Jer & Min Photography

This shot was setup by my kids.  I told them the theme and we brainstormed on how to show a school on Sunday.

I made heavy use of spot metering for this photo.

On Thanksgiving Day last week, my family and I were in Bern, Idaho to celebrate with my Father’s family.  We had a tremendous turn out and every ate until we could eat no more.  After the lunch, my sister Chandra and her husband Chris asked if I would take a few portraits of them together.  I agreed acknowledging that there wasn’t very many “interesting” backdrops at the location we were at and due to family obligations we couldn’t exactly go hunting for better locations.  Knowing this, we shot the majority of their shots from an angle slightly above them to use the grass as the background.  It was a fun experience and they got some pictures they were quite pleased with.

Here are my favorite three photographs.

Saturday evening I talked my daughter into letting me take a few pictures of her.  While I was scouting out a good background and workable light I noticed she was occupying herself with some little leaf project.  I have no idea what she was up to or trying to accomplish, but I decided to take a few pictures of her gathering and transporting the leaves.  She seemed almost frantic to get it done.  It was fun to observe and the results were the best shots I made that evening.

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: