focal length: 24 mm
shutter speed: 1/60
aperture: f/2.8
ISO: 320
flash: none

This morning I heard a knock on the door and opened it to see delicious cookies delivered to me! They were from my best friend, her hubby and puppy who live on the other side of the country. A gift for me on my birthday. I was so touched and needless to say, we had cookies for breakfast. Mmmm! Thanks so much!

focal length: 34 mm
shutter speed: 1/40
aperture: f/2.8
ISO: 320
flash: none

Sophie was so excited but waited patiently for me to take some pictures first. What a good photographer-in-training!

focal length: 56 mm
shutter speed: 1/800
aperture: f/3.2
ISO: 200
flash: none

It’s my first SOOC Saturday over at Melody’s Slurping Life. I’ve always wanted to participate but it’s tough when you shoot in RAW since RAW files have no in-camera processing. If you’re shooting JPG, even though it’s straight-out-of-camera(SOOC) you really are applying some processing to the photo because your camera does it for you by adjusting the tone curve (contrast), white balance and adds some sharpening, while RAW is… well… RAW. This is a RAW file with no editing done except resizing, exporting as a JPG, and adding the watermark. As RAW as it gets. Even so, this particular photo has vibrant colours and a bit of vignetting. That vignetting is probably caused by having two filters on my lens at the same time. I had a UV filter and a circular polarizer (which explains the vibrant colours) on, so I believe that caused a bit of mechanical vignetting.

If you’re brave enough to share your SOOC’s, join us at Slurping Life!

focal length: 24 mm
shutter speed: 1/50
aperture: f/2.8
ISO: 400
flash: fired

Today, she posed in front of the camera for the first time… or so it seemed. She was having fun trying to get as close to the lens as possible but as you may know, all lenses have a “closest focusing distance”, or what I like to call, their “comfort zone”. Once you pass that comfort zone, (0.38m for the 24-70mm lens I was using) they feel all awkward and everything and can’t focus.

Kinda like this…

She quite liked that.

Have a great weekend everyone!

focal length: 24 mm
shutter speed: 1/40
aperture: f/2.8
ISO: 1000
flash: fired

Ok, so it’s not a real rainbow but the colours of the play parachute were so vibrant, it was almost like being under a rainbow. Remember playing in these things in elementary school with the whole class? Here, it was just Daddy and me trying to keep this thing billowed up enough to keep Sophie interested. I was trying to hold a heavy camera setup with one hand while my other hand helped with the parachute. It was tough! I should have used a higher ISO, which would have allowed me to use a faster shutter speed to freeze motion on her face. But it was a bit difficult to do with only one hand available. With children, who have such short attention spans, sometimes you just have to take the picture, or the moment is lost.

In the end, I think it still makes for a cool picture!

focal length: 32 mm
shutter speed: 1/30
aperture: f/2.8
ISO: 200
flash: fired

I’ve been experimenting with flash these days so I’m keeping my external flash on my camera instead of in it’s case where it usually lives out its days. It sure comes in handy when I’m trying to take a few shots of my constantly moving child in a dark room! I believe I bounced the flash off the ceiling behind me, hence, the shadows on her face. In the image above, I used the adjustment brush in Lightroom 2.0 to subtly increase the exposure on the shadows and at the same time decrease the saturation so the pink reflection off her clothes wouldn’t be as noticeable. The difference is subtle but still significant.

Now, if only I could find someone to hold her down while I take a picture!