Been a While; Random Garden Pics

Its been a while since I've posted, although I'm sure my blog is rarely traveled, so all should be forgiven. Anyway, I've been doing more portraiture lately of my family and I haven't yet grown comfortable posting their pics in a public forum. I'm sure that will wane as time goes by, but haven't quite reached that comfort level yet. So because of that, haven't been able to blog too much, but thought I'd throw a few random pics out there that I've taken.

My Garden

I'm not too much of an avid gardener, but we do have some plants. Living in Houston, in the actual city, we don't have a whole lot of land to do much with. But its enough to plant some things and relax in. Its been a work in progress for quite a while. We do grow a few veggies and fruit though and there is nothing like fresh fruit/veggies. Nothing like it! My favorite is our long dead strawberry plant. Unfortunately, it didn't produce a whole lot of fruit, usually just a couple a season! And more often than not, the possums ate them right when they'd be ripe. We didn't have this problem for the first few years but I guess they realized we grew food. So, as of now, we have a banana tree that produces a really good amount of bananas, a tomato plant, and a bell pepper plant.

Our banana tree, pictured to the left produces a lot of fruit. In fact this tree is like a weed. I don't think we could get rid of it if we wanted to. We planted this tree probably about 4 or 5 years ago. It was a single stalk, almost dead that we got from our neighbors when they sold their lot to a developer. This tree got big, then the Hurricane swept through Houston and although it missed up, the wind was enough to knock our fence over, on top of the banana tree. So we were left with a few small stumps. Now, the tree is probably well over 35 feet and consists of no fewer than 10 "trunks." Its not really a tree, doesn't have a trunk per se, but basically the "trunk" is made up a layers and layers of leaf growth and it gets thicker and thicker. I honestly don't think you can get rid of these!

Unfortunately, I don't have a pic of my favorite tree. Maybe I'll add it on a later post. Its not fruit producing, I don't even know what kind of tree it is. Its my favorite because it was a plant we received when my wife was in the hospital delivering our daughter. it was a small, potted plant, probably about 6 inches tall. We planted this tree in one area, it almost died a few years ago, so I transplanted it to another area, gave it new soil and within 6 years, it has gotten to be about 30 feet tall. Truly a beautiful tree.

Another favorite is our bell pepper plant. This plant is low maintenance, produces a good amount of peppers, and seems like it produces nearly year round here in Houston! Some times of the year are certainly more bountiful, but it always seems like it has a couple of peppers at least. We have so many peppers we usually give a lot away. But its great to cook with. My daughter will even eat it straight off the vine. The stuff you get in the store is so bland. You don't realize it until you grow your own food. Store bought peppers are fairly tasteless, does have a small hint of flavor but nothing impressive. These peppers are juicy and sweet. Great to cook with of course. And it packs a crunch.

Unpictured is my daughter's tomato plant. She takes care of it and planted it. Its simply in a pot and produces a couple of tomatoes a year. She will eat these right off the vine. She absolutely loves tomatoes and even more so off the vine. I love the smell of them, very sweet. I'm not a tomato fan myself so I don't usually eat these. But they smell delicious.

Anyway, thought I'd throw some random gardening pics in since I didn't have much else to offer. Still getting better with teh camera but far from being proficient. I just picked up a 430EX Canon flash last week and I love it. But its something else to learn too, but that's the fun of it. Hopefully I'll have more material soon, for the audience that doesn't exist.

First Attempt at Macro Photography

Taking the DIY soft box found at the Strobist blog, I took some shots for my father in-law's golf club company for use on his website. There are largely untouched except for cropping and white balance adjustment. I wanted to show the mistakes I made. Overall, the box was great and did its job. The problem was I used too small of a box. Don't make this mistake. The Strobist recommends a box no smaller than 12"x12"x12". I believe one of my dimensions was 9": mistake 1.

Lighting used was lighting my father in-law had. He had four, 1000 candle watt lamps. He used them for high speed video: recording one's golf swing. He had something like a 10,000 fps video camera which of course required heavy duty lights. And heavy duty these lights were! You could see the heat emanating from these bad boys. I just used one lamp: mistake 2.

Also, you may not be able to tell from these images (I have others that show this more), but there is a definite gradient of light from left to right. The lamp was on the left side and above the box, so this makes sense. Not making mistake 2 could have helped this. Also, I think I could have gotten away with one lamp IF I had used a reflector or white posterboard on the right side of the box to reflect some light back: mistake 3. This would have done two things in my opinion: would have evened the light from left to right and probably would have eliminated the shadow underneath the club heads.

For construction, I picked up some tracing paper and white poster board from the art supply store. Cost was $7. A box was scrounged from my father in-law's house keepign with the theme of reusing as much materials as possible. However, I should have just picked up a box that would have been suitable for this project, probably would have cost under $3 and still would have had a soft box for under $10.

Chris' blog at http://chris-photo-journey.blogspot.com/2007/08/studio-session-with-light-tent.html used the same concept with infinite better results than I had. He also had the foresight to photograph the setup for all to see. I think he did an excellent job and his blog gave me the link for the soft box.

I guess I can't call my efforts completely failed. My father in-law is using the images on his website. The final images have the shadow removed and look just fine on his site. However, from a photographer's perspective, I feel I failed this lesson, however, I have learned valuable lessons from it and think I can correct the problems I ran into. And he quite generously gave me one of his lamps for further exploits. So I'll be experimenting with reflectors next time around. Also, the lamp, combined with some reflector, will probably

make a nice quickie portrait studio, if the model doesn't mind the heat from the lamp!

All in all, this was a fun project. I'll do it again some time. The key seems to be (aside from lighting of course) the size of the box and using some reflector if you are using only one light.

A Visit to the Texas Capitol - Austin

This entry will be fairly short and I won't be discussing any Texas history here. I'm pretty exhausted, got up at 5AM to be in Austin and was surprised I made it out this evening to snap these. But I was motivated. Overall, I would say this venture turned out better than Rice. I don't know if it was time of day (went about 2 hours later), but I didn't wash out the sky like I did during my Rice jaunt. Sky came out much better, pictures generally much better. Not saying they are awesome by any standards, but pretty good for me. I snapped about 130 photos but probably only half or less came out decent. Note also I've done no post processing on these suckers. I was too tired. Not even cropping. I'm still learning how to post process so I generally don't do anything too complex right now. I felt these pics were okay, some could have used some post processing - lightening up. I shoot in RAW and keep the RAWs so at some point, I'll revisit the photos and fix them up. But this is pretty much as shot!

Defense!

So the first set of photos I'll be posting are some canons I got some snaps of. I didn't get too many. I took these during the first part of my trip so the sun didn't cooperate too much. Most of my canon shots didn't come out right. This canon sits at one of the entrances to the capitol. It was one of two canons, one on either side of the steps to the entrance.

A Canon Guarding the Capitol

The Dome

Picture of the Dome, 1st Floor ViewAnother Picture of the Dome

I'm not sure which picture I like better. I would love the second picture with the shadows BUT I don't like the excess light entering the dome. I wish the lit part of the dome could look more like the first picture. The light is perfectly exposed. The dome in both pics is light by the sun.

I Hate Hotel Internet Connections

I travel alot and every hotel I stay at has the absolute worst internet connection. My blackberry is faster! So because of that I'm cutting the blog short because its too frustrating with load times. Its 2007 and I think it actually takes work to make internet connections suck this bad. I'm guessing they probably just have one pipe, probably just a single cable connection and one or two routers. Then you have a hundred or more people sharing the same pipe downloading pirated music. Please feel free to visit my flickr site,

http://www.flickr.com/photos/9778447@N07/sets/72157601112624605/

for all the pictures. There are some statue pics along with additional outside pics of the capitol. I enjoyed this excursion. I think the pictures came out much better than my Rice excursion. I'm debating whether to go out again and wander Austin or wait until tomorrow. I'm pretty exhausted right now, but I do enjoy it so its a tough call. The sun will be setting soon and I didn't bring a tripod so if I go it'll have to be soon. I may stay in and relax, perhaps play with some post processing. Sorry again for the lousy posts. This weekend I'll post more pics on the blog of the trip.

Rice University Outing

Ah, going back to Rice University brings back many good memories. At the time I couldn't wait to get out. Now I wish I could get back in! The campus is, simply put, spectacular. If you are familiar with Houston, then you know that the Rice campus is right in the middle of the city. Just a couple miles from downtown and across the street from the world class medical center. Being "inside the hedges", which is Rice-speak from being within the confines of the university, makes you forget that you are actually in the middle of the fourth largest city in the U.S. Pictured to the right is the academic quad. Graduation ceremonies are held here. Yes, Rice is that small. When you come into the university as a freshman, there is a ceremony where you enter through the sally port, pictured behind the middle tree. It is considered bad luck to exit it before graduation. And of course, when you graduate, you walk out of the sally port.


Anyway, Rice is the perfect place to take some photos. Unfortunately, I don't do the campus justice, but I tried. When I get better with my camera, I'll come back and do these right. To the left is another view of the sally port.

Rice has a small student body. I'm not sure about the numbers know, but if memory serves, the undergraduate population was around 1700 students. Another piece of lore is that there is a tree planted for every student.




To the right is where I spent most of my time. This is the engineering quad, housing the classes and labs for engineering. I studied Electrical Engineering at Rice, along with Economics and Business. Ironically enough, my occupation has nothing to do with any of my majors. I am a software engineer. In the background, you'll see the huge slabs, they are at angles of 180, 90, and 45 degrees. I took alot more pics of this area but unfortunately most didn't turn out well. I've been having problems with a blown out sky. I believe I need a polarizing filter to fix this. Unfortunately, to get the proper exposure of the landscape, I would have to either set at neutral or positive exposure compensation, resulting in the sky being blown out. If I set at a negative exposure compensation, the sky looked great, but everything else was dark. Maybe its my metering. Who knows, I'll need to find out.

The Nations Largest Graveyard!

That's right, at least that's how I remember it. I may stand corrected. Rice is a huge campus. The founder, William Marsh Rice, is entombed in the statue you see pictured above. Honestly, I forget the exact statistic (if its largest private graveyard or what, its more anecdotal I guess than anything). There was a "jack", a Rice term for a prank, where engineering students got together, and with only pulley's and rope, rotated the statue 180 degrees. The university hired a well known engineering firm to turn it back around. However, they couldn't do what Rice students could do: turn it without damaging it. Yup, the engineering firm damaged the statue when they rotated it back. This lead the university to force the students involved in the jack to pay for the expenses, which they were able to cover by selling t-shirts on campus. Also note in this picture the blown out sky. Looks terrible.

Anyway, I'll close out with two pictures of the Berlin Wall, located on Rice Campus. This subject has so much potential and in the hands of a better photographer. But the image of it is awe-inspiring and shows the power of the people and democracy can't be contained. I was young when the wall was still standing and even then, I never thought that thing would come down.

PS: I apologize for the formatting of this post. It doesn't look as good as it did in preview. I promise, I'll work to make other posts more readable.

My Gear and Selections

When I decided to get into the SLR world, I looked at many different cameras, but pretty much decided on the Canon system. I liked the look of the Rebel, how it functioned and how it felt. Also, the lens selection is incredible. One other factor was that if I ever needed to rent lenses, I understood that the easiest system to rent lenses for is the Canon.

What took longer for me to decide was which Canon to get: I had it narrowed between the XT (350d) and the XTi (400d). I took weeks, going back and forth between the two. I decided on the XT b/c even though the XTi does have some nice features that aren't found on the XT, for me it wasn't enough to spend an extra $200 or so. I decided I would be better served saving that money and getting glass instead. The two main points I debated on was the megapixels and the self cleaning sensor. I figured the MP's wouldn't make any difference for what I was doing and though the sensor cleaning feature is nice, still felt didn't need it. There are other new features on the XTi, but felt the XT was the camera for me.

So far, I only have the kit lens (18mm-55mm F3.5-5.6). Its a pretty good lens, especially outdoors and with good light.

I'm still learning. I have a long way to go. Not only with actually taking the pics, but also with post processing them. I've only begun fooling around in DPP with the various functions to get a better picture. I can't say I'm too good at it, but its a learning process and part of the fun, at least for me.

Pics will hopefully follow soon. Its been raining for over a month straight for the most part in Houston, s oI haven't been able to get outside and shoot unfortunately. I was going to go this afternoon but it has just started raining once again so I created this blog instead. I plan on my first set of pics taken at Rice University, my alma mater. The campus is incredibly beautiful, you forget you are smack in the middle of Houston. Plenty of trees, grass, shrubs, and the architecture of the buildings is amazing. Plenty of photo ops there. I hope to make it there today (weather and sun permitting), if not hopefully tomorrow!

Welcome

Welcome to my photography blog. I'm very new to the photography world. I've been a point and shooter for a while, but nothing "creative." Just the standard family photos. Earlier this month, I decided to dive in and get an SLR camera. So I picked up the Canon Rebel XT. Right now, I just have the kit lens. Will be picking up the Canon 50mm prime soon. Then I'll be looking at getting a telephoto. Have to figure out what my needs are first. I might pick up Canon's 85mm or 100mm prime before the telephoto because of the price and quality.

So I'll be posting pics every now and again. Looking to share and any critiques would be more than welcome. Hopefully as time progresses, the photos will improve, both from a technical standpoint as well as a creative aspect.

Welcome and this should be fun!