Jer & Min Photography

My sister Emily doesn’t particularly like to get her photo taken.  I took it anyway.  Here is a picture of my beautiful sister converted to black and white.

As I’ve gone through my photographs of this weekend, I found my favorite which is of Brinci catching snow on her tongue.  What I really like about this photo is how seriously she is trying to catch snow flakes and that if you look closely, she has caught one on her tongue that hasn’t yet melted.   Click on the image to pull it up in flickr where there is a note showing her catching one.  From flickr, you can click on the “ALL SIZES” button above the image for larger image with more detail.

The Canon EF 50mm f/18 II lens is amazing.  It is a very fast prime lens that is capable of creating great photographs.  I’ve been shooting with nothing but this lens all weekend to get used to it and familiar with its strengths and weaknesses (as of this writing, the weakness column is pretty short).

Here are a couple of the strengths I’ve found so far:

1. f/1.8 – This is a great low-light lens.
2. Bokeh* – Part of having a huge aperture is the benefit of having a very shallow depth of focus.  When wide open, the bokeh is absolutely beautiful.
3. Sharpness* – I am very impressed with the sharpness of images created by this lens
4. Price – It is less than $100.  Enough said.

To demonstrate the Bokeh, Sharpness, and shallow depth of focus achievable by the f/1.8, I’ve included the following photograph.

For this photograph, I focused on Min’s eyelashes.  As you see the bokeh shown on Min’s lower portion of her face is very creamy and quite beautiful (it helps to have a beautiful subject).  To view the shallow depth of field and the sharpness of this image, I’ve cropped a subsection of this photograph below.

You’ll notice, the only portion of this shot that is in focus is part of the eye.  Bokeh begins around the far edge of her eyelashes.  Additionally, notice how sharp and defined the actual individual hairs are.  To see a larger image, click on the photo.

I’m really enjoying this lens, I’ll put each shot I take with it in a set on flickr as a mini-project.

* Things such as Bokeh and Sharpness I have no way of offically quantifying other than my impressions and opinions of them.

Toby in the snow!

So I’m currently in my 50mm weekend and I’m loving it.  It is taking a bit of getting used to as this is the first time I’ve shot with a fixed focal length for any period of time.  I wish I could go out and about a bit more with this lens this weekend, but it is really snowing hard which means time for portraits.

I’ve been evaluating Lightroom 2.0 (I’m definitely going to buy it) and I decided to do partial saturation today.  Here are the results:

This weekend I’m going to shoot with only one lens, my 50mm f/1.8.  This is quite a sharp fast lens especially for the price (<$100).  I’m pretty excited about doing so and will post my photos.

Last night I had high aspirations of shooting some B&W landscape photography, but the weather didn’t cooperate at all.  We had low clouds with no contrast whatsoever.  I only kept the shot below.

Having not met my goal, I moved on to a different type of subject: neon signs.  We have exactly one of neon sign in our little valley.  It belongs to a new roadside diner that moved in called the Road Island Diner.  Here are the shots I made.

Although I didn’t accomplish what I set out to do, I had an enjoyable time and especially like the last shot of the lights reflecting off of the car.

One of the shots I’ve wanted to try is a long exposure at night while cars are driving past.  I like the motion and the colors I see in other people’s photos when they make similar photographs.

Last night I set out to do just that.  It turned out to be more difficult that I originally thought.  The difficulty had nothing to do with making the photograph, it was getting willing subjects to drive past.  I live in a very small town East of Park City, UT called Kamas.  It is a wonderful place to live, but not too many people moving around after dark.  I shot this at 8:30pm and had to wait for cars to go by!  I contemplated calling some friends and have them stage a drive-by but then felt that was cheating somehow.

A few things I learned:

1. Put a headlamp in my camera bag.  I had a devil of a time reading the settings display as I was trying to dial in a good exposure.
2. Turn off the IS feature of my lens.  You’ll notice some wiggle in a few of the stationary objects of the photo, this I believe contributed to this problem as I was tripod mounted.
3. Use Mirror lock-up.  This to may contribute to the vibration I saw.  Additionally, passing cars will contribute, but there is very little I can do about that.

They aren’t great photographs, but they are from my first time using my new 40D so I thought I’d publish them.  It is going to take me a bit to get used to this camera, but I’ll keep at it and see how things go.

None of the shots are landscape which is my favorite subject to photograph, but they are of my family whom I cherish more than anything.

Not really well composed, but I was trying out some different features of the camera and had a ton of fun.

My new camera arrived today.  I’ll post more about it as soon as I get done playing!

The past few days we’ve had quite a bit of stormy weather.  Unfortunately, the storm clouds were slow and unfeatured which made for very uninteresting skies.  Tonight the storm broke and the sky got much more interesting.  This shot is the last of the storm as it passed on to the Uintas to the East of our house.

EXIF: Canon PowerShot s410, 1/640 sec, f/3.5

I received a tip from Wouter Brandsma who knows a thing or two about black and white landscape photography about keeping the aperture higher with compact cameras, this is my attempt at following that.  Seriously, check out his site.

The entire time we have lived in our neighborhood, there has been a large cottonwood tree a field about 200 yards from our house.  It is referred to as the “tree house” by the kids in the area.  Our kids loved it.  I speak in past tense because it was cut down a couple weeks ago.  It is nothing but a distant memory now.  Fortunately, we also have some photographic memories of it as well.

EXIF: Canon PowerShot s410, 1/100 sec, f/2.8, taken June 14, 2008

EXIF: Canon PowerShot s410, 1/125 sec, f/2.8, taken June 14, 2008