Photos!

[dragonlady7]

No Christmas photos up yet (baby nephew! Well, Z's baby nephew, anyway. Cute!) but I have put up a whole bunch of Christmas-y photos taken while screwing around with store equipment at work. I need a macro lens of my own, like, yesterday. The photos are somewhat Christmassy because the only visually interesting things at work tend to be the holiday decorations. Someone brought in a pointsettia plant and that thing has fueled more mini-photoshoots than you can shake a stick at.

New photos start here. My favorite one is probably this one:

Comments

[besina-sartor.livejournal.com]

Wow! You take some rockin' photos! I like all of them but my favorites are of: the one you posted in your post, the snow on the windshield and the fisheye of the store hours. Very nice!

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

They're all borrowed lenses, taken from store inventory and put onto either store cameras or my camera. It's sort of torture, because I'm stuck trying to get creative with what I have in the store or parking lot, but I know if only I could afford to buy this lens (most of the ones in this set are in the $500 range, even with employee discount) I could take really amazing photos of the things I'm actually interested in. But they're so so so much fun to play with, and I am more than a little amused that I got so much more interesting results than my co-worker, who for part of the day yesterday took the same lens, only in a Nikon mount, and put it onto the store's D-90 to see what he could come up with. As far as I can tell, he wound up with nothing interesting. Ha ha!

[jenaiabird.livejournal.com]

wandered through your photostream :) what fun shots, am very jealous. more and more i'm starting to have "grow'd up camera envy" I get a feeling i'll be investing in a DSLR within the next 2 years (or this year when i pay off my laptop *blush*)

i love the snow on the hedges (?), so delicate... i actually like the snow better than the frozen water droplets i had to work with; they didn't show up so well on my hedges :(

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

I shoot with a Canon Rebel, which I got for my twenty.... fifth birthday? Twenty-sixth? I don't remember. It is not new; I am thirty now. So it's only six megapixels and doesn't have most of the really advanced features they're putting in cameras now. But, it still works.
I actually have my eye on a used, one-generation-old body, which I'm hoping to pick up body-only, no lens, for a song in a few months. (They just released the 50D, and the 40D does everything worthwhile the 50 does, but isn't new or shiny, and so is cheap.)
So I'm planning on slowly acquiring lenses until this body either dies or no longer meets my needs (or I get a real job that pays real money); the downside is that if I have lenses, I'm trapped in the Canon system, but having worked closely with a lot of Nikons I can say for about 95% of applications there's no damn difference. I just think that the newer Rebels are cheaply built compared to the comparably-priced Nikons.

Anyway-- yes, there's just so much you can do with an SLR that you don't even realize is an option if you're shooting with a compact camera. I used compact cameras for four or five years when I switched to digital, and thought I was just taking bad pictures, but once I got the Rebel I realized I just wasn't seeing the pictures I needed to take. Ditto for lenses-- with the kit lens that came with the Rebel, there were certain shots I just don't see in order to take them. With a different lens I can find the shot I want.

The ice drops in your photos have the benefit of being reflective and glittery, but yeah, lower-contrast. I did some post-processing on the images I posted (working in a print lab has really helped me see how important post-processing can be to an image-- color-correction, contrast adjustment, minor exposure compensation). But I was frustrated by how poorly I could make out the details I needed-- a better viewfinder and, silly as it sounds, Live View (the ability to compose a shot on the rear LCD screen, which isn't possible in any but the newest SLRs) are two things on my wishlist for my new camera body, because my vision just isn't good enough to make out details I need otherwise.

But yes-- having an SLR is a huge step up in terms of being able to find and compose shots, as well as achieve specific effects you want. I shot in Auto mode for years, but am finally learning how to use the aperture priority mode to play with depth of field. That whole Flickr set is basically me realizing that you can play with depth of field.

[jenaiabird.livejournal.com]

i've been learning a lot with my P&S (Canon A590is), it has a number of decent manual settings (i.e. Av/Tv/ full Manual)... i figure it will be a good transitional camera to get me used to tweaking before clicking :)

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, it's nice to have those settings to play with. Ironically enough it's easier to use those advanced settings on an SLR, though, so you're getting an extra head start. I never had that good a P&S to start with.