Cat's Photos: April 2006

Some pics from today

We had a picnic with my friend Wendy yesterday. Of course I had to get pictures of her and baby Caden. He is so much bigger and a lot more interactive than the last time I saw him. He seemed to enjoy hearing the shutter on my camera; it always made him smile.. and so did tickling his toes! :-) He's such a cutie! When Matt, Aiden, and I finally made it home, we went outside to play before bedtime, and I had some camera fun!

This is my favorite shot of the day. Her face is shadowed a bit, I had issues lightening it, but I love the color in the picture. (As always, click on the thumbnail to see a larger image.)

Here is the same picture except in b&w. It really helped to brighten her face, but I couldn't get this same effect in the color version without blowing out too much of the color. This is Robin Purcell's B&W conversion.

Here are more from our picnic:

And now for pictures of flowers! Our clematis blooms are dropping their petals, but I had one lone flower on the vine that still had lots of color.

Here are my lone iris blooms. For the past two years, I've always seemed to miss when my irises bloom. They really need more sunlight, but I can't do much about that. Matt is the one who gets rid of my shade for me using his trusty chainsaw!

A photoshoot...

Click on thumbnail for a larger view:

Another Gary Fong Experiment

f/2.2 1/80s ISO 200

More Gary Fong Bathtime Fun!!

I really need to practice using this thing somewhere else other than the bathroom, with Aiden in the bathtub.. poor child is probably going to go blind... lol..

I so love this thing... anyone who has a speedlite NEEDS it!!!

I'm finding I have better results with my flash when I am shooting in manual. I set the shutter speed to 1/60s or faster and then I just play around with my aperture to get the picture I want. The metering this flash does is AWESOME.. if you have a good clear shot of the subject, you get great shots every time. On these pics, all I did was bump curves a little bit to lighten them up some basically!! I LOVE LOVE LOVE the LS!

Springtime with Miss Brit Brit!

Click on each image to see a larger view!

Let Sleeping Angels Lie...

I so rarely am able to get pictures of Aiden sleeping, he's such a light sleeper!! But I dared to do it today. I had to have my ISO at 1000 so they are SUPER grainy.. and even at ISO 1000 I didn't have enough light where he was on my bed, so there is some camera shake going on too.. but they are just little angels when they are asleep, even bad pictures look good!

1. This was the best of the bunch. Too bad I cut out Pooh though:

2. Soft and blurry as all get out, but I tried to salvage it:

3. Weird angle.. it's hard taking pics of a baby hovering over him on a bed!

But isn't he just the sweetest little thing???

Bathtime with Gary Fong!

I should say with the Gary Fong Lightsphere Inverted Dome Diffuser... These were taken with the 580EX Speedlite, flash directed at the ceiling with the inverted dome on the diffuser. These look much better than straight-on flash or even bounce(off the ceiling) flash. It was a good $50 investment!

And for you Amber, here are pics without using the GF. Both of these are SOOC, no editing other than resizing for the web.

This one is the flash alone, bounced off the ceiling...

This one is flash dead on the subject...

Pics from the NEWEST camera!

We picked up a little Sony DSC-W50 this weekend to throw in our pockets and take with us when we don't want to lug around "The Behemoth." It's about the size of a credit card and is a 6MP camera..

We had looked at getting one of the little Canon ELPH's, but after holding the Sony and trying it out, the layout of the buttons, menus, and the faster speeds made us go with Sony this time. The pictures aren't as sharp as I'd like, but I'm really not complaining. It's a fun little P&S camera! I love how tiny it is!

Here are some pics from this morning! These are all pretty much SOOC, only some sharpening(USM) applied. The B&W was using Rob Carr's B&W conversion. I had to do something about the bright yellow glow from the slide.

For Rita...

I was doing my best to not make an appearance in my photoblog.. but since I mentioned the other day that I was rarely IN a picture with Aiden, and Rita snapped some pics of us on Sunday, I must post at least one ;-). I like this one, it's pretty cute. It was a tad blurry, so I sharpened it with USM.