Clingman's Dome

Went hiking yesterday up to Clingman's Dome this time. This is what it looks like from the top of the world!

From the parking area it is only 1/4 mile to the top, but it is very steep. I had to stop on the way up about 4 times... okay, really about 5 or 6 to catch my breath, but it was worth it!

We went late in the afternoon - about 5:00 p.m. It was beautiful. I don't usually like to take photos in the direction of the sun unless there is a lot of color going on, but the light and shadows playing on the mountains here just fascinated me. I would have rathered the fur tree limb to the right not be in the picture, but couldn't really work around it and still get the wide angle and the light was best on the nearer hills in this spot. In case your wondering, yes, there is a sliver of a lake in the upper left hand side of the photo. Is it distracting? Unlike the limb on the right, I could photoshop the lake out easily enough. But since I know the lake is there and enjoyed the view of the lake on my hike, it is rather endearing to me.

Mushrooms and Fungi

It has been raining like crazy here all summer, so the mushrooms are very prolific this year. I have never seen so many different varieties. I am not up on my mushrooms so I can't tell you what kind these are except the last one is a "Crowned Coral". If anyone can identify them for me I'd love to know. I looked on-line without much luck, especially for the one to the right here that looks a bit like a flower; would love to know what it is.

These on the side of the tree were the size of large dinner plates! Wow!

Laurel Falls Trail Hike

This past weekend we hiked with three of our grandchildren to Laurel Falls in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. It is a great little hike - about 2.6 miles round trip. The trail is paved - although could use a repaving - so you can even take a stroller along. The trail head and small parking area is along Little River Road between the Townsend Wye and the Sugarlands Visitors Center.

Found this little one armed Salamander at the base of the falls!

Hearts-a-bustin'

Fall is just begining here in East Tennessee!

My First Contest

I entered my first Contest and placed well! One of my photography instructors had been encouraging us to enter the TN Valley Fair Competition and I had a friend that pushed me into doing it as well. I don't know why I held back. I think I was really afraid of feeling that if I didn't win it would mean they really weren't very good. I waited until the very last day to enter. All in all, it ended up being a very positive experience. I learned how to follow the rules in sizing and mounting my photos - I had never mounted anything before.

It was very intimidating when I dropped them off at the Fair Grounds. I could not believe all the photos; there must have been a thousand of them! The girl in front of me - hers were very good! I decided I would be happy if just some of mine were even displayed or if just one might get an honorable mention or something.

We could enter up to eight and I so I did. Three won ribbons; a first, second and fourth places! I am thrilled. Here are my winners and the categories in which they won. I am so proud... not going to be fit to live with for awhile!

1st Place Black and White / Plant or Man Made Objects

2nd Place Color / Motion or Action

4th Place - Black and White / Architecture

Grotto Falls, Smokey Mountain National Park

Following my last post about photographing water, thought I would post this one taken just yesterday of Grotto Falls in The Smokey Mountain National Park. I love living where I can get in my car at 10:30 a.m., drive to the trail head, hike a mile and a half to see something like this then hike the mile and half back and be back home in time for supper. Amazing!

Slow Shutter Speed for Flowing Water

Argghhh - I don't know how long it is going to take me to get this stuff into my head. Drove up to the mountains last Sunday with my son. We stopped to picnic at this little spot beside the road. Before we left, I thought I'd get a photo. The Joe Pye Weed was blooming beside this pretty little mountain stream and I love Joe Pye Weed because it is one of the few things blooming this late in the summer. It was a little overcast making the conditions right for a water shot here. I love photos making water look like it is flowing rather than frozen in action. You can't make these shots in bright sun light because you have to be able to slow the shutter speed down enough to make the water look all soft and yet not let the white caps get over exposed. When you slow the shutter speed down it lets more light into the camera therefore easy to over expose the shot.

I got out my tripod and framed the shot. I set my aperture as small as it would go. This would let in less light and I wanted to have a large depth of field anyway. I took the shot and it didn't work. The shutter speed was still too fast. I tried a couple more and then remembered I had to adjust the ISO. It had been on auto. Even then I couldn't get the shutter speed low enough. See the photo to the right. Yuck!

I get back in the car and my son asked if I got the shot I wanted. Noooo! I was doing something wrong, but what? 3 minutes down the road it hit me! I had been turning the ISO up instead of down. I had been thinking so much lately about speeding the shutter speed up in order to NOT take a blurry picture that when I WANTED a blurry picture, what did I do? I turned it up! In turning it up I was causing a faster shutter speed instead of the slower one I needed. I had taken the photo at F22 with an ISO of 1600 which made the shutter speed 1/30 - the slowest I could get it without over exposing the shot. While 1/30th of a second is slow it was not slow enough to get the nice fluffy water I was hoping for.


About a minute later I saw this other spot and pulled over and made the shot again this time cranking down my ISO instead of up. This was shot at F22 with an ISO of 100 at 1/6. This is much better. See how the water looks like it is flowing rather than frozen in place? This is more what your eye sees when looking at a mountain stream. With more shade it would have slowed the shutter speed down even more and been awesome.

Below is one I took a few months ago. It was shot at F22 with an ISO of 200 at 4 seconds. It is probably a bit too slow, but I love the effect and the feeling it gives. The spot where I took this was so shady there wasn't any sunlight being let in by the trees. This is what I wanted!

Totally Rad for Quick Textures

On August 5th I did a blog on adding cool textures to your photos, check it out below. I have since discovered Totally Rad Actions a company that has developed a really cool plug-in for Photoshop that will actually provide the texture or you can add your own, except instead of having to do all the blending and layering... their plug in does it for you. On top of that, you can see what your photo will look like even before applying the action. It is too cool!

Not on the market yet, but between now and August 23rd they are doing a contest... check it out! http://www.gettotallyrad.com/blog

I can't wait for this!

Focus in Landscape Shots

Here is something new I just learned... haven't used it myself yet. In a landscape shot I had been focusing out to infinity, but the buzz is that you should focus about 1/3 of the way from the foreground into the shot (would be at an imaginary line drawn across the bottom 1/3 of the photo). Hmmm.... the idea is so that the foreground will be in focus as well as the background scene. I am going to try it.

Large Depth of Field Slows Shutter Speed - WATCH OUT!

Okay, I said I would post something about what might be a problem when you set your aperture for those landscape shots where you want everything in focus. Now I am regretting having said that. I have really been trying to keep this blog basic and I'm not sure how to make this simple, but I think this is important to know so here goes.

You have three things that determine the amount of light coming into your camera: Aperture, Shutter Speed and ISO.

Here you are in front of this expansive landscape scene you want to capture. You check your camera setting your aperture to between f16-f22 so you can have the greatest depth of field. The closer to f22 the better. You snap the picture and look on the back -it is blurry. Why? I can't tell you how many blurry pictures I took before I finally found the answer and here it is... this small aperture lets less light into the camera. Your camera, the genius it is, compensates by slowing down slow shutter speed allowing in the correct amount of light to make sure the photo is properly exposed. It really is genius. But at some point depending on the available light conditions you are shooting in, the shutter may have to stay open so long that it picks up the camera shake from your body. Voila, this will of course cause blur and totally ruin your picture.

How do you determine when the shutter speed is so slow that you can no longer hand hold your camera and snap a clear picture? Here is a rule of thumb. If your shutter speed is slower than 1/focal length of your lens. If you have a 70 mm lens on your camera this means that if your shutter speed is less than 1/70 you may experience shake. If you start getting down to 1/50 you are definitely going to have a problem. So what to do?

You have two options. Do you remember my post about the camera I had with no working flash and I used 400 speed film to take wonderful photos indoors? Your ISO on your SLR works the same way. You can set the ISO on most SLRs up to 1800 if needed. The higher you set the number the more grainy your photos are going to apear but I think the difference is nominal on most photos. As a matter of fact, I was looking at a friend's photos the other day taken at ISO 1600 and couldn not believe the clarity. I am sure it varys from camera to camera and most photographers will tell you that jacking up the ISO is the least preferred option.

The preferred option is to use a tripod. If you don't have a tripod look for something to brace the camera against, like a tree or fence or rock. If none of those are an option, and often they are not, then you are going to have to raise your ISO.

Transform

My favorite photography video. Okay, this video is a little dark emotionally, but it is so inspiring as well. If you are dreaming in f-stops and are thinking about or even presently pursuing photography for a living you should watch this. http://www.zarias.com/?p=284

Out of Focus Problems

One of the things I have noticed about most SLRs is that if you have them in "auto" mode or even "professional" mode they tend to default to the largest aperture (smallest number i.e. f4-5.6). I don't know whose idea this was, but in my case that is wrong and I think in most cases it would be safer if the default was toward the smaller aperture. Here is why and here is why you may want to adjust your aperture often if you are shooting with an SLR.


The larger the aperture (f2-f5.6) the shallower the depth of field; which means that the subject is in focus but the things surrounding and behind the subject are blurry. You want shallow depth of field in many instances such as a portrait or a photo of an object where you want that person or object to stand out from everything else. Like the photo of the mean looking Emu above.


But if you are shooting a scene, which I shoot most of the time, you want as much as possible in focus. So, if all your vacation shots of the Grand Canyon are in focus in the middle of the photo and out of focus along the edges... this is why. For these shots you need a small aperture (f11-f22), not the f2-5.6 your camera is defaulting to in the "auto" or "professional" modes. There are two ways you can fix this. You can either make sure you select the appropriate "scene" mode on your camera every time you want everything in focus or you can set your camera to the "aperture" mode and adjust the aperture manually while shooting. If you select the "scene" mode option you will need to be sure and change it back to "auto" or one of the other modes such as "portrait" when you are taking a photo of a person or a bird and so forth.


I use the "aperture" mode because it gives me quicker and more precise control. The "aperture" mode is still adjusting all the other settings for you automatically such as shutter speed to make sure you have a correct exposure. The only thing that is manual is the "aperture". It can be changed quickly, depending on your camera, with a little dial next to your thumb and you can see the setting in your eye piece so you never have to take your eye off the scene.


Either way, just remember that your SLR is going to float toward the most shallow depth of field and if you want that clear shot of the Grand Canyon then you are going to need check the aperture and probably make a change.

There is one note of caution here. This is written assuming you are taking photos in day light situations. If taking the picture in low light your camera will adjust to a slower shutter speed to let in more light. This means you may need to use a tripod to avoid camera shake. More on that in my next post.

Adding Textures to Photos

In my last post I emphasised the importance of photo editing software for saving pictures that were not exposed correctly. Photo editing software is also good for adding features to it that will turn it from an okay photo to a "wow" photo. Here is an example. When I was visiting San Francisco a few years ago, I turned a corner and while I and everything around me on my block was in the shade, here was this church steeple shining in the sun. I thought it was a great shot and took it from the vehicle. Later, I didn't feel that it had really done the scene justice and it became one of my just so, so photos.

Recently I have been playing with adding texture to photos by layering them into the photo in Photoshop. Here is a great article on the how to's http://digital-photography-school.com/how-to-use-textures-to-enhance-your-photographs. I added a layer of a cover of an old book and one of some thick red and white paint and voila! Now this is something frameable I think.

Photo Editing

After familiarizing yourself with your camera and learning how to transfer pictures from it to you computer you will need to get some sort of photo editing software.

There are a few freebies you can download from the Internet but at some point, if you are serious about photography you are going to have to invest in Photoshop or something equivalent. Personally, I think Photoshop reigns King. I have both Elements 6 and CS3. CS4 is out but I have heard some negatives and will stick with CS3 for now.

People who know little about photography think of Photoshop only as a means of doctoring a photo by dragging things into the photo that originally weren't there or taking things out such as power lines or some one's ex-husband. That is not the purpose of Photo editing at all. Nothing is sadder than to discard a good photo because it is badly exposed. So much can be fixed as seen in the before and after of the photos below.

Photoshop or photo editing software is the digital photographer's dark room. It is a must for any serious photographer to learn and be skillful at photo editing. If you learn nothing else in Photoshop learn how to re size and crop a picture, change the exposure by adjusting the levels, increase and decrease the saturation, and increase and decrease the contrast. These are the same things a Photographer did in the dark room with film.

Also, one final tip - always save a copy of your original photo before editing... meaning you will have two copies on your computer - the original photo and the edited photo. Every time you edit a photo it looses a little bit in the process. If you want to do something to that photo later you may not have enough to work with in the edited copy.

Camera Settings

These shots, which I thought were good, broke my heart. There was this terrific sky with the sun setting behind the hill and the old farm house out in front giving a great photo opp. I jumped out of the car and got as many shots as I could before the light was gone.

I looked on the back of my camera and many were, I thought, exceptional. Later, I would discover that they were all shot in Standard Quality JPEG. I had been shooting in RAW earlier in the day and thought I might be running out of space and decided to change to HQ JPEG but must have accidentally put it on SQ. Every one of them were smaller than 1 MB leaving me very little to work with in Photoshop and not very good for prints.

With prices so cheap now for large format video cards, there is no reason to shoot in SQ - EVER. I have a 4GB SanDisk in my camera and I carry a 2GB as back up - although I doubt that I will ever use it.

Customizing Your Camera Settings

Once I found out where to find controls on my camera, what they did and how to use them I discovered I had new question. Were the factory default settings the best settings? What did I need my function button to do, how much of an Ev step was best, did I need to adjust the picture mode settings? What settings had professional photographers who had used my camera determined made the best pictures and worked the smoothest. I discovered that they indeed chose to change many of the factory default settings in the Olympus 510. For example, by setting the noise option to "off" I found I had a much better picture. It is really only needed if the ISO is cranked up really high and then only in the "low" setting.

http://www.wrotniak.net/photo/43/e510-sett.html#LOCKRECOM is a great site for customising your settings for the Olympus E-510 or E-410. The web site also has a detailed review of the cameras which I found very helpful. There are other cameras in review there as well.

Once I lived with the suggested settings for awhile I then tweaked them a little to my liking, but pretty much found the suggestions to be spot on.

Camera Specific Tutorial for Dummies Found!

After having waited about 7 years to take the photography classes I'd dreamed of, I found I was sorely disappointed - at least in the beginning. I realize now I was just sorely lost. I had just bought my camera and had no idea how to operate it. I'd jumped into these classes with terms like apertures, white balance and metering and I had no idea how to find or set these features in my camera. There were only two of us with Olympus Cameras in the class and the other person was more lost than me. The instructor was a Nikon person and had boned up on Cannon but made it clear he couldn't hold the class back to figure out how my camera would set a custom white balance. He told me to read the manual then if I still didn't understand it he'd help me after class next time. I couldn't understand the manual. THAT was why I was in the class!

Being the impatient person I am, I didn't wait until next class to meet with my instructor. I started googling my camera on the Internet and low and behold there was LIGHT! On http://www.youtube.com/ there is video after video of people explaining every button, where it is, what it does and how to operate it. I found the Holy Grail! Just enter your camera make and model in the search bar. I spent hours there and have to say that by the time I went to class three, I was a master of my camera!

I did not go this route myself, but found out later that http://www.elitevideo.com/ sells really good instructional videos on just about any camera made. They are very detailed and go over every feature and button. Prices range from about $35 to $79 from what I could tell.

I had to understand how to operate my camera before I could move forward in understanding the technical side of photography. Once I did this, I was in the game.

Where Is A Digital Geek When You Need One?

It took me about two days to realize how over my head this new digital camera was. I'm pretty technically savvy for a Real Estate Agent / Mom / Grandma. This camera had more buttons on it than a 747! I had no idea how to operate it. The book was written in Geek and made no sense to me. I really wanted to know HOW to get the most out of this camera.

I looked for the University Catalog. The timing was right. I'd had my best year in Real Estate and my kids were grown. I signed up for a Fundamentals One class thinking that is all I would ever want or need to take. I mean all I really needed to know was what all those other buttons besides the green "A" on my camera would do, right? Yea... right!

Digital Deliema

I had tried a little Kodak digital camera when they first came out and hated it. It never worked right and the pictures were awful; but about 2006 I realized the digital camera quality was catching up to 35 mm. I knew that when the prices came down it would be much more cost effective to have a digital in the long run. I also liked the idea of being able to review your results imediately on the back of the camera.

In 2007 I started asking around and researching digital cameras. I was thinking seriously about a Cannon Rebel. One day my Broker told me of a lady that was trying to break into the photography business that would take really good pictures of my houses for nothing because she wanted the experience. I called her and used her as much as my conscience would let me without paying her - twice. She was really good. We stayed in touch and when I was just about to make the plunge I decided to call her first. She used an Olympus and liked it. It came from the box with two lenses - a wide angle and a telephoto. This would be perfect for me since I needed to take pictures wide angle for inside my houses and I loved doing nature photography as well. I looked up Olympus on the web and found nothing but positive posts. It had a stablizing feature in the body that many of the cameras didn't have. In March 2008 I bought my Olympus E-510. This picture of the blue bird on a bucket was one of the first pictures I took with my new camera. I was hand holding and this is zoomed up to about 7x. A little shake, but not bad.

The Hunger Begins

I saved my money and bought a Pentax ZX-7 35mm. Again, I never got past the "auto" mode - but loved it. Well, I did play around some with the macro feature without any outstanding results. But the landscapes were awesome. The camera really made me want to learn more about photography because I knew this camera was capable of so much more than what I could do with it on green "A".

About this same time, out of the blue, I started receiving a University Professional Studies Catalog in the mail every semester. I had never taken any of their classes, but loved looking through it. Every time it would come I would scan it from front to back and dog ear the pages with classes I'd like to take. The one that ALWAYS got turned down for sure was the page on photography classes. There was always an excuse. My job took a lot of my time, I was married and had kids so didn't want to be away nights, and finally money. It seemed like such an extravagant thing to do when we needed so many other things. I really did not see myself ever being able to take the classes, but I'd dog ear those pages just the same.

First REAL Camera

We were a nature loving family. Spent almost every weekend outdoors when I was growing up; backpacking, camping, and canoeing mostly. I really loved to take nature and landscape pictures. Taking pictures, however; was secondary to everything else I was doing. I never even considered spending a lot of money for a camera until I was in my mid thirties.

I was a Realtor and needed a decent camera to take photos of my listings. I knew nothing about cameras so my first purchase pretty much entailed walking into a camera shop and talking to the guy behind the counter explaining what I needed and how much I was willing to spend. He sold me a Minolta. It was one you could keep in "automatic" and it would make all the choices for you, or you could use it on manual and make your own. Of course I chose the former.

I took this picture of a sun set in California with it. I was very impressed with the results and took some really good pictures with that camera for quite awhile.

The pop up flash stopped working within about a year but I just worked around that by using 400 speed film whenever I photographed inside. Yea, this meant that I wasted a lot of film. For years my camera and I limped along like this. The rewind button finally did us in. It was this little rubber dot you had to press with the tip of a pen or something small like that. Eventually it stopped working for me. I took it to the camera shop and they told me it would cost more to fix it than the camera was worth. I'd had it about 8 years by then I think.

My Very First Camera

This was the first picture I remember taking. It was at girl scout camp and that is my girlfriend in the tree.

I must have just gotten my first camera and I was eleven. I probably got it to take on this trip. It was a Kodak Instamatic. I can't remember the model or anything but I know the first pictures I took with it were in black and white. That little Instamatic was a trooper. Even a kid couldn't kill it.

When I was about 15 I got a Polaroid. I was excited because it meant I wouldn't have to depend on my parents to get my film developed and the results were instantaneous. But the pictures weren't very good and the film was expensive. I went back to using the little Instamatic. I finally drowned it in a river on a canoe trip when I was in my 20's.