Day 280 - The Monochrome Setting in your Camera

Before I could start complaining to anyone about how tired I felt, I decided to do my shot of the day.  I've become such a nag unto myself, lately - have to keep nagging to do the shot of the day, otherwise I am all eager to slack off.

I've had too many weekends with no rest and some commitment or the other, and that's finally gotten to me.  But you know the best part?  I'm going to be on vacation one whole week, starting Monday!  Yayyy!

I have quite a few errands to run, appointments to keep, but I'm going to try and finish all that by Tuesday, so I can just relax and do the stuff I haven't been able to do in a long time - watch a movie, listen to music, read a book and of course, do some sunrise and sunset photography.  I'm hoping we'll get some snow, so I can go out and do some frosty sunrises.  Let's see what Mother Nature has in store for me in terms of that.

These shots are of my little box of mints.  I took the shots in this dark and dingy part of my workstation because I was compelled to remain at it for a want of energy.  High ISO, and therefore the noise.  Soft focus, because the shots were handheld on an unstabilized lens on slow shutter.  No, I don't want to make excuses, but I'm just sayin'... ;-)  

What I did today was set my camera to the Monochrome setting, and then compose the shots.  

So why shoot in "Monochrome"?  Read my how-to blog to see why.

Day 223 - Relearning the Alphabet: The Letter "J"

Starts with J - J for Jujubes

Please don't blame me, if in the next few days you forget your alphabet and relearn it slightly .. ahem.. differently (read backwards).

Well, as I'm running out of inspiration again, and the weather isn't helping, I thought I'd start something I have been wanting to do for a while, but had put on the back burner.  So, while I still had a small supply of jujubes, I decided to start my alphabet with J.

These images were made with the 90mm lens, with the lights off, external flash fired at 1/8 power level, light bounced off the ceiling.  The ISO was jacked up to 1600.

90 mm, f/20.0, 1/8s, WB set to Flash 

90 mm, f/14.0, 1/8s, WB set to Flash 

90 mm, f/9.0, 1/8s, WB set to Flash 

The colour cast is a little disappointing in the last one, and I'm not quite sure why that happened.  I kept the post-processing to a minimum - removing colour cast, increasing exposure, contrast and a bit of sharpening.

Please help me out with ideas for the other letters of the alphabet!

Day 196 - Macro Week - Tender Coriander

I'm truly in the doldrums, as I told one of my very kind Flickr friends!  I am actually a little low on energy and inspiration because I've been a bit under the weather and my son has been more ill than I was.  However, he seems like he's finally on the mend; but I'm quite exhausted.

I was going to use this bunch of coriander leaves in my cooking, and suddenly decided to turn this into an image.  And the droplet was an idea right after the first shot - I love doing water droplets, except this time I didn't have a lot of great ideas/objects to use for the reflection.  So I grabbed the first thing I could find and took a couple of shots quick, quick!

90 mm, f/5.0, 1/6s, ISO 800, flash fired at - 2, Manual Mode

90 mm, f/29, 13s, ISO 100, Aperture Priority

Day 149 - Bailey's filled chocolates

I am starting to get into indoor mode already.  So, the first thing I did was to dust off my external flash that I had bought a few months ago and started experimenting with it.  I recently bought a few coloured bristol boards to use as backdrops, so along with my backgrounds, flash, and a steel serving tray that I use as a reflector, I got to work.

I used my 90mm lens for this shoot as the weather was pretty gloomy and I needed a faster lens to keep the ISO as low as possible.  I still had to have it at 400.  Most were shot in manual mode with the exception of the last one that was shot on AV.

With flash at a 60 deg angle to camera right at 1/64 power.

 Same set up but with flash at 1/16 power. 

 Off camera flash was pointed at the ceiling at 75 deg.  The on-camera flash was covered with a piece of paper to filter off the light since the camera was barely a foot away from the subject.  

This one is SOOC, shot only with ambient light. I think this is by far my favourite shot.

The top one was shot with the flash to camera right, at 1/16, and the steel tray used as reflector to cast a kind of rim light on the chocolate to the right at back.  The bottom shot was with ambient light and the reflector at camera right.

One of the last shots of the evening, I had a really hard time exposing the chocolate in focus.  I intentionally kept it away from the window side so I could use my flash/reflector to see how that would work.  I can't say I like this one much at all, but it was a good exercise to see how I could work with it. 

A fun shot - I seem to like doing this a lot lately! ;)

This was actually the very first shot that I used as the basis for the rest of the shoot.