Day 172 - Soft focus & bounced flash

My experiment today would have been to use my YN460 flash to light the background to make it look white.  Instead, it turned out that the flash wasn't behaving itself at all, and consistently turned out some really gray backgrounds.  I switched over to custom white balance and then decided to use the flash to bounce some light into the centre of the flower as it was showing up really dark.  That didn't go too badly and I did get the centre to lighten up a little.
I was hand holding the camera since I couldn't find my tripod head and the soft focus was purely accidental.  I had a bit of camera shake when trying to shoot the gerberas.  I found the soft focus actually looked pretty nice on the LCD screen of my camera and instantly decided to try and play with that.  So, I intentionally took a few shots with a soft focus and then touched them up in Lightroom.

250 mm, 1/8s, f/9.0, ISO 400, Aperture priority

250 mm, 1/4s, f/9.0, ISO 400, Aperture priority

250 mm, 1/5s, f/9.0, ISO 400, Aperture priority

Day 171 - Still catching up

Handheld @ 55 mm, 1/8 s, EV -0.67, f/14, ISO 100, Aperture Priority

Day 146 - Portrait of a duck

I went out with my photo club members to learn about portraiture from a fantastic photog and a friend.   I had to sneak in a duck shot and a shot of the underwater vegetation while he was setting up.  I almost never give up a chance of shooting random stuff and in fact these were the only shots I took of these because I noticed this duck all sleepy and it was being spun around with the water current (see the ripples around it by enlarging the photo)

Since I don't post people shots without their permission, I will have to wait to get it, so I can post a couple of shots from the lesson.  We were basically learning how to bounce off light from one reflector to another to create a soft fill light as well as use another reflector to get a hair light.  Excellent lesson - can't wait to try it out for myself sometime soon.

But for now, here's something different!  I did very little post-processing on these and I'm really surprised to see how well the colours have turned out.  The sky was very blue and the slanting rays of the sun actually hit the plants underwater and I was able to get a good shot without a C-PL.

Day 121 - Nothing like a strawberry milkshake

I've been feeling quite under the weather the past couple of days, and wanted some quick nutrition options to start my day.  Fresh strawberry milkshake, topped with a swirl of low fat whipped cream and a cherry!  That's what I call comfort food!  I'm not very happy with the colour cast because I forgot to set the WB and my PS skills are awful and I couldn't make any effective correction.