Penny in SF

Here are some pics I took of Penny when we went to San Francisco.. She's growing up so fast!

Modeling shoot in Malibu

My wife's friend Meghan is interested in becoming a model and since I'm interested in photography it made perfect sense for us to go and have a photoshoot together. I got a new Canon 50D for my birthday from Masae and this is the first time I've ever used it. It definitely took a while before I figured out how to use it, but eventually things started to click (no pun intended).

We started off in Santa Monica but there were way too many people around so we hopped into the car and drove to Malibu. We found a decently empty spot on the beach that wasn't too hard to get to. It was a completely overcast day which actually make it easier to shoot because the shadows were very soft. We started around 5pm and shot for about an hour before it got too dark.

At first I tried using Av mode (Aperture Priority) but the camera kept underexposing because of the bright sky so I went full manual. I think manual is the way to go when the sun is behind the subject.

Here are the shots.





This one looks like her legs are in the sand.. I need to watch out for these things next time.










Trying to make it look like a Victoria's Secret catalog in these.




This one seems to be the crowd favorite. I actually shot this one with the Rebel XT and the 55-250 IS lens. One thing I've been learning about taking photos of people is that its more flattering to stand further away and zoom in to get the proportions of their face correctly. If you stand close with a wider lens, it tends to make the nose look bigger, which most people don't like.







Eyes are kind of dark here. I think a bounce reflector would help in this case.

Cancun

These were shots I took in 2007, and decided to look at them again and see what worked. I did some post-processing on some of them. Again, these were all taken with a point and shoot camera.

Full Moon

It was a full moon a few nights ago. I grabbed my tripod and my 55-250 IS and attempted to photograph it. Its not as clear as I had hoped it would be. Also I can see the limitation of the Rebel XT with 8 megapixels and only 250mm reach, the photo here is a 100% crop, no resizing, so I end up with only 720x720 photo. Definitely too small for any kind of print. I think with a longer reach lens, or more image size I would be able to get a larger photo and probably more clear.

The settings on the camera were:
ISO 100
Focal length 250mm
f/10
1/200 shutter

Mammoth in March

Took my Rebel XT to the mountains to work on some snowboarding photos. I love snowboarding, and I've always wanted to capture the excitement of snowboarding that showed more than the run-of-the-mill snapshots that people tend to take when they snowboard. I used my Canon 55-250 IS lens (aka "nifty-two-fifty") exclusively, because of the reach it gives me, as well as the portability of this lens. The fact that the lens is fairly inexpensive ($255 shipped) makes me not worry about it as much. As always, I have the front element protected with a B+W Multi-coated UV Haze filter (not the cheapest filter, but they say that cheap filters degrade the quality of your images).








In some of these action shots, the sky was really dark and I had to turn up the brightness to make the sky look somewhat blue. As you can see, the blue was really dark and not realistic. I think this is the problem with shooting snow. Snow is very white and it makes the camera think that the shot is overexposed so it compensates by turning it down a lot. I could have probably prevented this if I used a complete manual setting, but I wanted to freeze the action so I had it on shutter priority.



















This one was taken at Red Rock Canyon on the way back from Mammoth. I love whenever the moon is visible during the daytime.

Chichen Itza

These photos were from 2007, when I took Masae to Cancun and proposed to her. Back then I wasn't into digital SLR photography yet, but I did enjoy taking photos. These photos here were all taken with a Canon point and shoot digital camera. With some photoshop techniques (curves, levels, sharpening, burning, etc.), I was able to create a dramatic look that was vastly different from the original photos.

Pet Photography

This past weekend Masae and I went to visit my dad and introduced Penelope (our Yorkie pup) to him for the first time. After spending a little bit of time with her he decided he wanted a dog too! My cousin and her family were also over so I took a few photos of Penelope and my cousin's dog.

I was using the 55-250 IS lens which takes surprisingly good photos, especially outdoors where light is abundant. I found it quite difficult to take photos of my cousin's dog because he's a black poodle mix with something else. Black makes metering very difficult and it was hard to get the right exposure for the shots. Good thing we were outdoors for the most part.















This are the two shots where I used my 17-55 f2.8 IS to get the wide angle.