I love watching wee one’s at play — especially little girls. It has a way of taking me back to the days of my own carefree childhood where hunting or hiding treasures was a part of everyday life.
aperture, shutter speeds, and vantage points
My photography skills are very much under development. Up until now, I have mostly played around in manual mode. By this, I mean every setting on my highly technical camera has been automatic leaving the only variables as my creative eye and ability to hold the camera steady.
For a long time now, I have yearned for more. In Yosemite, I was lucky enough to have a skilled photographer friend nearby at Tunnel View telling me (in response to my desperate pleas) the exact settings to use in order to attempt to preserve the moment. This essentially took the “manual” out of manual mode making it a different form of automatic.
I bought a couple of books and glanced at a number of websites, only to fumble around blindly trying to picture what the words on the page were actually directing me to do.
Lately, another skilled photographer friend has been helping me learn the craft. He has been explaining these basic concepts one at a time to me. The new information is allowing me, the budding photographer, to come out of auto-pilot and take off in new directions. Not only that, he has been letting me borrow his lenses one at a time to play around with the various concepts.
Yesterday, we took a field trip. While I introduced him to my favorite open space, he showed me creative ways to play around with composition and depth of field. Each marveling at how differently our creative eyes view the same 1 mile route. While one of us was drawn to a bird, the other was focused on a rabbit.
Life on the Farm
Over the Moon
You’re probably wondering when my fascination over the moon will end. And rightfully so. I am forever wooed by it.
Tonight, it caught my attention before the sun was even down. Hanging low in the sky, it made sure that I saw it as soon as I walked outside from my work day. I rushed into the house for the camera and headed outside as quickly as I could mount it on the tripod. It didn’t even matter that the wind was blistering cold and I was without a jacket. The moon was calling… and it needed me NOW.
Men at Work
Across the freeway, there are men hard at work on a building of sorts. Way up towards the sky they work. They are there when I arrive at work in the morning and, as far as I can tell, do not seem to break for lunch either.
But at the end of my work day, they have all but vanished. Which is probably because they can see the long line up on the freeway.