DVC Training

A selection of pics from the DVC Training handgun class I attended over the weekend. I'm pretty sore, but physically I performed better than last year, so I'm proud of that. Generous use of sport mode on the camera resulted in 1,236 images I have to sort through, but here are some highlights.

DVC's slogan is, "Hope is not a course of action... TRAIN!"

Consider the lillies... or maybe the tulips

Had a nice day today with an abundance of sunshine, so I took a moment to get out of the house and take some pics of the perennials that have made their yearly appearance around our property. Put the camera on full manual controls, set the ISO to 200 manually, and snapped away with different apeture sizes to experiment with field of view. With the apeture opened up all the way to the stops the field of view is insanely short, which I really find intriguing. Occasionally using a touch of zoom, and focusing very carefully, I did my best Georgia O' Keefe impersonation.

F5.6, 1/1600


F4.5, 1/320


F14, 1/250


F10, 1/125


F36, 1/60


Hey, this isn't a flower! What are you doing here? Why is my camera being sniffed?

Sunset and the pear tree

After days of wind and rain, we caught a break today and had a nice warm sunset. Morgan and I noticed that the pear trees in the backyard have started to bloom, so I took some pics and we played with the dog for a bit until it got dark.

I'm really happy with these pics because they haven't been digitally altered to adjust the color saturation or anything. The lighting was just THAT good.





I did take a bit of flash photography of the blossoms themselves. For being flash photos, they came out pretty well. Beautiful little blossoms that portend heavy fruit later on.

Fire! More fun with shutter speeds

I had the camera in the car today, on the way home from the office, when I came across the fairly common sight of a local farmer burning a junk pile near his horse corral. Inspiration struck and I pulled over and asked permission to take pictures of the fire. It didn't strike him as anything worth taking pictures of, but he humored me.

Again I set the camera to Tv, shutter speed priority, which has to be my favorite camera mode because I use it so often when feeling creative. I hadn't really explored the upper reaches of the camera's shutter speed and here I was in bright daylight-- I thought, lets see if I can make the fire stand still!

First, I started very slowly. With the apeture closed all the way to F36 (which the camera's computer simulates--the lens itself physically only goes to F3.5), the image still overexposed greatly with a shutter speed of 1/4th of a second. I had to bring the gamma down with the computer afterwards to create this image, which is kind of a creepy one if you ask me:


In the corners you can see that this shutter speed actually captured quite a bit of blue flame. Oooooooh...

I started to creep the shutter speed up. 1/15th of a second:


At 1/400th of a second the fire looked pretty realistic. The mirage effect of the large amount of heat being generated was also being captured realistically:


I continued to take photos with progressively faster shutter speeds. 1/1000, 1/2000, 1/3200, etc., until I finally reached the insane shutter speed of 1/8000th of one second. The result detail captured by the camera is pretty neat:



1/8000th of one second shutter speed. Did I mention this camera is cool?

Lets Play Ball!

In order to cement our status as true blue fans of the Kansas City Royals, Morgan, Greg and I went to the "open house" sneak preview at the newly rennovated Kaufmann Stadium on Sunday afternoon.

The Curse of the Royals Spring Promotion struck, as usual, and the weather was miserable-- light flurries, temps in the high twenties, and wind blowing at about 40mph. Thousands of true blue fans showed up anyway.

The stadium's rennovations are very nice, but the weather was so ghastly that its depressing to even look at most of the photos I took. Freezing cold people huddled together against the wind, in a grayscape of cloud and freezing rain. It just didn't look like baseball season, either at the event or in the photos I took there. Frustrating, but I will have other opportunities to take photos of Kaufmann in better conditions.

I did enjoy setting the 40d to shutter speed priority and taking some pics of the children's carousel they've installed past left field. I'm still having a blast with the Av and Tv modes the camera offers. I know these pics are fairly standard in composition but I really like them. I'm getting better at conveying motion while still creating a coherent image.





Outside, we located one of the best presents I've ever recieved-- a brick installed in front of Gate C as a gift to my wife and I from our friend Greg. Even the weather couldn't dampen Morgan's smile as she stood behind it.




I bought some basic materials and turned my bedroom into an ad hoc studio. I don't have room or funding for a proper studio, but I hung some white linen shower curtains from the bedroom wall, put some white sheets on the bed, and bought a couple of large shop lights for additional lighting. I can set it all up and take it back down in 5 minutes if I wish, and I convinced Morgan to pose for a bit of formal portraiture, since I have been doing candids exclusively since I bought the 40d. My primary concern was generating enough lighting and making that lighting flexible, and my secondary concern was creating a background that wouldn't distract. Of course I set my apeture wide open so the resultant field of view would be as narrow as possible, hopefully making the background blur into an uninteresting white field behind the subject. This being our first formal photo session, it took a minute for Morgan to get comfortable in front of the camera, but I was pleased with the results:




I'm still struggling mightily with flash photography, but its getting a bit better. I like my concept here, but would rather re-do it later on with better lighting, perhaps even outdoors in daylight, so I can avoid using the flash. Again with the distracting shadows, white balance issues, and loss of color depth, all so I could up the shutter speed enough to catch the ball in the air.



Even though its not remotely baseball related, I want to share one more. Of course I'm biased, but I really love my wife's eyes. The amount of detail captured by the 40d, even with ad hoc lighting is pretty cool. Morgan did a great job of holding still and putting up with having the lens constantly floating around her face. I'm a lucky man.