Life Signatures

The Park was rocking on Sunday. Pastor Nancy asked me to take pictures and I gladly obliged.

The Park is the children’s Sunday service and like our main auditorium is very very tricky to photograph.

The Its were moving around very fast! The lighting is really challenging – I had to use, gasp, manual mode so I can get some rich color and not have it all washed out with a flash.

I also didn’t want to distract the performers…

After shooting about 50 black or blurry photos, I had to come back second service and try to capture more images…the light adjustment was a bear.

Miss Tracy has two babies in there…this is our second set of twins on staff within a year. There is definitely something in the water, I’m glad I’m too old to catch whatever it is.

I finally settled on ISO 800, shutter speed of 40 and aperture setting of f5. I would have gone lower with the aperture but my lens wouldn’t let me, shoot.

These are straight out of the camera. No post-processing at all…not that I wasn’t tempted mind you.

Ok, professional photographers may accidentally find my site and say, “What’s she talking about? She must be an amateur.”

Well yes I am, and I don’t care. It’s probably pretty obvious anyway.

I recently received a telephoto lens as a gift. It’s because of this lens that I had a “Ding-now-I-get-it” moment. It was about depth of field. Believe it or not, I spend a lot of time thinking about it.

Depth of field in laymen terms, refers to how much the subject is in focus and how much of the background is out of focus. I took my new lens to my parents backyard and shooting. I zoomed in on a flower and when I downloaded it, I saw that the yucky snow behind the flower was out of focus, giving the flower a lovely background. It was dead but even in death, it was pretty. My mother said she leaves the flowers out there so that the birds can eat the seeds.

Photographers also call this bokeh (pronounced bo-kay). It’s a word I kept seeing all over photography blogs and never bothered to look it up until now. I saw so many images with beautiful bokeh and I wondered how do they do that? I just thought it was one of those photography things that was over my head.

Telephoto lenses can create a much shallower (more blurry) depth of field. This depth of field is interesting to me because the (dead) basil behind the in-focused piece of basil gives the image a tapestry-like feel, I think.

It’s probably just me.

The two main factors that determine your depth of field are the aperture and the focus distance. It’s easier to get a shallow depth of field with a telephoto because this type lens has the ability to make the subject appear bigger or magnified. It uses the focal distance to “cheat” and make it easy for an amateur like me to get a shallow depth of field. Anyway, you can get this same effect with wide angle lenses like the one that came with my camera. That’s all about aperture and I’m still trying to really understand it in order to apply it…when I do, I’ll let you know.

The above pictures were taken with my camera on the auto mode with the flash off (it was a gray day and sometimes the flash will fire when I don’t want it to in auto mode) and I stood faaaar away and zoomed waaaaay in. It’s cool.

By the way, the lens Santa brought me is a Nikkor 70mm-300mm lens. It’s heavy so you’ll have to start pumping weights if you want to lug it around a lot like I did Christmas Eve.

But I was able to get some great close ups with it, like this one. I didn’t use the depth of field theory in this photo because I wanted the cute singing kids in focus behind Archie. Depth of field also has to do with how far the subject is from whatever is behind it. In this case, the kids were too close to Archie to “blur” into the background. Had I zoomed closer to Archie’s head (thereby, increasing the magnification), I would have decreased the focal distance and made the kids behind him blurry. But then I wouldn’t have been able to get their cute faces.

I took this picture using a technique that a co-worker showed me for taking pictures in low light…another time…

Now I don’t have to borrow Danny’s lens to take pictures of the girl on her horse. I was always terrified I was going to drop it.

This is so much fun.