Austin Imagery: April 2011

HIGHlights & lowLIGHTS of my week:

I'm totally shooting in manual all the time now- wooohoooo!!! However, my subjects (kids) quickly become impatient while I'm taking FOREVER figuring out my settings. Patience does not run in the family y'all!

My confidence of my camera skilz increases every day... until I attempted panning. Grrrr panning, I will get you one day!

Speaking of panning... I took about 500 different pictures trying to master this! I tried it on my husband (who gave up running for me by the way), I tried it numerous times with my kiddos, and then a light switch turned on in my brain. hehehe (insert evil laugh here). My problem was either over anticipating the movement or it all being blurry from me not being so steady. So I grabbed my handy dandy camera, some tape, a hanger, and my son's train set. I set everything up on my turn table, and wahlaw! I just turn the table, hold the shutter button, and see a very clear pic of Thomas The Train with a super blurry background. Only problem is, I got a good panning shot that didn't make me feel something when I looked at it. So it didn't make the cut. But I was super impressed with my MacGyver-ness!

A different issue I had that made potentially awesome pictures suck, was when I was shooting for a frozen action shot. With my shutter speed around 1/1000, my aperture was super low. I do love this because I'm a super low aperture junky (I like the blur), but if I was shooting more than one person, all of the faces weren't in focus.

I spent all week going to different places & shooting different events, but the pictures that made the cut were of my kiddos. Cuz it's Easter, and they're so cute and all :)

This weeks theme: FAMILY FUELS THE CREATIVE SOUL :)

Blurred Action

1/30, f/18, 400

Panning

1/40, f/22, 100

Frozen Action

1/1000, f/4, 100

What I learned this week:

Don't do a photo shoot while wearing sunglasses. lol. I'm still laughing at myself over that one.
Don't wait until the last night to view and post your pics. They just might not have turned out how you wanted them to.
Take the time to crack out a handy dandy tripod if your shooting in low light at a high aperture. Blurry pics will make you very angry at 1:00 in the morning.
When all else fails, do what ya got to do with what ya got :)

These are my "new" set of pics I took around midnight because I learned the hard way from my many mistakes (listed above). This weeks theme: "Procrastination is the fastest way to perfection". I didn't make that up peeps, I really heard that somewhere- lol.

Story Telling Aperture

f/22, 2.5, 400

Above is my "landscape" picture. hehehe. I deliberately added things on the table so you could see that everything near and far was in focus. And I intentionally put the lights in the pics so you could see the rays.