Photo of Friends in Utah: Before

This past weekend my college buddies and I went to Utah for our annual pre-Thanksgiving celebration. This year we chose to go to our buddy Andrew's house in Salt Lake City. We also spent an afternoon in Park City which is about a half an hour away. I took a lot of photos and will discuss a few of them in the coming days. I'm still waiting for Lightroom to convert all my RAW files to JPG's on my slow laptop, so I'm going to split this post into two. The photo above is an original, unmodified shot I took of my friends in Park City. In the next, I'll show my modifications to the photo, and the rational behind my choices.

Critique: Watch the Heads

The way I composed the shot makes it look like there's a piece of floor molding sticking through the little girl's head! It's one of the basic rules of composition: don't make it look like there are random things growing out of or running through people's heads. Tsk tsk! I didn't notice this mistake at first, but now that I see it, I can't NOT focus on it! That's Kasey on the left doing a little dance while her dad snaps off some photos. Good times.

Critique: ISO Too High

In this photo of Kasey, I set the ISO too high. Parts of the living room were dark, but this particular corner contained the main light source in the room. Unfortunately I forgot to dial down the ISO, so she's very grainy. I also cropped the photo heavily which doesn't help the quality of the picture. Maybe I should start using the camera's Auto ISO feature. Just kidding!

Critique: Bad Focus = Missed Opportunity

Awww man!!! Neither Amy nor Kasey are in focus. Look at Kasey's expression! What a missed opportunity. Sheesh! I love looking at photos I've just taken, but sometimes these kind of shots are just painful to see.

Gravy

I'm cooking gravy for the pre-Thanksgiving celebration my college buddies and I hold every year. This time we're meeting at our friend's place in Salt Lake City. I'm cooking the gravy a few days in advance, so it gives me more time to hang out with my buddies. I'm making a meat lover's version with turkey wings (big pot) and a vegan version for my buddy Dov. I wanted to take a photo of both steaming pots, but my 35mm lens (52.5mm focal length on my DSLR) isn't very wide, so I had to lift the camera up high over my head. It took eleven shots before I finally found one I liked. Actually, I missed the left edge of the big pot, but I gave up trying for the perfect composition. Thank goodness I wasn't shooting film, it would have taken nearly half a roll to capture that photo! I should have taken advantage of my camera's Live View feature. Just for kicks, along the left are the first ten shots I took. For the curious cook, you can find the recipe I used on Food Network. Update: it's past 2am and I'm finally done cooking the large pot of gravy. The recipe yields 5-6 cups, but I doubled the amount of ingredients to make more. Somehow, I ended up with less than 2 cups! Sigh, I'm going to have to try it again tomorrow night.

Kasey is Fearless

I don't have anything meaningful to say today, so I thought I'd share with you evidence of my goddaughter Kasey's fearlessness. Below is a picture of me in my second Halloween costume this past Friday. Most people who saw me in that hood were at least a little frightened. Kasey wasn't fazed at all. She also wasn't afraid of the creepy Nurse Joker three months ago at Comic-Con!

Critique: Too Much Negative Space

It's time for another critique. This time I want to focus on a problem I have with fast moving subjects, e.g. Kasey. Because she (and most babies) move so fast, I have to snap off a shot right after my autofocus acquires a lock. The consequence of this is that I don't have time to recompose the shot before pressing the shutter release. This often results in a lot of non-artistic negative space which messes up the composition of the photo. One way to overcome this problem is to use my camera's multi-point autofocus feature. Unfortunately I find that it is not very accurate, especially in low light situations.