front of a computer. While this isn’t too uncommon of me, the projects I’ve been on have kept me in front of a PC more than usual. Fortunately, I enjoy what I do, so it doesn’t always seem like work. And as for the couch, I’ve spent many late nights in that exact spot, so I felt the need to include it in the shot.

Here’s to another year.

Snow Dayz In Texas

On Thursday (Feb 11th) it started snowing in North Texas. It’s rare, so I made sure to enjoy it with the boys. For the first time we were actually able to build a real snowman and have snowball fights with the neighbors. I was able to get some nice photos over the last couple of days.

The biggest thing I had to remember was to decrease the aperture because my first set of pictures came out all white. I thought my camera was on the fritz, but realized I had it set to 2.8 for some indoor shots I was taking earlier. I lowered it to 8 and everything was all good. I also threw in some black and white shots.

Nikon D80 Challenge: Silhouette II

This photo was taken for the Nikon D80 Challenge #102: Silhouette II. The goal of this challenge was to:

A silhouette is a view of a object or scene consisting of the outline and a featureless interior, with the silhouetted object usually being black. The term has been extended to describe the sight or image of a person, object or scene that is back lit, and appears dark against a lighter background.

Many photographers use the technique of photographing people, objects or landscape elements against the light, to achieve an image in silhouette. The light might be natural, such as a sunset or an open doorway, a technique known as contre-jour or it might be contrived in a studio.

Quite simply, your challenge this time is to take a photo where your main subject is a silhouette with no discernible features visible. It should be black and outlined by the light situated behind it. The subject and post processing is up to each individual.

I think this was one of the firsts challenges that I’d gotten a decent number of votes in. I knew what I needed to do to get a silhouette, but I needed a subject. Well, once again I got my little model to help out.

He had just gotten ready for bed and I asked him to put an ornament on the Christmas tree. While he was busy finding a spot, I shot a couple of photos for the challenge.

I added a black faded border around the picture and played around with the levels to enhance the glow from the lights. I think I got a decent shot. View the image at flickr to see the camera settings.

Christmas Card Fun

A couple of weeks ago, I took the boys outside to take some pictures for our annual Christmas card. It was definitely very trying for me because they were all over the place. I’d read in a Flickr forum that following toddlers around and catching them in a pose was a good way to get a picture of them. I decided to try that along with some posed shots to see what I could get.

I don’t know how photographers did it back in the days of film because I took around 130 pictures. Most were unusable, but there were some that I was able to keep. I thought I’d share some of those along with the final poses I used for the card. The last picture is the card that I created at ritzpix.com. I probably should review their service, but I’ll save that for another post.

Playgrounds & Punkins

The weather this weekend was amazing, so I decided to take the kids on an afternoon outing to the park. Earlier that week, their daycare gave them some pumpkins and we weren’t able to go to the pumpkin patch this year, so I figured why not bring them along. My boys are my practice models and I hoped to get some shots in while they were playing.

Here’s what I learned:

• Don’t go to a crowded park if you want them to focus on you. The playground was packed and my youngest was all over the place.
• Make sure you have plenty of daylight and a fast shutter to prevent blur. I couldn’t set my shutter speed too high as the sun went down, which caused some of the pics to come out dark.
• Make sure the camera focuses accurately on the subject. Moving targets can be hard to get in focus.
• Take plenty of pictures. With digital you can always delete the ones you don’t like.

BTW: For those wondering, I know pumpkins is spelled wrong in the title. That’s how the boys say it.

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