Expressions

Expressions of a three-year-old. It's kinda neat what memories you can make just sitting around the dinner table on some random night...especially when you have a calm, cooperative kid and a fast lens.

Here's what I did to capture some precious moments. Around my dining room table I noticed that we have some nice soft light coming from the chandelier overhead. Since the light intensity was not that great, I knew I needed to break out my 50mm f/1.8 and boost the ISO on my camera to at least 800. To meter, I switched to spot metering and manually dialed a +0.7 to +1.0 exposure off the cheek facing the light and locked it in. At f/2.8 I was able to get a shutter speed of 1/25 sec...good enough if I I hold the camera really steady and JCO doesn't move too fast.

Ok, now that I have the exposure down, time to make some interesting pictures. My strategy here was to ask JCO to impersonate a particular feeling or word...like "sad", "angry", or "flying". I'd then snap a few shots and show him the picture on the back of the camera. He found this very amusing and asked for another word. We shot some more, looked at the shots, laughed, and shot some more.

Good fun, priceless memories, on some random night, around the dining table.

Glider Port

This month's assignment was another location : Torrey Pines Glider Port in La Jolla, not to far from my work. I was very lucky that on the day I decided to go snap some pictures, there was some tropical moisture passing through creating interesting cloud patterns and crepuscular rays and made for a beautiful sunset. Hopefully I captured some of this beauty.

I decided that the main subject of this session was going to be the sky and I was ok with allowing the paragliders to be dark or even silhouetted. My approach here was to set the camera to manual exposure mode and exposed to protect the highlights. In other words, I took several test shots while monitoring the blinking overexposed highlight warnings on the LCD. Once the blinking is just limited to the a very small porportion of the highest highlights or completely gone, I lock in the exposure and shoot a series of shots. Of course, light changes fast in these situations where the sun sets behind dense clouds, so I adjust accordingly when I sense the scene get lighter or darker.