focal length : shutter speed

I was a regular model photographer with my friend's children. I was crawling around on my knees - taking hundreds of shots - and they were perfectly posed, exposed and framed...or at least it looked like it in the view finder.

However, photo...

After photo...

After photo...

After photo...

...was fuzzy or out of focus or something was just wrong. When I brought it up to Todd (see top right) he mentioned a ratio that I had not heard of before. Shutter speed should always be at least the same as the focal length. That should help reduce any lens shake. I'm excited to see the difference.

This last picture is here because it was one of my favorites from the weekend.

As promised

Here is the first of several new pictures that were taken that weekend in St. Louis. Enjoy.

Some things I didn't know

Thanks to my photo mentor (who will have his very own link on my blog as soon as I figure out how to do that...) I have new information. My 50 mm lens has little numbers around the ring in the front - specifically '1:1.8'

That number impacts my dof but it actually represents the largest possible aperture opening!

Another fun mistake follows:

I took this picture because the lighting was fun and I needed to take a picture of something!




The image looked "noisy" to me so I wanted to check the ISO - maybe it had been too high?

On my computer I just click on the image and then press the apple key + i and magically...all my image information appears.

However...

I was looking at this image in photoshop and so when I pressed my trusty information combo, this happened:

My history pallet said that I had "inverted" it. I still don't know what that means but I thought it was fun. Maybe I'll shoot a few things planing to "invert" them and see what happens.

They say failure is the best teacher...

Depth of field

This past weekend I traveled south from a snow filled Iowa to a 77 degree Sunday in St. Louis! More pictures from that trip will post soon but here is one in original form and after some minimal work.

This is the orig. picture - my friend's daughter was playing outside.


The following is the revised photo after "smart sharpen" in Photoshop and cropping:

I know this lovely little girl and I know her mother will like the picture - however I don't know if it has "market value." Would a stranger who didn't know her find the picture interesting?

If I could do it over I would use my 50 mm with a depth of field (dof) that can reach 1.something to blur the background. Better yet I'd get a zoom lens that has a better dof... The background is distracting in this picture. This photo was taken with an 80-200 mm zoom.

Seeing everything

You never know what you are going to get. I was really pleased with the rose pictures and had lots of fun taking them. I was thrilled to finally put some pictures up that I had taken recently! I was proud of the work I did and I also pride myself on my attention to detail...

Below there are two pictures that have a very distracting line down the middle from the background. How did I not see that till after they were posted? Pride wants to take them off immediately - but since this blog is devoted to learning - stay they will.