This is one of my favourite pictures of Connor at the moment.

I really want to post a bit more here but I can never find the time to get around to it. Pretty busy with the model in this photograph.

Anyway Its good to put something here so enjoy.

Anyway he loves them. I don’t want to forget how excited he gets about them. Once they arrive he really digs in. This Saturday he ate nearly a whole plate of them himself. It was a good morning. Nice and warm in the sun. Sitting there drinking my coffee. He was alternating between his Churros and a glass of pineapple juice.

I even managed to get a couple of shots in.

Connor enjoying Churros in Casemates.

Thats not something you want your photos to be or is it.

This morning I was out with Connor my son. And I deliberately took a blurry photograph of him. I was trying to do something different you know. So he was out of focus in the background.

I couldn’t get him to look up which is a shame but anyway by pure coincidence when I checked out a site I’ve been visiting recently http://digital-photography-school.com and this was one of the new pages.

So I thought I’d put the photo up here and enter it as a submission. So there you go.

Does it work? I’ve no idea but I find it interesting and I think that’s probably good enough at the moment. So without further ado.

Appreciation for distance.

Anyway let me know what you think I’d love to hear from you.

It all looked great through the view finder so I set the exposure compensation to -2 stops (the minimum on my camera) and the exposure bracketing to +-2. So basically that was one photo at -4 one at -2 and one at 0. However disaster even with these settings when I clicked the shutter It was over exposing the image. (I took 50 shots and verified on the computer but not even one of them was properly exposed). Looking at the EXIF data they were a lot slower than the origional shots so what am I doing wrong? I’m not sure what metering mode my camera was in. Update: I just turned it on now and it was in partial metering mode.

Is it because the sky was lighter in my original shots that the camera chose a different time for the shots one which gave good exposure? Indeed I took the photograph when the sky was still blue. (but not very blue). How do I get decent exposure?

Anyway here is my favourite attempt from the first shoot. I’ve had to increase sharpness in raw mode and also add back in some brightness.

If anyone would tell me how to get correct exposure I’d be grateful.

The Moon.

I’m not sure which version I prefer so any comments on this will be greatly appreciated.

Okay first up is an HDR image of Ocean Village Gibraltar.  HDR images may have been possible before but digital but if they were they would have been really difficult.  Basically taken using three shots one light one dark and one normal.  These are then combined in the computer.  I like the cold feel to it and the unnatural look.

Secondly we have an Image of the Moon. I really like the way it came out composition wise but I’m still trying to get a final edit of this one that shows the detail of the moon very clearly.  I ended up taking over 100 shots with my camera with a 300mm lens at full zoom to try to get this photograph.  The reason it took so many is I was trying to hold the camera steady by hand. Anyone who has used one of these lenses will tell you thats not an easy prospect.

To get any image at all I needed to turn the camera up to its highest ISO so the shot was taken quickly.  ISO is basically the sensitivity to light.  Unfortunately this has brought up a lot of noise.  I hope on a later date to be able to fix this on up to the point where I’m happy with it.

The next one I’ve taken twice with two very different effects applied in Post processing. They are pictures of my eye. Yes I took a photograph of my eye. This certainly felt stupid. Thank goodness for auto focus on the camera :p.

My Eye

Finally you can see I’ve also been experimenting with black and white.  I’m pretty pleased with this shot.

Anyway there you have it.

A decent tutorial for HDR can be found at http://www.stuckincustoms.com/hdr-tutorial/ however I find the article itself to be a bit spammy.  There are wonderful examples on this page and the pages that follow however.

I didn’t us this I just used Paint Shop pro X however for my pictures.  I’ve seen some good video tutorials for this on youtube but I can’t find them right at the moment.

You can read more about ISO over at wikipedia.

The last link I’ll leave you with explains Post Processing.

So as you can all see I’m really having fun at the moment.

I’m much happier with the new situation, I’ve taken over 800 photographs since Christmas day.  Most are not good In fact I would go so far to say that a much smaller percentage of them are keepers but that’s just because I couldn’t take risks in the past. I’ve got some things together that I don’t know that I’d ever have tried before and I’ve had a lot of fun doing it.

I do want to get better though.  I really do, a college of mine at work is also very interested in getting a DSLR.  Sure its going to be more expensive than mine and I’ll probably be jealous but its going to be great to have someone to talk to who’s also sharing the same interests. He’s primarily interested in long exposures as far as I can tell. Anyway he sent me a link to Digital Photography School which I think has some wonderful learning resources on it. To be honest he just sent me a link to some wonderful examples of long exposures. http://digital-photography-school.com/long-exposure-photography

Anyway that’s pretty much it for the moment.  I’m going to post a couple of examples of photographs that I’ve taken that I wouldn’t have taken before later.  Don’t be too critical I’m just learning.