Burst Mode On

Quiet again, I know. Life keeps getting in the way. I went through a little spasm of photographin' there for a minute, then we decided to try to buy a new house. For various reasons I won't get into this is kind of hard on me. I doubt I'll have time or energy for photography until at least a few months after this is done (which with any luck will be sometime in July.)

But I did manage to take a few pictures.

This is an aspiring model named Brittany. (Not Britney. Brittany is a fine old name. Britney is... not.) Yet again, high-ISO fast-lens madness.



The backlighting is a streetlight: it was absolutely pitch-black outside other than streetlights. Here's a picture I took of her where I literally could not see her through the viewfinder.



Here's me gettin' all Ryan McGinley, except that it was kind of cold to ask her to run around naked. But it's Cute Young Person In Hip Yet Unstaged Circumstance With Direct Flash Lighting, so that should at least get a C for effort.



M More after the jump - click here!

Placeholder.

And so I pause on a very grey and icy Christmas Eve morn to say two words. I've been busy with work and family matters and even when I'm not "busy" with them, it's hard to concentrate on other things that seem a bit frivolous, such as photography. I got a "lateral" promotion at my day job - same title, but additional responsibilities, a new office, and a minion. Never had a minion before. It's actually kind of worrisome. I know *I* can look busy, but now I have to either make sure another person also looks busy or I look bad. We'll see how that goes.

Anyway, as soon as this family thing is resolved - which, sadly, probably won't be much longer - I really do want to try to get back into photography. It's just that scheduling things in advance is a bit of a fool's game at the moment.

Anyway anyway, I gave my father and my grandmothers digital photo frames for Christmas and preloaded them with several hundred family photos. They were a huge hit.

You can give these to even non-techie types if you a) preload them and b) make sure that they are such that if they get turned off or unplugged, all you have to do is turn them back on and they go into slideshow mode. I don't know what kind of industrial design school dropouts they've got designing the interfaces for these things - half of them don't even have a shuffle feature - but you can find acceptable ones if you shop around a little. They've gotten quite reasonably priced, too. I got 15" ones for not much more than a hundred dollars! That's big enough even for older people whose eyesight isn't the best and/or larger rooms.

M More after the jump - click here!

For Your Consideration.

We took my daughter to the county fair today. Since we got there just as the Midway opened, we had to wait in line to buy tickets. There, apparently sent by the God of Metaphorical Photo Ops, I saw these two.

I call this, "Jackie Spratt and, Um, Jill Spratt."



I don't know (nor would I care to wager) that they are anything other than friends and/or relations. They might have even been total strangers waiting for their kids. The title is not meant to imply a spousal relationship. I just thought it was funny.

Incidentally I don't recall that Jack Spratt's wife had a name. In the nursery rhyme tradition I have called her Jill. I also considered Jane. Incidentally incidentally, you can't read it at this resolution, but the sign reads, under the "Notice" section:

Due to the design of the seating safety device on this ride, exceptionally large people may not be able to ride.

I think Jill is dead out of luck. Sorry, Jill.

Comments invited.

M More after the jump - click here!

Perpetual Motion Machines

Or, as most people refer to them, "Toddlers." A co-worker of mine asked me to shoot pictures of her daughter, who'll be a year old next month, for the birthday announcements. I took her birth announcement pictures, and apparently she was pretty happy with those and asked me to do it again. "Why not?" I thought.

Well, this year we took the pictures at Grandma's house. (Grandma has a really nice back yard.) I wanted to start early, both because the light is better before the sun is too high, and because I don't like being hot. :) After bravely navigating the path to Grandma's (my co-worker's directions had a MAJOR error that I only avoided because I knew roughly where Grandma's house was already) I waited the half-hour that I knew I would wait* and they arrived...

Surprise #1. Another couple, with a baby about the age of my co-worker's. Huh? When did I agree to shoot two families?

Surprise #2. They brought their dog. Their very large, extraordinarily slobbery dog. This dog nailed my lens with goo from ten feet away. Impressive.

Anyway, into it we went. One of the great "secrets" to child photography is to get down to their level. Pictures of the kid looking up at you - and I'm over six feet tall - are not very interesting. However, the getting up and down is wearying when you also weigh over two hundred pounds. And up and down for two kids. Whee!

Her kid is just adorable, and was very cooperative for a one-year-old. I can't complain, really. The dog was not. There were just too many people running around and he couldn't stay put. Oh, well. You do the best you can with what you have where you are.

Used quite a bit of fill-flash until the batteries in my strobe died (some knucklehead forgot to swap in fresh batteries.) It helps a lot, especially in direct sun. The yard had lots of shade and lots of sun and the kid was constantly running between, which made the exposure work fun. I did go two-gun and wear a camera with a zoom lens and one with a fast prime.

My favorite pictures, by far, were from the prime. I shot in AV (Aperture Priority) mode with the lens opened way up. I got quite a few pictures that were a little fuzzy (although I have auto-focus on a priority button and switched to Servo mode, so not as many as you might think.) But the ones that were good were great. Soft, buttery backgrounds with lovely circular highlights. And with a lens opened to f2.2 or so, even in deep shadow and at ISO100, I got shutter speeds low enough to freeze the kids and the dog. In direct sunlight I was almost maxing out the shutter! (Fastest shot I saw was 1/4000.)

Here's grandma's backyard with the prime opened way up. (f1.8 for lighting test, lens's max aperture is f1.4.)



Darn, I just love a fast lens. I only shot a few lighting tests without anybody in them and my co-worker hasn't given me permission to post any pics with people, so that's all I got for now. I'm out.

M

*My co-worker is hardworking, intelligent, and talented, but amongst her many gifts, "punctuality" does not lie. Her husband, so far as I can tell, is even worse. More after the jump - click here!