rainy

Here we have two standbys of rebelyang and bokehed: tons of bokeh and underexposure (respectively). Hannah passed through the region this morning, and while I waited for my food to heat up, I saw some interesting opportunities. This shot was inspired by steph's latest post. After attempting a few times to shoot through a rain-speckled portion of glass, it occurred to me to make the glass the subject and crank the aperture. I like the effect. There's also this subtle vignetting...I think just from coincidence from darker colors or shaded areas, but I think it adds an extra bit of focus to the center of the frame.

Bonus pic since I may be late/missing tomorrow...



Yes, it's underexposed. Yes, the white balance is off. When I imagine a well-exposed version of this in the correct white balance, though...I'm not sure it'd be _better_. It's raining...it's _supposed_ to be dreary.

just to spite stephen

hows that for underexposed? Neener.


Anyway, took a few of these this morning from the gym. The rest are more...normal..attempts, and you can find those on my photostream. The problem I was having--and what led to trying shots like this--was that I wanted to get the rather nice view of the sun peeking out from behind some clouds as it rose above the hotel. It really was a pretty scene since I normally don't ever make it out of bed before 8am. If you look at the other shots, the sky is all washed out, and while they're more accurate to the amount of light out, the one above gets a _bit_ of the play between the sun and the clouds. You can actually see what's going on in the sky. I _think_ I'm supposed to use a polarizing filter for this sort of thing, but I find "buy more stuff" less interesting than figuring a way to do things with the hardware one already has, I thought it might be an interesting experiment.

This is just begging for an HDR treatment, but for now I'm sticking to learning how to do things without postprocessing.

catching laughter

DSC_0163, originally uploaded by edfooliu.

One huge advantage of my upgrade to the D40 is the speed of continuous shooting and continuous autofocus. This paid huge dividends in capturing shots like this... It's fantastic to get 10 shots of a single moment shared by a group of people and find several where the expressions and body language harmonize.

It's particularly satisfying to soak in the socially-amplified excitement and fun of oldschool starcraft after a humiliating beatdown of a football 'game', but I digress.

What let most of my shots down was the AF's difficulty picking up the right/desired subjects in the low lighting conditions. Cranking the shutter down to 1/10 or thereabouts also proved a poor solution to the lighting--nearly all my throwaways were due to camera shake or subjects moving (you can see this in a lot of the raucous laughter shots). I probably should've given up and gone to higher ISO earlier in the night.