Hilton Head Island

Dunes, Ocean Spray

This is my favorite of the trip so far... sweet, tender, yellow flowers on the dunes  AND this butterfly!

My new niece

Rainy Day

Here's a few pictures I took during and after the rain last week. It was really, really fun. I look at the images now and it is amazing to know that light came from overcast skies!!! I love the color saturation of these photos. I did not do any photoshop enhancement/editing.

update

I felt an update was in order. I keep avoiding new postings because I haven't had any pictures to attach. For a few weeks, I just wasn't motivated toward photography or anything creative-- different priorities surfaced. Over the course of the past week I have felt inspiration creeping in but I am a little stuck. I feel disabled by photoshop. I took those maternity shots of my sister. Each of them needs a little editing but I am just not skilled in the photoshop tequniques yet. I have been reading a lot and experimenting. One in particular, I did a lot of editing to, in multiple layers-- smoothed skin tones, patched a blemish, darkened the edges of the frame to highlight the subject, etc. I printed it on paper and saved but apparently saved in a format that doesn't remember photo shop "layers." So, basically, the editing is gone.  Also, those layers are costly in terms of space/memory. I know I need to figure out a way to save the images I take but pretty soon, my computer will be so bogged down. Do I get an external hard drive? Do I put them on a jump drive? Do I upload to a "cloud" type resource??? I just don't know! 

I feel like I need to research to the point of a decision

• storage
• photoshop basic editing
• saving format for my photos
• ** light, lense, focal length

The whole light thing....it's nuts. There is a mathematical equation regarding aperture and shutter speed. It makes sense in the simplest terms-- smaller opening needs longer length of time open to let in appropriate lighting. But, there are degrees of opening and shutter speeds.   

So, to just say, "I want to bring that background out of focus to highlight the subject's face in front of me, therefore I will use a lower aperture" means that all of a sudden your picture is overexposed (too light) if your shutter doesn't close faster. So, you need to adjust the shutter speed. And there are varying degrees of adjustment that come into play based upon an exposure wheel.  So far, I have read over this a couple of times when I have been tired. I am not making progress so far. Same thing for getting your subject in focus and calculating the focal length. Something about the image sensor, something about a conversion factor with Nikon... like, your lense says 200m but with conversion factor (no idea why at this point) with Nikon there's a 1.5 increase so really you are looking at 350m and this is important when determining how far from your subject you can get with a certain shutter speed and maintain focus without having to bump up the ISO which can create "noise" in the photo. Is that a run-on sentence?? ;)

So, I really want to take a photo shop class. I think it would be a concise way to cover the ground I need to cover.  My trial by error, teach myself approach is taking a lot of time and is frustrating. 

I HAVE to get a handle on the measuring light issues and get comfortable with making quick, effective decisions for exposure based upon those readings.

I LOOOVE to think about composition and just the fun part of capturing those things that stir my heart, but I have to say, in a large part right now, I feel like my inspiration toward that angle is stilted because I know I have these other barriers that prevent me from getting those images to print or even saved in a way that is going to work.