Wow, great resource

I had to repost this link: killer roundup:

http://www.pixiq.com/article/photo-sites

Kinder Farm

Just a few pictures from a recent jaunt around Kinder Farm's 2 mile walking loop.

Roses at 50mm

I took a stab at using natural light and my new 50mm to get some low-light shots of the roses I bought my beautiful girlfriend for Valentine's Day.  I'm not super pleased with the sharpness of a few, but since I have to manual focus that is partially me as well.  Maybe I should have upped the ISO a bit.

Them be roses ^^

Overall fun though!  I'm still getting the hang of the manual focus but it does make you think more about your compositions!

Some initial thoughts on the new 50mm lens

Christmas Tree

Well I've gotten to take a few pictures with the new lens and I realised a few things.  First of all, I really enjoy having a prime lens. Not being able to zoom really alleviates a crutch in photography.  It makes you move your feet and your hands to get a better composition instead of just zooming and shooting.

This lens is AF, not AF-S like the rest of my lens.  This means that it does not have a built in auto-focus on the lens.  The long and short of it is that I have to do all my focusing manually.  I've done some manual focusing in the past year or so, but mostly only on macro shots or in very low light.  Using all manual focusing is much trickier then I thought it would be.  Getting to within 10% of focus is very easy, but getting to the point where everything is sharp and how I imagine it to look, is difficult.  In low light situations, my viewfinder isn't always even sharp enough to allow me to tell when the image is in focus.  I look forward to getting more experience in this area and hopefully getting better at it :D

Another thing I've noticed is that at F/1.8 you do get much more light.  It doesn't allow you to do anything miraculous but it does allow you about four times faster shutter speeds then the lowest aperture on my 18-135 lens.

I want to get more use out of this lens in the next few weeks.  Hoping to be able to take some macro, portrait, and landscape shots to use the full capability the new toy.

50mm Unboxing

I got the new prime 50mm in the mail this week and took some pictures of the unboxing!

Lunar Eclipse

 

Last week during the lunar eclipse that a large majority of the East Coast of the United States experienced I forced myself out of bed at 2:30AM to try and get a few good pictures of the moon.  I hadn't really done any research on how to photograph eclipses but figured that with my tripod and a few different attempts I'd be able to figure it out.  The biggest problem I had was the weather.  It was very frigid and very windy which made my hands frozen and my patience tested.  I would have taken more time photographing had it not been so very cold.

It was initially a difficult task because I had trouble with the technical aspects of shooting a dark moon against a dark sky in my parking lots with bright lights.  My best attempt is shown above. I bumped up my ISO to 1600, made the shutter speed shorter (About 1/30 I believe), and had the aperture very low.  This image above is slightly blurry, I think because I had the aperture so low.  In the future I'll increase my depth of field and hopefully will have better results.  This was also shot with my 135mm and not my 300mm which I'll surely change next time as well. 

Nikon 50mm F 1.8

I just took the plunge and purchased my first prime lens.  Hopefully will have unboxing and test pictures soon as well as maybe some portraits.