Day 148 – Birthday Present!

Yes, I’m spoiled rotten. I know it.

Sweetie gave me a Canon EOS 7D EF-28-135 IS USM kit for my birthday. I’ve had my eye on one for a while and I’m really, really happy with it. It’s much heftier that my Rebel T1i, and has a wider range of capabilities. ISO starts at 100 and increases at 1/3 stop intervals up to 6400. Very, very little noise at the highest ISO (one of the comments I read over and over and over again about this model). Also, 100% field of view means the photo I compose in my viewfinder will be the photo the camera will produce. No unknown stuff around the edges. I took it out for a whirl today. Here are just a few of my shots. Very little processing done to these, just a bit of sharpening of the RAW files.

Close-up of a buckle on my leather jacket.

Rose in the backyard.

Nina on a walk-about in the backyard.

Jezebel by the light of the living room window.

This was my only flash photo…Maya by the front door. Exposed for outdoors with flash used to equalize the indoor lighting.

Day 112 – f/1.8

Playing with my 50mm lens again today. I really love the flexibility it provides as far as depth of field, but with opportunity comes challenge. Today I experimented with very shallow depth of field. It is quite the challenge to find that sweet spot, but oh how I love the effect of falling off focus! f/1.8 was a bit too tight, so I stopped down a bit to 2.2. The best results of both are below.

ISO 100, f/1.8, 1/200s, 50mm

f/2.2, ISO 100, 1/30s, 50mm

Day 94 – 50mm

I got a 50mm lens! Unlike my zoom lenses which will only allow me to go to f/3.5 at 18mm, this lens allows me to take my f/stop all the way to 1.8. I took it for a test drive today. Here are just a few of the photos I shot.

Day 61 – Cooperative Kitteh

Busy day! No chance to shoot anything worthy of posting here. Luckily I have critters!

We had a guest speaker tonight in our lighting class. He gave a rapid fire presentation on Speedlite flash photography and my brain is reeling. It will take me some time to absorb what he told us, but I did latch on to a couple of concepts and had to try to apply them when I got home.

I learned the difference between TTL mode and manual mode and how to lessen the intensity of the flash so I experimented with stopping down the flash so that it wasn’t as intense.

This is Maya. She was resting on the back of the sofa about an arm’s length from me. Shot at 100 ISO, f 9.0, 1/160s. Manual flash at 1/4 which I learned tonight (a) how to do and (b) is not one-fourth of intensity but rather 2 stops down. Thank goodness she puts up with me!

Day 27 – Tangled Tree and a Kitteh

I wanted to share this with you. I took this photo in the same field where I shot the wagon wheel. Behind the wagon wheel (lower left of this photo) there is a tree with a wheel that, as the tree has grown, has been absorbed into the tree itself. One of these days I’m going to sneak through the barbed wire to get a really good look at it.

Normally Maya is a bit aloof but every now and then she wants to hang out and tonight was one of those nights. She paused on the end table and I was able to snap quite a few of her lit only by the table lamp. She looks so sweet and soft.