It was good to get out
February 14th, 2011
Decided to see if there was anything worth shooting over at the Forest Grove “Arboretum”, such that it is. Funnily enough, one of my best shots was from my iPhone (and my best iPhone picture ever) before we even got out of the car:
picture of trees through car windshield while it's raining
Of course I was none too amused that it started raining pretty hard just after arriving but it let up quickly enough.
The arboretum isn’t particularly thrilling and there just weren’t a lot highlights with almost everything being so dormant but I did manage to get a few good shots:
Chestnuts (1/365)
Pale Yellow
Ponderosa Pine
Lace in the Sky
The Meaning of Gnarly
Even better though, having to really look for something to shoot and actually coming up with shots I liked reminded me just how much photography really makes you stop and look. Stop. And. Look.
And in other news, working with all these photos and viewing a ton of other photos on Flickr today showed me just how out of whack the color/contrast/brightness/gamma settings were on my TouchSmart display. Took some time and got that sorted out. “Green” still isn’t quite right but I’m not quite sure what it needs to bring it up to snuff. Another little task for another time, I suppose.
Back into it
February 12th, 2011
Canon EOS Rebel 2Ti with 15-135mm f/3.5-5.6 Zoom Lens
So, I have a new toy. I’ve been wanting a nice digital SLR camera for a long time. I can’t say that they’ve gone down in price all that much over the last several years but the feature to price ratio does seem pretty high these days. That combined with the fact that I decided to use a good portion of my car insurance money to treat myself to a few things, meant I was in the market for a camera. After some limited research on camera models, I chose this one and then spent way too much time researching lenses which is where the real value/cost seems to be ;-)
So I’m combining / celebrating by resurrecting this old blog that I never used much after setting it up almost two years ago. (I hate that I go in and out of phases for writing/blogging but there it is).
I took my first 35mm/SLR picture when I was in my early teens by way of an odd little hobby: model horse showing — the idea being that you set up your (realistic) “toy” horse (Breyer is an insanely popular brand) in a realistic setting, take a photo of it and then enter it in a “show” by mailing the picture and the list of classes to enter the horse to the “show judge”.
I learned a lot about photography during the many years I was involved in that hobby.
College came along and then getting settled as a young professional so for several years my interest in photography waned only to pick up again when I got hooked on going to music concerts. That brought about a whole other learning curve ;-)
Then film photography got expensive and my desire for a digital camera kicked in. My husband bought a fairly nice point and shoot camera but I was never very satisfied with it. Then for a while, being able to take photos at the drop of the hat from my iPhone was kind of fun but I had to totally forget about expecting real quality.
And now the next phase of my life with photography is kicking in. I’m very very happy with this camera and I’m probably going to take an evening course next spring just to see what more I need to learn now that I’ve made the leap to DSLR photos :)
So, here are a few quick and dirty shots I took the other night, brought to you via the Slickr Flickr WordPress plugin (which I really like, by the way):
I just wish it weren’t February, the dead of winter for all intents and purposes — almost no color in the landscape, garden, or anywhere else :p I’ll have to figure out something, most likely go for a drive tomorrow… because now I have an itchy trigger finger!
