(EDITORIAL COMMENT: Fie on all who shopped on Thanksgiving Day. How about spending the day being grateful instead of spending it getting more stuff!? And fie on the retailers who tempted people to shop on Thanksgiving Day by offering them super bargains. Those bargains could just as easily have been offered on Black Friday. This year's attempt to get the jump on your competitors by opening on Thanksgiving will just lead to more stores opening on Thanksgiving in the future. Soon the whole day will be eaten up -- pun intended -- and we'll all be wondering where our nice holiday went. What a shame. Greed is NOT good!)
Enough with the lecture! Let's get back to more pleasant things. Yes, I'm thinking about Christmas! It's time to buy a reasonable amount of gifts, plan some festive occasions, practice Christmas songs on the ukulele, AND, last but not least, take some holiday photos of Sal. My sister and I are planning an outing to take pictures of Sal with some holiday lights. I am concerned, however, about how to feature both the lovely lights and Sal in properly exposed photos. To mention the obvious, lights are very bright, the night is very dark, and Sal is in between!
Tonight I arrived home from work to see the Christmas lights twinkling in the gazebo across the street -- as they always do in December. It struck me that I could just walk over and take some experimental Sal pictures there. If what I tried tonight didn't work, I could try something else tomorrow night. By the time Anne and I do our real photo shoot, I should know what I'm doing! (As a lazy photographer, I don't use all the features on my cameras, so this will give me the motivation to challenge myself. For the holiday light pictures I'll be using a Canon Powershot G11.)
Sadly, the photo session was not a success, but here are two of the pictures anyway.
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| Starting with the simplest thing first, I tried the Night Scene mode on my camera. As a picture of an outdoor Christmas tree at night, I think it's okay, but as a Sal photo, not so much. She's supposed to be star, but you can hardly see her. |
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| When I realized that Night Scene wasn't working, I tried the Low Light setting. This let me set the exposure by Sal, so you can see her. This photo is a more accurate representation of the actual lighting in the gazebo. Unfortunately, it's too noisy. I'll be trying some other things in the coming days. Looks like I'm going to have to leave the comfort of scene modes and move into something more advanced. Gulp. |
Lessons learned and resulting thoughts:
1. Sal has to be in a pool of light or she will not be visible in the photos. Otherwise, even if I can see her just fine, the camera can't.
2. It's good to take practice photos when it's not freezing cold and windy. Keeping my fingers crossed that the weather stays nice.
3. Some snow would be pretty, but it would probably change everything. So if it's going to snow on the big picture-taking day, let the snow begin very soon!
4. Using a tripod is a necessity.
5. It was a good idea to do some reading and decide what I was going to do before going outside to take pictures. I will continue to figure out my plan where it's light enough refer back to the book -- in the house!
6. It's time to learn about my camera and what it can do!
Here's hoping I'll have better shots to share in the following days! Sal deserves to be beautifully photographed! :)
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