Category Archives: Photography

Pictures with Green in them

A coworker was stopping by to talk about some storage matters and noticed my PC background – he mentioned it looked awfully cold and wintry.  So last night I set about trying to find something green to use.  The willow tree in our backyard had some greenness to it, so here are a couple pictures of it.

Picture 1

Picture 1

Picture 2

Picture 2

The nice weather really let me play around with my camera settings – I goofed with exposure time, f-stop and ISO speeds.  Taking pictures of stuff up close proved to be challenging with the auto focus, so I had to tweak what part of the frame I wanted it to grab.  After spending about five minutes trying to figure out how to manually focus the lens I gave up.  Ideally, I wanted the picture to not be too bright but for the green to pop out a bit.  Picture 2 ended up being closer to what I wanted, color wise, but I preferred the layout of Picture 1.  Paint.net came to the rescue (I’ve never really messed with picture alteration before) I simply dialed down the brightness and ticked up the contrast and came out with this.

Picture 1, modified

Picture 1, modified

In with the green, out with the snow!  🙂

–Nat

A walk in the park

It is hard to come up with a good reason to go outside during the Winter, especially if you aren’t into the multitude of Winter sports that Minnesotans have contrived in order to convince themselves it doesn’t suck to live north of the snow belt.  Taking pictures is worth it, though – I took quite a few but it is so bright there were only a couple that seemed to be worth sharing.

— Nat

New Toy!

For Christmas, or maybe just because I’d been asking for one for a long time, Kristin gave me the go ahead to pick up a DSLR camera.  I found a really great deal courtesy of slickdeals and was able to make it happen cheaply enough that I didn’t feel super guilty about the investment.

Specifically, I am now the proud owner of a Canon Rebel XS, which is a 10 megapixel camera that you actually need to use the view finder for.  It comes with a lens in the normal kit and Amazon is sending me a telephoto lens via USPS that is supposed to be here sometime in January.  Of course since it came tonight, I had to unbox it and try it out.  Here are some of the pictures I took.  Click on them to get the big images.  And they are big, I am going to need to figure out how to compress them or something 🙂

Let’s hope that I can someday do the camera justice.  I think it is going to be fun trying!

–Nat