Saturday Hikes: May, week 3

Confession: it was rainy yesterday, so I didn't go on a hike.  But next weekend I'm headed to Moab, so much hiking will be done to make up for it.

Just now, I went out onto my patio to take some pictures of the allium plants that I have growing in the little garden there.  I use the term garden very loosely in this case.  It's a patch of ground that has some plants growing in it.  Someday I will turn it into an actual garden.  It will require a fair amount of work and some replanting of bulbs, so I think I'll leave that until the fall.  Anywho, I took some pictures.  Here is one of them.

f/2.7
1/1600
ISO 100
5/19/13, 12:46pm
My patio

Photoshop is a wonderful thing.  It's even better when you start playing around with more than just the quick settings like I usually do.  This looks soooo much better than it did straight out of camera.  I like the little raindrops on the bud, especially the way you can see the background upside-down and backwards in the one on the left.  I'm glad it came out as clear as it did.  I think that maybe if you click on the image to enlarge it, you'll be able to see it a little better.  I can't wait until these all bloom.  This little 2" bud will explode into a 6" ball of color.  These flowers are the best!  I'm so glad I have so many of them. :)

Saturday Hikes: May, Week 2

Last Saturday on my way home from my hike, I stopped at the 7-eleven at the mouth of Big Cottonwood Canyon.  It claims to be the busiest 7-eleven in the world, and I guess I can believe that.  There were certainly a lot of people there when I was.  There was a group of kids that wanted to go hiking to Donut Falls, a popular hike in Big Cottonwood Canyon.  One guy in the store was nice enough to let them know that there is still 10 feet of snow at Donut Falls, so hiking there wasn't really an option in their shorts and flip flops.  But he did tell them about Lisa Falls, an easily accessible, though unmarked, hike a few miles up Little Cottonwood Canyon.  I filed away that little tidbit of information and decided to go there this weekend.

My intent was to get up to the falls early enough that it would still be shaded from the direct sunlight.  I wanted to try out a longer exposure to get a nice blur on the water.  It's one of my favorite photo effects, but with my camera, it's a hard one to do.  The key is to let in as little light as possible (small aperture, low ISO) so that the image isn't completely washed out with the light coming in with the slow shutter speed.  It definitely doesn't work on a fully-lighted waterfall.  Which is what I found.  But luckily, the trail was shaded up until the waterfall, so I tried out that effect on the runoff.  The trail doesn't follow the main stream up, but closer to the falls, there is still some runoff coming down along the trail.  Here's one of my attempts.

f/5.6
ISO 100
1/6
5/11/13
Little Cottonwood Canyon, Utah

There's not a lot of water coming down at this point in the stream, but it was a good practice.  I got the effect I was hoping to get, although it would look much better if there were more water.  Oh well.  The lesson learned here is that with a little bit of water, a faster shutter works a little better.  On some of the other pictures where I tried catching the blur of the water, the water is almost completely invisible because of the longer exposure.  But with a lot of water running this slowly, the effect would be more pronounced with the slower shutter speed.

f/8
1/100
ISO 100
5/11/13
below Lisa Falls, Little Cottonwood Canyon, Utah

This is directly below Lisa Falls, in fact, in the top right corner of the picture, you can see the falls running down the rocks.  The water was moving so fast that it was blurred to the naked eye.  The joys of the spring runoff.  If I had realized at the time how close I was to capturing the effect that I wanted in this picture, I would have been even more frustrated at the limitations of my camera.  Here, I was using the smallest aperture and slowest ISO speed that my camera allowed, and I still had to use a pretty fast shutter speed to make the exposure come out okay.  The number one least favorite thing about my camera is how small the aperture range is.  I've felt this way for some time now.  It makes me wish that I had just waited a while longer, saved my money, and purchased a DSLR. *sigh*  And since my camera is only a year old (and I just bought a new dishwasher), it will be a while before that upgrade actually happens.  The good thing is that it forces me to work on other, more basic skills.  So maybe by the time I do upgrade, I'll be able to take good photos right off the bat instead of having to struggle with a completely foreign camera.

An just as a bonus, here is a picture of Lisa Falls itself.  It's a lot taller than it looks, maybe 20 or more feet tall.  I'll probably be visiting again once it's warmer outside and the water isn't so icy cold.

Saturday Hikes: May, week 1

It should be a surprise to no one that I'm a week behind.  Again.  Since the weather is starting to get nicer, I've decided to start going on little hikes every Saturday.  Lots of trails are still snowed in, but there are plenty of little trails near the mouths of the canyons that are already accessible.  Last Saturday, I went to the Temple Quarry trail at the mouth of Little Cottonwood Canyon.  It's all paved, although I definitely spent most of my time off the trail.  There was a lot to see, and I was able to get some cool shots of the dry creek bed.  There were also some mountain goats way up the side of the canyon that some fellow hikers pointed out to me.  Too far away for any decent shots, but it is not requisite to take photos of absolutely everything you see.

I've had my camera for a year now, but I'm still learning how to use a lot of the different features.  I'm trying them out one at a time and trying to get the hang of them so that I can add to what I already know and become a better photographer.  I like a lot of my pictures, but I also look at them with a critical eye (too critical, depending on who you ask).  I know I can do better once I get the skills.  On this particular day, I was playing around with the spot metering feature.  I wish I had known about this a long time ago!  I really liked seeing how different the pictures turned out, just by changing what I was metering off of.  Since this was my first time really using this feature, I took a lot of over exposed pictures.  A lot.  It'll definitely take a lot more work to get really good at spot metering, but I'm looking forward to the challenge.

Here are two unedited pictures that I took last weekend.  The thing that I find most interesting is that the only thing that was different between these two shots is what I was metering off of.

(for both images)
f/3.5
1/125
ISO 100
5/4/13
Little Cottonwood Canyon, Utah

What a difference the metering makes!  I personally prefer the second one.  Everything looks more green and warm and alive.  So, lesson learned.  Metering matters.

The Dog Park: April, Week 4

"I Got It!"
Canon SX40 HS
f/4
1/1250
ISO 200
4/27/13
Salt Lake City, UT

Hey, it's only Saturday and I'm posting already!  yay me!  So today I took another trip to the dog park.  These pictures turned out way better, I think.  I tried things out on the sports preset mode on my camera, and I got the results I was looking for.  The camera uses a 1/1250 shutter speed or faster and automatically adjusts the rest of the settings to get a good clean image.  It was so much easier than trying to make all of the adjustments myself.  Lesson learned.  Pili and I were having a good old time playing fetch with this nice stick that we found at the park.  Here she's just coming back for another toss, even though it means splashing down these rocks.  My number one favorite part of this picture is the sheet of water arcing off of her tail. It's a little hard to see because water is, after all, a clear liquid, but it's something I probably would have missed on any of my other camera settings.  I'm feeling good about the progress I made this month on my action shots.  There's still room for improvement, but I feel like I've figured out a thing or two, thanks to this little exercise.

The Dog Park: April, Week 3

"Oh, So Close" (to being awesome)
Canon SX40 HS
f/4
1/500
ISO 400
4/13/13
Salt Lake City, UT

This picture was so close to being really great.  The trouble with photographing dogs is that they move so much faster than I do.  Yes, I realize that this dog's head is missing.  But there are so many other things that I love about this picture that I decided to make it this week's picture anyway.  This dog was playing catch with its owner.  You can see the red toy in its mouth.  It was just so happy getting in and out of the water; they played for maybe 30 minutes, just doing the same thing over and over.

What I like about this photo is how the action is nicely frozen, even though it is not nicely framed.  The splashing water is just so perfect.  If only I had anticipated how quick that dog was.  Sigh!

For this trip to the dog park, I decided to use a different setting than the last trip.  For the photos from weeks 1 and 2, I was on manual mode; for this photo, I used the Aperture Priority setting.  That way I could still play around with the depth of field but not have to fiddle with the other settings.  Since it was a cloudy day, I bumped up the ISO in order to get a faster shutter speed. I think that overall the pictures turned out better than the first trip to the dog park.  As is obvious from this picture, I still have some work to do, but I'm feeling better about my action shots.  I feel good about my picture-taking ability; I just need to anticipate the action better. Next time I take my camera to the dog park, I think I'm going to try using my camera's preset mode for kids and pets.  I think that will free me up even more to try to keep up with the dogs.  I'm excited to see what the next trip brings.

The Dog Park: April, Weeks 1 and 2

So, the point of this whole photo of the week practice is to actually get better at photography.  I definitely have my preference as to the types of photos that I take, so this month, I'm branching out with the help of some friends.

This month I'm trying my hand at action shots, and trust me, there is lots of action at the dog park.  I've gone a couple of times with my friend Courtney and her dog Pili.  Pili is a very energetic 6-year-old chocolate lab.  She is my favorite dog ever.  She loves the water, and the dog park very conveniently has a creek running through it.  It is the perfect opportunity for some water shots.

"Fetch!"
Canon SX40 HS
f/5
1/400
ISO 100
3/16/2013
Salt Lake City, UT

"Shake It Out"
Canon SX40 HS
f/3.5
1/500
ISO 100
3/16/13
Salt Lake City, UT
This is a fun shot, but I think it would have turned out better with a faster shutter speed.  Dogs just shake the water off so quickly that even 1/500 of a second is too slow to stop their motion altogether.  At the same time, I kinda like that she's a little blurred.  It does give a sense of motion, not that the action itself doesn't, but you  know what I mean.

I took both of these pictures using a manual setting, which I decided is a little difficult when you need to make quick adjustments.  Lesson number 1 from this: full manual mode is not always the best.  On my trip to the dog park last weekend (pictures from that trip for weeks 3 and 4), I tried a different mode, but even with that, I think that the preset mode for action shots is going to be my best bet for the dog park.  I'll probably go again in the next few weeks.  I'll try it out again and see what happens.

just in case

on the off chance that anyone checks for new pictures mid-week, I'm working on it.  April is really getting away from me, and with the semester winding up, I've been a little preoccupied.  But here's a teaser for what's coming: action shots.