Family Portrait @ East West Center - 11/22/09

Today's lesson was Family Portraiture. It was late afternoon so the East West Center Garden was nice and shady. It seemed like perfect lighting for taking portraits but I found that my photos lost color and skin tone had a bluish tinge and was pretty hard to correct. I'm not sure if it was because of the pixel size I use, but I think my next year's resolution will be to start shooting in RAW mode!
I tried doing a HDR of the bamboo.
Photographing kids are always a challenge but it's also soooo funny seeing them squirm thru the session.
You have to have great patience until you get that perfect expression.

HDR Sunset 11/21/2009

I haven't been to the beach to check out the sunset for a while since the sun has been setting closer to the west. But now that the sun is setting closer to the east, it makes for better photo opportunities. However, the clouds have blocked what little sunset there is. As I waited w/ the crowd that has also gathered to watch this even, I decided to try HDR w/ multiple shots. I didn't bring a tripod but since I was shooting at a fast enough speed, it was fine...except people in the shots get blurry if they are moving. I tried HDR w/ 2 exposures and 3 exposures to see if there'd be any difference. The shot below was done w/ only 2 exposures and the bottom was 3. Can't really tell the difference much.
I've seen this man playing his violin that was plugged into the speakers before and this time I decided to take a photo of him. The sun had set so it was really dark where he sat so the high ISO and small aperture I used caused a lot of noise, plus it was hard to focus in the dark, but I really didn't want to use the flash on him just in case he'd get mad at me for taking his pic.

Foster Botanical Garden Take 2 - 11/11/2009

On Veteran's day off, I went back to Foster Botanical Garden and met up w/ Erick, Susie, Jalna, and Sze. I wanted to work on more HDR now that I kinda got used to the tripod.
I'm still trying to work on my flowers to get the right color saturation.
Although I don't have a macro lens, I tried to do some closeup and then cropped it to look more macro...
Purple is a really tough color to get...most of mine came out kinda pinkish..
Greens seem to come out better in HDR...
I wanted to get some patterns on the leaves.
We walked around and I wanted to get a shot how enormous the tree was by shooting up the tree..
When I tried to copy Jalna's setting for contrast, saturation and tone, I actually set the dial the other direction to -2 instead...DUH!! ARGH!! So, the cannonball flower came out kinda washed out..even after doing HDR processing.
After the walk around the garden, we ended back at the green house....even though the weather report sounded ominous and it poured the night before, it turned out to be a nice day after all.

Foster Botanical Garden - 11/1/2009

I haven't been able to go on any shoots for a while and started to get "photog withdrawals". I've also been looking for a tripod and finally decided on a Manfrotto Tripod and wanted to take it out for a "test drive" taking some HDR shots so Erick, Celia and I decided to go to Foster's Botanical Garden. I am a bit rusty since I didn't get that many good shots so I must go back and try again soon.
A must-visit for me is the new green house. It was soooo hot inside especially on this humid day so I decided to get an HDR of the exterior instead.
It was unfortunate that there were not as many blossoms as there were the last time I visited.My HDR of flowers didn't really work out and the only one that looked natural was this pitcher plant.. there was only one blossom that didn't turn brown. This hanging plant is usually swinging in the wind from the fans blowing so it is especially hard to get a good HDR shot.There were mostly green plants in the green house...(duh?!!)
Just outside the green house is this statue of a girl with butterflies. Around this area I saw a lot of butterflies dancing around the flowers.
I waited patiently until I was able to capture these two shots of butterflies. These were cropped since I was using my wide angle lens and wasn't able to get too close without scaring away the butterfly. There's even a caterpillar in the flowers.
I wanted to get a panorama of the cannon ball tree, but that photo also didn't turn out and I got this instead. I think this is the largest tree in the garden...It took 3 shots to build this panorama.