Archive for the ‘Family’ Category

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.

Are You Ready For Some Football?

This past weekend my son had his first flag football game against the Sooners. Most of the game consisted of running plays, but we actually pull off a screen pass that went really well. It was fun watching them on the field. After a couple of plays, they seemed to catch on to what was going on. He almost had a touchdown, but his loco legs got a hold of him and brought him down.

Despite a few little meltdowns and a fire ant attack, he did good. But most importantly, he had fun.

Surprise!

This past weekend my wife and sister-in-law threw a surprise birthday party for my mother-in-law. It turned out really nice and I was able to get a lot of shots of the festivities. Like I mentioned in my DSN post, I don’t get to shoot a lot of events, so I enjoy it when I get the chance. This is what photography is all about. Capturing those special memories you want to keep forever.

Taking indoor, low light photos is always a challenge when you don’t have a good lens, so most of the pictures were doctored up a little. I didn’t break out my external flash, so I used the on-camera one which had to be toned down some in post processing. I also found auto focusing was an issue at times, but the Nikon did pretty good with picking out the right settings in Priority mode.

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