Mamarazzi’s New Toy, Part Deux
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An entire post about my walk to the Small Circle Woods with Bradley sparked a little bit of sibling rivalry, so in order to test some more features with my new Nikon D3, Gregory and I went for a walk. I’ve been reading the manual slowly, and trying out new features, so it was a good opportunity to test some things I was curious about, like how to shoot on manual settings on a bright sunny day in little shade and not blow out the whites. Keep in mind that my style generally involves photographs with blurry backgrounds for a painted effect, so I often shoot with a wide open aperture. All pictures below are from RAW files straight out of the camera. The only change is that they have been resized and saved as jpg for Web display.
Above, I got a lot of shots of Gregory walking through the woods looking down. It was muddy and he was freaked out about falling on the slippery rug of leaves.
ISO 250. 1/800s at f/2. 135 mm lens.
- He looked up!
ISO 250. 1/800s at f/2. 135 mm lens.
- We were looking at all the sweet gum trees in the woods. Gregory decided the really big ones should be called Gigumbus Trees. I like that word, gigumbus. It’s pronounced ji-GUM-bus. I’ll use it in a sentence: Julie’s new camera is gigumbus! She’s going to need a new neck soon. (Oooh. That was two sentences.)
ISO 250. 1/800s at f/4. 135 mm lens.
- It was actually quite dark in this little valley, other than the obvious sunlight streaming in on Greg’s face. I wanted to see if I could expose the shot and not completely lose the background while also not blowing out the skin tones. I also closed up the aperture some because I didn’t want to completely blur the background.
ISO 250. 1/1250s at f/8. 135 mm lens. Exposure compensation: –1/3.
- Greg is not very patient with me when it comes to look-at-the-camera portraits. I had to be quick on this. I would have turned him slightly to get the sun off the end of his nose, except my subject would only allow one shutter click and he wasn’t “getting” my “turn slightly to your left” direction so I just took it and hoped for the best. Ugh. I love his raised eyebrow. He reminds me of Jack Nicholson sometimes with those eyebrows and Michael Douglas with his dimpled chin.
ISO 250. 1/800s at f/2. 135 mm lens.
- Look! There’s Santa coming out of that house!
ISO 250. 1/800s at f/8. 135 mm lens.
- The spot meter works very well to expose the shot based on where I set my focal point. Alas, the background is too blown out for my taste, so if this were a shot I really loved and wanted to print, I would drop two exposures of this into Photoshop and layer mask them together in order to craft a picture that would seem to have been exposed properly. Sneaky, huh? But I’m happy to know the spot meter works as it should.
ISO 400. 1/400s at f/5.6. 135 mm lens.
- I like this one a lot. Gregory was having a great time unblocking the “river.” I like shots that make me recall giggles and happy smiles.
ISO 400. 1/400s at f/4. 135 mm lens.
- Back home, he went straight back to building Legos.
ISO 2500. 1/125s at f/2.8. 135 mm lens.
- Do you see Mike in the background?
ISO 2500. 1/160s at f/2.8. 135 mm lens.
- There he is, concentrating on putting some tiny round Lego peg into some tiny square Lego hole.
ISO 3200. 1/125s at f/2.8. 135 mm lens.
- See?
ISO 3200. 1/125s at f/2.8. 135 mm lens.
- This is the dark corner just inside our foyer. I can’t believe this picture came out so nice! Can you read the name of the store? My mom gave me that house. Thanks Mom!
ISO 3200. 1/125s at f/2.8. 135 mm lens.
- I’ve been using my 135 mm lens so much I thought I’d see how the full frame camera looks on my 50 mm lens. Cool! I wanted to see how far I could push the aperture to get a sharp background with little noise.
ISO 6400. 1/200s at f/6.3. 50 mm lens.
That’s it for today’s testing. Happy new year!
