LoLo Goes to High School

Where has the time gone? My baby sister is starting the 9th grade TOMORROW!

I had a lovely time hanging out with my mom and sister when they came to visit me this week. Tomorrow Lauren starts her first day of 9th grade and I start my first day of my 4th year teaching at OHSU.  It's going to be a great school year!

While Lauren was up visiting, we were able to spend some quality time together shopping and getting good deals (Ross + TJ Maxx!!).  I suggested to Lauren we have a photoshoot because the last one I took of her on the beach is super outdated.  And what a great way to feature the new hip clothes we got for her!

The location in these photos is actually right around the corner from my house.  It's a cornfield, a patch of wild sunflowers, a gravel road, and some railroad tracks - I really don't think I would ever come across somewhere like this in California.  I was actually shocked at how beautiful the background came out in these shots - this is my new favorite shooting location.

Lauren was a great model.  It was a fabulous time to be out taking pictures - it was about 7:30-8pm and the sun was going down and it was actually pretty cloudy.  The windy was blowing so it caught in her hair.  When we faced a certain angle, we hit the sweet spot of the lighting and her face just soaked it up.  I was very sad when we had to stop because it started raining and my memory card ran out of room. :(  I had so many favorites of this shoot and only am featuring a small amount of the loveliness of Lauren!

I left my settings on mostly ISO 100 and did half with my 24-70mm lens and the other half with  my fixed 50mm lens.  Currently I'm experimenting with how close I am to my subject as a photographer and how that affects the depth of field (area that is in focus) in my images.  This is a skill that I want to be so second nature to me that I don't even think about it anymore, but I'm not quite there yet.

Sunset on the Factory

I looked out my window one night last week to the most beautiful palette of colors in the sky while the sun was setting over the sugar beet factory in my backyard. I literally SPRINTED up the stairs and grabbed my camera/tripod to capture the vivid colors. The scene in the pictures below was gone after about 10 minutes.  I live in a beautiful place!

First, I tried doing a panorama. I have my beginning photo class stitch together panoramas for one of their first photo assignments. I used 4 different pictures to form the panorama below - click on it to see a larger version.


Secondly, I tried doing two different HDR composites with 6 different images each.  HDR works well for things that don't move.  These clouds moved millimeters while I was taking all of the different shots so when I tried to merge the HDR images in photoshop the clouds look all blurry and dumb each time I tried.  Any suggestions on what to try to make this work better in the future?

Lastly, here is a picture where I tried just backlighting the sugar beet factory with the sunset so that the shape of the factory was blacked out but the sunlight showed the shape of the spire. I did this by closing my aperture up tight - I also did this so my depth of field would be clear and in focus too.