This dude stopped by tonight!  Now I am not a bird photographer. I just don’t have the patience to wait for them to get done being scared of me. I get bored and go do something else.

But this red guy was just standing there in the grass!  I had time to go get my camera

and he was still there!

So I got a little closer.

and a little closer,

and a little closer. He never moved, just turned his head  and looked.

This the closest I’ll probably ever get to a cardinal or any other bird.

When I was done photographing him he flew away.

He probably only wanted a selfie.

I remember my friend saying he loved a macro lens because he could spend the whole day in his own back yard getting great photos.

Here is what I found on a boring rainy day!

ISO 500  f/3.2 1/160 sec  105mm

ISO-800   f/4.5    1/60 sec   105mm

ISO-800   f/5    1/60 sec   105mm

ISO-800   f/5    1/60 sec   105mm

ISO-800   f/5    1/60 sec   105mm

ISO-800   f/5    1/60 sec   105mm

ISO-800   f/5    1/60 sec   105mm

ISO-200   f/5    1/100 sec   105mm

The good news is a lot of my old photos were recovered from the broken harddrive!

The good news is a lot of my old photos were recovered! The bad news is I’ve been looking at them and scaring myself. I know I’m my own worst critic but c’mon, what is the focus of this photo? The one egg with no paprika on it? Nothing is really in focus except the bottom of the pan. Today I’d throw this out.

This one I dislike for two reasons, 1, the flash was used and didn’t help. I could easily have moved it near the window and it would’ve looked 100thousand times better.

2, the cup cake dead center is in focus and that generally only looks good on portraits. Ah hah! it was a cupcake portrait!

This one isn’t too terrible or I’m just trying to be nice to my former self and don’t want her to quit.

Yeah, keep practicing and learning from it. eventually you’ll learn to see the light. Obviously I didn’t have that part down yet.

High five for these cookies, there’s a nice feel about this photo.

If you have just started do not be afraid to take bad photos the more you shoot the more you learn. Someone said your first 10,000 photos are your worst. For me it may have been my first 40,000.

I got the opportunity to try out this micro 4/3 mirrorless camera. It’s an older model, so the newer equivalent will have video and other features.

I went straight to manual to see what it could do.

It has one dial on the front that is either the shutter or aperture. You just press it once to switch and press it again to switch back. That was pretty easy to pick up.  I didn’t do much manual reading to test this out, I wanted to see what I could quickly figure out.

There is an AF’AE lock button that I unsuccessfully tried to set to back button focus. I have become totally hooked on BBF and become extremely irritated when I can’t decouple the focus from the shutter.  Just last March I thought I could never learn how to use back button focus and now I’m hooked.

Changing the ISO is easily accessed by clicking the top button on the 4-way buttons on the back of the camera.

It only has one card slot. I prefer two just incase one card corrupts.

I was not able to figure out how to have one focus point that I could toggle around. Very annoying, the camera was “thinking” and randomly choosing what it “thought “ was the right thing to focus on.

Then Molly said she’d model for me, and the camera thought I’d like some hairs under her chin to be the main focus of this photo. Grrr.

Molly didn’t like the way she looked even though I promised if she’d give me another chance or 20 I might get the camera figured out. She left.

Then I tried the girls in the pasture.

It seemed soft and mushy. Might be the kit lens, might’ve been me, I’m not sure but I was at f/16 so there’s no reason anything shouldn’t be in focus.

They took one look at me and left.

So then I decided I’d try out the sunflare. Shooting into the sun, I discovered I had a lot of finger prints on the lens!! Hmm, maybe I should’ve cleaned the lens first.

This little camera brackets 5 shots! That’s better than a lot of DSLRs, I’m impressed.

I also like how light it is for a camera with interchangeable lenses.

Would I buy it?

Not unless I could figure out how to select a single focus point. Which might be possible, I’m just not sure. And properly set up back button focus.

The battery life was not impressive, but this is a rather old camera in camera years. I think camera years are like dog years.

The next camera I want to review is the Sony a6000. I think there’s a lot to that little camera. Stay tuned.

I got a flash. I don’t know how to use a flash. This could be ugly!

I got this inexpensive Chinese flash that works on Nikon or Canon cameras. It’s only manual. But I figured that would be good because then I’d have to learn what power to set my flash at or suffer ugly consequences.

Be prepared for ugly!

So here’s what happened. I tried under exposing by a bit and setting the flash at 1/4 power. Nope! Too much light.

Then I learned about “recycle time”. No point in rapid firing because you get a no flash photo like this. It can’t recycle that fast.

I’d already learned what “200 sync speed” was. When I tried to fire the flash with the shutter set at 1/400 sec and I got another black photo which I won’t bore you with. But if the shutter is too fast the flash won’t fire and that’s a fact.

Next I tried the flash at 1/16th power and I got closer for a head shot.

Then I stopped to pay my model with a dog biscuit.  She charges by the pose.

ISO100   85mm  f/2.2   1/160 sec    flash 1/16th power

ISO100   85mm  f/2.2   1/160 sec    flash 1/64th power

ISO100   85mm  f/2.2   1/160 sec    flash 1/64th power

Eek, to much light because I got closer but remember to compensate for it.

ISO 320   85mm  f/2.2   1/160 sec    flash 1/64th power

Now that’s ugly.

ISO 320   85mm  f/2.2   1/160 sec    flash 1/64th power

So I backed up quite a bit and it was a lot better.

I was just reading 25 Photo Clichés You Should Stop Doing Right Now and found I am guilty of at least 10 of them!

Text over Photos

Guilty! But I’ve changed, I really have, I now like my photos without any distractions on them. Well except for PhotoADay photos.

2009

I think I knew the photo wasn’t really that good and somehow if I added some text on top of a crappy white border maybe somehow that would improve it.

Boarders.

I need to go hide.

selective color

Embarrassing, You don’t even want to know how many hours I spent trying to achieve this!

The only reason I did it in the first place was because I saw other people had done it. I did it as an exercise to see if I could do it. I never stopped to think whether I even liked the look or not.

Eeek, I even did a blog post about selective color on this blog in 2010.

Just clouds

I did, but I think I have since gone back and deleted them all. I really prefer some landscape or something to give some perspective in the photo too.

Bad HDR

When ever I think of bad HDR, this broccoli plant comes to mind like a bad dream that just won’t go away.

Big ugly watermark covering the photo

As if anyone really would want to steal my photos anyway.  I thought about watermarking photos because other people did it and there are lots of free software that can easily do it. I tried it a few times. But I can’t find any right now.

I found looking at other people’s photos the only time I cared to know who took the photo was if it was a really outstanding piece of work that just left me sitting the saying Wow!  And most of the time those artists just had a simple signature or water mark in the corner so you could see it if you cared but didn’t detract from the image.

Slow shutter on waterfalls

I’m guilty of this but I have no plans to change. I like slow shutters with water.  I took this a couple of months ago.

Landscape panorama

Yup, I’ve one those, did this last week. I will continue to do them when the mood strikes me. This one is pretty boring. Ok, I agree. But there’s a story that goes with it. Maybe I’ll do a post on it soon.

sunset photos

Whatever, I still like sunsets. This one was taken with a point and shoot and I’d just hope it would focus where I wanted it to. Actually I really didn’t notice how the near icicle is not in focus back then.

But I do kinda get what he’s saying. Like this one, BORING. I could’ve moved to the right a little to add that tree into my photo and that might’ve helped. I rarely like the main subject dead center like a bulls eye.

I’m a photographer selfie

Yeah, I’ve done those with the big camera in the bathroom but I end up deleting them because, well, for all of the reasons Kai mentioned.

But don’t let any of Kai’s list of photo clichés stifle your passion for photography, don’t resist the sudden urge to get off the interstate to photograph a pink Mack Truck for no other reason than you like it.

Keep learning,

keep growing,

and taking on new challenges.