Long time no see! I haven’t been updating the blog regularly but you can always follow my work on Flickr (if you don’t know my username, just look in one of my pictures).
Today I went to Lisbon (the capital of Portugal) with the purpose to take some photographs on the “tourism circuits”. I’ve published this set on Flickr, which contains the best 28 pictures in my view.
You can see it by clicking here (unfortunately, I couldn’t publish Flickr’s embed flash). Hope you like it!
Yesterday I was shooting Woody (as I’ve explained in my other post) and the picture above was one of the ones that I’ve selected and uploaded to Flickr. I must say this isn’t one of my favourites but people on Flickr liked it (they even placed it in their favourites!) and I’ve decided to share it in the blog because it was a fully manual picture.
Yes, it’s the first picture that I share here where I’ve used fully manual settings (and made me see that I don’t need Sony’s help anymore). In this picture I wanted 2 things: the lowest noise possible and the background out of focus. This is done by using low ISO and big aperture (lowest numbers). Bearing this in mind I’ve used ISO 100 and f5.6 (the biggest my Minolta lenses can do at 80mm).
Now it’s a matter of exposure. Yesterday I’ve learned that my camera seems to like pictures with more light than me. This means I couldn’t trust the light meter to do what I wanted as I was always aiming for something near -0.7EV of what it considered the correct value. In this particular picture it was a shutter speed of 1/500 that gave me what I wanted.
I shot this with manual focus, but that was a “just because I can” thing (xD). Since I was too lazy to go to the WB menu (and I still don’t understand it very well) it was in Auto WB and that turned white into yellow. So, I’ve applied the preset “Color Process 2″ in Aperture. That made the colors correct but they weren’t what I wanted so I’ve changed the saturation value to 1.19.
As you can see, describing a manual picture is a big process. But I was also inspired by what I consider to be the greatest album ever done: Awake by Dream Theater. I know this isn’t a music blog but just give this album a try.
Go ahead and download this on Flickr!
Smile! by Afonso Garcia is licensed under a Creative Commons Atribuição-Uso Não-Comercial-Não a Obras Derivadas 2.5 Portugal License.
Hey! It’s Woody! I’m affected by the Toy Story 3 fever (like everyone in my generation, after all we grew with this toys). And I saw one funny Flickr group called The Secret Life of Toys. And I decided to rescue Woody from the evil hands of the trunk (it was that or my paper Pedobear…).
Since it was just to have a picture in that particular group, I didn’t care too much about the camera settings and just shot in Auto. The real secret of this photo is Aperture. I’ve used the preset “Toy Camera” to make the vignette and to saturate the picture.
If you want, you may download Woody in Flickr.
What about you? Have you took any picture to your toys? What did you thought of the group?
There’s a snake in my boots! by Afonso Garcia is licensed under a Creative Commons Atribuição-Uso Não-Comercial-Não a Obras Derivadas 2.5 Portugal License.
I saw some photos like this on the Internet and decided to try it out. This is the portuguese test from one of my friends (to which I thank) as my machine (and me) saw it.
To take this photo I’ve used manual focus to blur what I wanted (and not what my camera wanted). I think (but don’t remember well) that this picture was took in Auto mode but should have been in Macro.
Available for download at Flickr.
Lettering by Afonso Garcia is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Portugal License.
