Hollywood Cemetery II

There is something incredibly creepy about coming across and old stray dog sleeping on someone's grave. At least I assume he was a stray. No collar and looked like he slept outside a lot. I think he may have been blind too. I wanted to get better pictures of him, but I was also afraid to get too close.

Hollywood Cemetery

White Balance

Lesson two was about white balance. My cheapo digital has 4 settings - auto, daylight, tungsten and fluorescent. These picture are all essentially the same with just the white balance changed. This actually gives some pretty cool effects. I know the same could be achieved with Photoshop, but it's less work this way and instant gratification while you're taking pictures. Also, I'm taking a photography class not a Photoshop class so I'm doing it this way.


Daylight


Fluorescent


Tungsten

Cheating

I decided I wasn't going to photoshop any of these pictures, but I cheated with this one. The main reason is when viewed on my camera or on the software Kodak gives you (which is crap) it lightens the picture to look about like this. When viewed any other way it's almost completely black. I kind of liked this one so I went ahead and adjusted the lighting so I could put it out here.

Snow

These are not your typical snow pictures, but I was taking them at night so you can't expect too much. I stood on my porch (safely out of the snow) and took some pictures right by the flood light. I tried varying shutter speeds and f-stop settings and these are what I got. Actually I got a lot of pictures, but these are the best of them.

This was the first one. Of course I don't remember the settings for any of them, but if you really want that info is usually stored in the data with the picture so you can look find out.

This one had a bit more light in it so you can see the tree in the background.

And again the same tree you're sick of seeing by now. Still I thought the patter of the snow with a slow shutter speed was pretty cool. I think I got the best pictures set on about 2 seconds. I don't have a tripod but it's dark enough that nothing looks blurry.

For anyone looking at these pictures and asking why is someone putting pictures this bad out for others to see, you've only got to look at the title of the blog and question why you are here.

First Class

Our first class dealt mainly with shutter speed and f-stop settings. I have a very basic digital camera and took some very basic pictures. Still it was fun to try out some new stuff I never knew how to do. Our assignment was to take some pictures out our back door, so here's what I've got.

This was just a basic picture of a tree in the back yard. The sky looked kind of cool and since our back yard is not looking especially good right now I thought it would be a good starting point.

On this second one I tried a different angle and let in a bit less light. Kind of changed it from a bright sunny day to looking like a storm was coming.

On the last one I kept the light f-stop the same but changed to black and white. Nothing too impressive, but I thought the effect turned out okay for my first attempt.

My first post

Okay, since this seems to be the cool thing to do, I'm going to start a blog and see how long I actually keep it up. I'm taking a digital photography class and decided I would post some pictures I take on this site. It's the best of both worlds - bad writing and bad photography.

Here we go - yeeeeeehaaaawww!