Factory Girl

A couple weekends ago, Speed Racer, Speed Racer's Dad, and I went on a little photo trip.  We were all in the mood to get out of the house and take some pictures, despite the bitter cold.  So we headed off and came across this cool factory.  It was creepy, musty, and had huge holes in the floor.  It would have been perfect for a horror film complete with scary scratching metal sound every time the wind blew. Ironically none of brought our tripods.  It was a sunny sunny day and we didn't think we'd be inside.  So some of my pictures didn't turn out, but some were fun anyway.  Also Speed Racer and I were sharing a camera, so some of these are his....and some I can't remember if they are mine or his.  I should have known better, I mean camera 101, ALWAYS HAVE YOUR CAMERA.  I got lured in because I love my husbands camera and it's one of those things, if I had brought mine, we would not have gone out.  Such is life.

This is one of Speed Racer's photos.  Great detail of the glass pipes.

Another of Speed Racer's and probably one of my favorites from the day!  I just love it.

I feel that I must end with a very important note from your sponsor.  DO NOT DO THIS ALONE.  For reals people, as a fellow photographer I understand taking risks to get fun, cool, new, exciting shots.  However, as a former rescue squad volunteer, these shots are not worth your life.  So let's roll over the basics.  When shooting urban terrain whether it's at night or abandoned places, always have a buddy.  Do you have your buddy?  Second, always tell someone who is not with your buddy or your group where you are and around what time you will be back.  I am very serious about this.  It takes one false step to fall down a hole, break a leg, have no reception, and no one know where you are.  So be responsible so that you can have fun and everyone else can enjoy your future photos too!

It's for fun

Did you know photography is fun?? Crazy! I know.  But it is in fact fun.  Here is a teaser of some shots that I took a couple of weekends ago.  It was a sunny weekend, and it was nice just to go and take some photos for fun.  You should try it sometime.  For realz.

ABCs

E is for Elephant.  I don't know how many times I said that this morning.  Learning the alphabet is an important part of children growing up, but it can also be a helpful exercise for photographers.  Not just because, "Me photographer, me need to know how to speak and write," but for many reason.

The other day I went out and about Knoxville and tried to find letters.  I had a specific word in mind because that helped me focus a little bit more.

But you would be surprised how hard it is to find letters, "in nature."

I love this exercise because it makes you look at the world differently.  It's a lot harder than I thought it would be.

I encourage you to try this, even without a camera!  It really helps you "see" objects not just how they are but as how you would like them to be. (Deep, right?)  So in the end I ended up with the word I wanted.

I'm still going to play around with the letters more, and also try to find some more letters.  Feel free to share what you find!

Hello, Monday

The day after coming back from vacation is always a rough one for me.  I have a sense of "coming back to reality"and trying to play catch up, while really all I want to do is go bask in the sun. There are good things about coming back from vacation though.  It's always good to realize you're home, to be kissed hello by a husband who maybe, (maybe) missed you, and to sleep in your own bed again.  But even then, I usually spend the first week back, thinking about my vacation and smiling at all the great moments.

This vacation my family and I spent at Pipestem State Park in West Virginia.  We stayed in a cute little cabin at The Resort at Pipestem, and were fantastically isolated in the woods.  It's always hard, for me, to find a balance between activities and just being lazy on vacation, but this time I think we got it right.  We usually got about one activity in a day, whether it was cards, playing life, archery, hiking, boating, swimming, or horseback riding.  There was even a little mini golf...I won't tell you my score, because I would just hate to brag that much.  And between it all I was able to get some couple portraits in of my Brother Jack and His wife Pockets, but more of that later.

If you've never been to Pipestem State Park, I highly recommend it.  The park is clean, there are a variety of places to stay from the lodge to tent camping, and the staff were all really nice.  So without further ado, here is a lovely mix of our activities.  Sorry there aren't more of the swimming, archery, etc type activities...I had my hands a little full.

Camera Basics: White Balance

Are you having trouble with your pictures coming out too blue? Too orange? Too purple? Okay, so let's hope not purple. Odds are you're not setting your white balance correctly.  But don't worry, we're going to get that all straightened out, and you'll have beautiful, regular colored pictures in no time. There is a lot of scientific, intense information on White Balance (WB), and I'm sure if you google it you can get really in depth.  However, we're just focusing on the basics and easy terms here.  Essentially, there are many different types, shades, and temperatures of light, and our eyes are very good at perceiving them, but our cameras are not.  White Balance is the process of removing unrealistic colors from your photos, so that the objects that appear "white" or even in color to your eye, also appear so in your photographs.  As always, it's easier to explain with examples.

We are going to be focusing on this section of your display screen, so ignore all the other settings for right now.  If you need to, put the rest of your settings on Automatic, just this once, so you can focus on what we're talking about.  You can access your different White Balance settings by pushing the WB above your top display screen, and then using your large wheel to move in between the settings.  So here we have it set on AWB, that's Automatic White Balance, and is probably what most of you have had it set on until now.  AWB is good, but it is just the camera making an estimated guess at what the best white balance would be for what's going on in the photograph.  You're going to run into trouble with it if you have multiple light sources, or low light.

Here is an example of AWB.  Pretty good on average.  It's a little too cool at times for my taste.

Next up is your sunlight setting.  It's that happy little sun icon.  Obviously you want to use this when it's sunny outside, or you're near a window where you are getting primarily sun coming in.

I think this looks a little better than the AWB setting.  It's a little more vibrant.

The icon of a house casting shade, is your shade setting.

Obviously, you would want to use your shade setting actually in the shade and not in the middle of your back yard like I am.  But I primarily want to show you the difference in the tones.  Your shade setting is going to add back in some of the golden you would lose, if you were just on a sunlight or AWB setting because it is compensating for some of the lack of direct light.

The cloud of doom!! Cloudy setting folks.

Still adding in some golden tones, but not as intense as the shade setting.

Light bulb!  That one is pretty self explanatory.  You want to use this indoors when you have Tungsten light.

Again, this is just an example of how it would look on the wrong light source, it would look just normal if I was inside.

That icon is suppose to look like a fluorescent bulb.  You know the old ones in your elementary classrooms  that would sometimes go out and half the class would be left in darkness?  Yeah, those.  It's confusing to us young folks who now have fluorescent bulbs that look like regular light bulbs.  But if you take a picture outside with your camera on fluorescent, it will look like this:

Not pretty.

Flash!  That's right, you would need to use this setting when you have your flash on.

When you don't it looks kinda blue.

This little guy is suppose to look like a gray card, I think.  Anywho, this is your custom white balance setting.  If you have a gray card you can custom set how you would like the white balance to be.

Mine is not custom set at this time, so it just kinda looks normal.

K is for Kelvin.  Kelvin is literally what is used to measure the temperature of a light source.  Kind of confusing, but think of a burning fire.  Lower levels of heat are orange and yellow and red, at higher levels it is blue and white.  Thus the different "temperatures" of light.  This setting allows you to set the color temperature over a broad range.

Now we're going to look at examples of using white balance correctly and incorrectly:

So here, I am in the shade shooting on my sunlight or daylight setting and it's a little blue.

Correctly, with the shade setting on.  Brings back some of the golden colors.

Disturbing photo of Ms. Brisco.  She wasn't too happy about being woken up to have her picture taken.  But this is on the Tungsten (light bulb) setting, and you can see the colors are even.

With the sunlight setting, you can see it's way too orange, and she's done with letting me take her picture.

Finding a more willing subject, here is another example of with the sunlight setting indoors with a tungsten lamp, and then the correct setting.

So there you go!  You're on your way to getting great looking pictures.  A few parting words before you go.  If you have lots of different light sources, say you are inside, with a lamp but there's a big window beside your subject with natural light coming through, what should you do?  You want to do what you can to make one light source the dominant source.  So either choose a setting to shoot on, and edit later if you have editing software, or close the shades, so the Tungsten is your dominant, or turn off the lamp.  You could also use a flash to try and blast out the other options.  But just try and think of which setting is going to give you the most even colors.

Also, color as always, is subject to opinion and taste.  In other words, if you like a photo but it's on the wrong setting, no biggie!  This is a creative art, and it's always fun to experiment.  I like most of my nature shots as realistic as I can get color wise, but for people I like to have a little warmer tone.  It's all about preference, so have fun!

Pinhole Photography

Lately I've been thinking a lot about art.  My darkroom is still in transition, still lots to figure out about water pipes, and demolition.  But I have been absolutely craving to do a pinhole photography project.  Pinhole Photography is tons-o-fun, very easy to do, and you can get a lot of creative effects. Hanging above my desk is a pinhole photograph that my photography professor took of me for a class example in college.  It was one of my favorite wedding presents that we received.  In the foreground is a statue, one side is lighter than the other side, I think he was showing the difference in exposure times.  Then he had me stand on the right side for a certain amount of time to get a ghost image.  I love the mystery and the ambiguity of the photograph.  And in some ways it's like seeing a ghost of myself from back in college.

A Pinhole Camera is a basic camera without a lens.  Really it is just a box or object with a very small hole in one side that light passes through.  Whatever you use for your camera needs to be primarily light tight, and you will need to make some sort of shutter (I usually used electrical tape).  Getting the light right in pinhole photography can be a bit of a trick.  It can take anywhere from 5 secs to hours of exposure, depending on your light situation.  When it's done right pinhole photography can have exquisite tones, eerie ghost images, or funky focus.  You can make a pinhole camera out of an oatmeal can, a hat box, a regular box, something that can fit in your mouth, or (I've never actually seen this but I've heard about it) a red pepper.  Supposedly the light that does come through the skin of the pepper is similar to that of a red safe light in a darkroom, so it wouldn't expose your sensitive paper.  But like I said, I have yet to experience this.

One of my favorite artists is Ann Hamilton.  She does large scale installations that deal a lot with textiles, as well as photography, language, video, and sound.  Some of her works include Indigo Blue, Corpus, and Myein.  They are absolutely beautiful and moving, but also deeply thought out.  It's fantastic to hear how she speaks about her work as well.  One of my favorite photographic series that she did, though,  was called the "face to face" series.  In this series she made a pinhole camera out of a small plastic container, small enough to fit in her mouth.  She used her lips as the shutter and would open them to expose images of the people she was talking too.  Obviously she would have to keep her mouth open for quite awhile to expose the image, and she talked about the social awkwardness of having your mouth open while staring at someone's face.  In the photographs you can see the outline of her lips.  It's very interesting and you can check out some galleries of her work Here and some videos of her HERE.

Pinhole is a great way to get some fun, and beautiful images.  Sometimes going back to the basics can inspire and intrigue us in new ways.  If you decide to give pinhole a try, all you need is: photographic paper, your object that you are going to make into your camera, I suggest a small strip of metal to drill your hole into and then attach to your camera, something for a shutter, and lots of tape to seal up any holes or light leaks.  And then of course you will need somewhere to develop your pictures.  I'm hoping to do some pinhole soon, I'm just bursting with ideas.

Beach Bummed

I miss the beach.  This is a fact that I cannot ignore.  For over a year now I have been living in a landlocked state, for the first time in my life.  I grew up near or on the water, and I miss the smell of salt in the air, the heat that is so close it's like a hug, and the soft powdery feel of sand beneath my toes. Unfortunately with the way the summer is looking, I don't think Speed Racer and I will be able to make a beach trip this year.  We have always gone to the beach at least once in the summer, it's a ritual, it's a need, it's a raw animal desire...see? I start to get a little dramatic when I don't get some beach time.

The day the above picture was taken of me, was a day that my parents will never forget.  At that time we only lived about 30 min away from the beach, and on the weekends in the summer, it was a fairly common ritual to hit the sand.  This day in particular the beach was packed.  When I was that age, I never really went farther than the water front without my parents, and after some lounging in the tidal pools I decided it was sand castle makin' time.  One of my favorite parts of sand castle makin' time was collecting beach items to decorate my sand castle with.  My Mom started getting the buckets together and asked me to collect a few shells to put on the castle.

I started collecting and I guess got a little farther away than planned.  But what really did me in was that I lost our blanket in the sea of blankets and passed it on my way back.  I have no idea how long I walked.  But it was long enough that eventually I started to get scared, very scared.  Finally in frustration I just sat where I was and started to cry.  Luckily I was right in front of a lifeguard station.  The lifeguard came down and asked me if I was lost.  Being told so many times to not talk to strangers, it took me  a while to warm up to him.  But he showed me all his official uniform items, and his radio, and said that he was a good stranger and that he was going to help me.  He took me up on the lifeguard stand, gave me some crackers and some water, and radioed down the beach for my parents.

I can't explain the relief I felt when I saw my parents (or now that I'm older, the relief I'm sure they felt when they saw me!).  They took me back to our blanket, where my two brothers explained they thought I had drowned...and may have been a tad happy about it (no annoying little sister, yay!).  All kidding aside, they hugged me and explained how worried they were and how hard they had searched the beach.  It was a great reunion, and that's where that picture was taken.

With such a traumatic experience you would think I would be afraid of the beach or the water, but no.  If anything it strengthened my love for the beach.  For me it is a place to be alone, a place to get lost in the roar of the waves, and a place where the ever changing scenery is all I need.  It is a love that Speed Racer and I have always shared.

Here are some of my favorite beaches and watering holes.  Some of the pictures are not mine but hopefully the people who took them won't mind sharing.  They are all family and friends.  Hopefully this will give you a taste of the beach, even if like me, you can't get there this year.

Camera Basics: Depth of Field

On our last camera basics post we talked about camera settings and Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority, and Manual.  We lightly touched on what aperture is and depth of field, as well as shutter speed.  Today we're going to talk about how aperture affects your depth of field and how depth of field affects your pictures. Depth of field is literally, the "field" in your photograph that is sharp or in focus.  Your aperture is what determines your depth of field.  Smaller aperture number 2.8 means the larger the opening in the camera is (I know it's confusing it's backwards!), the higher the number like 22 the smaller the hole and the more that is going to be in focus.  Let's use some pictures to illustrate, that always helps me figure it out a little better, and after all this is a photography site!

For example if your aperture is set at 2.8 (wide open) you are going to have a shorter depth of field, meaning the things closer to you will be in focus and the background is going to be soft and out of focus.  Here is a prime example of that.  The red circle highlights the area that is in focus while the background is out of focus.

Here is another example.  In this photograph my aperture is set at 5.0, shifting the depth of field more towards the middle.  Now I am highlighting the corner of the lantern (yes it's a funky lantern, oh the things we use for examples).  This allows the closest part of the object to go out of focus, while also keeping the background out of focus.

Again, as we continue up the aperture numbers, this is at about an 8.0.

And all the way up.  Now, even though aperture controls your depth of field, the point on which you decide to focus on is obviously also going to change what is in focus and what is out.  For example if I were to zoom out in this photograph but keep my aperture at 12-22, then everything would be in focus, not just the back ground.  But I am choosing to focus on the background.  But I am also able to do that because of my aperture being set at the higher setting.  Confused yet?

Sometimes it helps if you take your camera lens off of automatic focus, set it to manual and then set your aperture.  See when you move the focus what is in focus and what can't be in focus at that setting.  That will give you a little better idea of what I mean.

Most of the time I prefer a short depth of field, meaning I keep my camera at 2.8 a lot.  I think it just adds an intimate feeling to the photographs.  But even in this picture I should have paid attention a little bit more and got his little antennae in focus as well.  Focus and depth of field help you tell the viewer what is important to you.

Like pretty flowers...

And tomatoes...

Here is another example of changing the depth of field within the letters on the truck...

A little bit farther out on the focus...

More over all in focus.

Although I prefer the shorter depth of field, there are times when having everything in focus is nice.   Like for large sweeping landscapes, or group shots, or big honkin' trucks.  If you take a landscape picture for example at a shorter depth of field (but you want it all in focus) it may look all in focus at the time, but then you'll get it home, put it in photoshop and go, "why is that mountain back there fuzzy?" Same with group shots, it will look wonderful but then you'll exclaim when poor ol' Uncle Bob is all fuzzy.

The only last thing to remember is that as you're changing your aperture, remember that you have to adjust your other elements like shutter and ISO to compensate for your lighting.  So, if you're in Aperture Priority (AV) your shutter will adjust for you.  But remember to change your ISO if you're going from inside to out, or sun to shade.  If you're in Manual, remember to keep your eye on that light meter in your viewfinder and change your shutter speed when you adjust your aperture.  Now go out there and have some fun with depth of field!!

Morning Portrait

My lovely friend Ms. Holly is in town this week and staying with me while Speed Racer is in NORWAY...that's right I said Norway.  But more on that later.  So Ms. Holly was a good sport and let me take some lovely pictures of her this morning, we went out and had a good time.  And here are the results!

Cades Cove

If you live near Knoxville, you know about Cades Cove.  It's part of the National Park and is a fantastic place to get away, read a book, ride a bike, enjoy nature, and maybe...just maybe takes some fantastic pictures.  I love Cades Cove.  Speed Racer's Uncle (also a photographer who puts me to shame) took me up there a couple Friday's ago for some fun shooting.  I'm sure you will see many more pictures taken there, but here are just a few of my favorites.