2013: Favorite Photos – People
I’ve enjoyed looking through my 2013 photos and thought I would post some from a few different categories. My shooting has dropped off dramatically in the last half of this year, so I had been thinking there would be slim pickings when it came time to go looking for something to post. I was pleasantly surprised to have a bigger supply than I had imagined.
One thing became very obvious when looking through an entire year’s worth of shots. Wildlife photography is my strong suit, and what I spend most of my time doing with the camera. I enjoy different kinds of shooting, but definitely feel most comfortable wandering the woods and hillsides looking for wildlife.
I’m kicking the series off with ‘People’. That’s kind of misleading, because it’s mostly just my kids. While I have a pretty good supply of people shots from portrait shoots and other gatherings, I’m not always comfortable with posting pics of others. Animals are easy because I don’t have to worry about permission issues…
Jesica
Natalie
Lindsey
Malcolm
My back-flipping niece.
Kids at the amusement park. This ride was going around at about 10,000 mph, so I was happy to get a shot with all of them in the same frame.
A self portrait in Red Rocks park.
My favorite timer pic of 2013. Malcolm and I on 14,155′ Tabeguache Peak during our four day 14er binge in the summer.
Sadly, I only shot one race all year – and only part of that one.
Malcolm got me a pair of remote flash triggers for Christmas, so we took a hike up Green Mountain the other night and tried them out. They open up the door to a lot of creative possibility, because I no longer need to have the flash attached to the camera.
Posted on December 29, 2013, in photography. Bookmark the permalink. 4 Comments.
The Scene Begins 
Fun. I am looking forward to this series. These are great shots – I particularly enjoy the roller coaster one the most.
Thanks, George. That shot is a good example of shooting in manual mode and thinking through all of the settings. The ride was in the shade so I didn’t have a ton of light to work with, yet I needed a pretty fast shutter speed (1/1000). I boosed the ISO way up to 2500 (I almost never go over 1600) so I could pull it off.
I am, as you know, a photo novice, but have been playing with my camera. It is not an SDLR (I can’t justify that being as much a hack as I am), but it has a manual mode. I find that I use BW quite a bit there because it hides mistakes. I can get the ISO on “double” increments (100, 200, 400, 800) up to 3200. If I tweak the shutter speed to be open too long, the camera overrides me and brings the ISO back down (sometimes to 80 which I know is not on the double increment I mentioned).
Whatever. All fun – and that is a great shot.
That is great you are venturing into the manual mode. There is no better way to learn than playing with the settings and observing the results. It helps me to think in more of a progression – depending on the shot, of course. I usually start with shutter speed. Do I need to freeze the action or is it relatively static. Boosting ISO always comes with the caveat of adding noise (grainy look) and losing finer details. It is best to keep it as low as possible (which is why the camera overrides you when using a longer shutter speed), but not at the expense of a blurry image because your shutter speed was too low.
So back to my unsolicited advice, think in terms of shutter speed first. If you are freezing action, you might need anywhere from 1/250 to 1/500, or higher depending on how extreme it is. For just a normal handheld static shot you can settle on 1/60-1/125. Then depending on how much light there is to work with, you ramp up the ISO (making the sensor more sensitive to light) in order to reach the proper exposure.
Keep at it!