photos from december31/2009 – New Years Eve!

sooo these photos were by no means pre-planned. i had a few friends over, and we had had some drinks. which made us decide to do an impromptu photoshoot, using the pull-down projection screen as a background. we are GENIUSES! so, excuse the very crappy composition; all the photos are cropped at really awkward places, but that’s because the screen didn’t go down any further than that. i’m working on building a portrait background out of PVC pipe. also, this was my FIRST attempt at any sort of portraits/portrait post-processing.

well, here goes nothing:

and these photos here, are merely a joke…as we were drunkenly snapping off photos, the girls thought it would be funny to photoshop ourselves onto various tourist backgrounds! so, these are just really quick jobs in photoshop, just for fun!

and with that, i believe i am all caught up. i will be taking some more time for photos sometime soon; i’m still getting all the holiday stuff put away, i’ve taken on a 2nd job, i’ve ALSO taken on cleaning my boyfriend’s grandparents house, and dave and i are going to go to my mom’s house soon and organize her spare room – including all the christmas decorations, and halloween decorations. we are certainly not doing this because we are nice people (though we are, of course!) but moreso because we have some stuff we want to store there.

anyways, sorry for the long hiatus, i will be back!

photos from december 4/2009

these are the photos i took for the front of my christmas cards this year. i also made the paper for the cards! they were quite a hit, and i feel rather chuffed with myself for being so crafty! anyways, here they are.

these are various christmas decorations i found laying around. it was VERY hard to get the lighting right with these. they still look quite off, but decent enough.

my favorite:

the colors on this one are absolutely horrible, but i liked the arrangement

ditto to this one

the hummingbird! it is my mom’s favorite christmas ornament, and always has been. just beautiful

and last but not least, the christmas house!! this one street does this every year, and each year it gets more elaborate. i can’t even imagine their hydro bill for december…

photos from november 15/2009

i have most definitely been neglecting this blog…and pretty much everything to do with photography! quite disheartening. so i guess i had better catch up…here are some photos from November 15th, 2009.

this is my first attempt at building, and using, a light tent. i never thought to get any photos of the setup, but next time i will.

these photos turned out far from perfect in my opinion; in the originals the backgrounds turned out grey, and i had to up the exposure to get the background a clean white. this in turn washed out the photo, and caused them to look a little flat. so i opened them back up and adjusted the levels to make them pop a bit more once again, and the snakes are pretty close to their true colors.

i’m looking for some critique on these, what is the best technique for getting a clean white background? i was just using my on-camera flash, definitely not ideal, i know. so if you have any comments or critiques, they are definitely welcome!

these two are our smallest ball python, Peanut; she is carrying the Piebald gene.

and this is our male “spider” ball python, Arthas. he’s been breeding with our albino female!

this is my female “anerythristic” corn snake, Winifred. she’s one of the babies we bred last year and held back for future breeding. she currently weighs about 60grams.

this is my “pastel” ball python, Sage. she looks quite big in this photo, but she’s really not as big as she looks. she weighs in at about 600grams.

and just for fun, here’s a closer crop of an old photo, from way back in july:

va-va-va-vancouver!

it’s been awhile!

my sister and i have went on two photowalks around the city of vancouver recently, so i thought i’d take the time to post some more photos. there are from the first day (which got cut very short due to rain):

diagon alley

black, black locks

doors and bricks, can’t go wrong

peekaboo! a photo of my sister

barbed silhouette

and here are the photos from the second photowalk, which dave also joined us for.

we found these lovely fishes and leaf bokeh at a downtown school

autumn is here!

some more leaf bokeh, tryin’ out my macro lens for a couple landscape shots

my sister was alllllways steppin’ in my way! this time, it worked!

a portrait of autumn joy!

tree depth

and last but not least, an mc escher painting, in an alley! this was a long exposure night shot, i desaturated the reds, oranges, and yellows to get this effect

skateboarding!

so a little while back a friend told us to come on down to the skate park for a bit, and so we did. didn’t know there was going to be a competition happening, but anyways. here is my attempt at photos. i took almost 300, and these are the only 5 that i actually liked.

i’m not huge on weird effects, but for some reason this seemed kinda cool:

lily’s garden, again

we had just bought my sister a nikon D60 for her birthday, and a friend of mine had her boyfriend come over from the island, and we all went out shooting. we decided to go to lily’s garden since it’s both close, and scenic.

we found this fine piece of grafitti on the way.

and this is the “view” from the underpass that goes under the sea to sky highway.

why this chair is here, i do not know but, it made for a good photo!

something strange hanging from a tree; i thought they were apples but they have strange little dointies attached to them.

thirsty?

turn this.

the tiger lilies were AMAZING! their leaves were all curled up like that because it’s so dry here, they need a drink! and drink, they will get, as it is absolutely POURING here today.

a pink lady. just kidding. pink lady is a type of apple, i don’t know my flowers. a rose, maybe?

and last but not least, a birdhouse! there used to be a different, much older one at lily’s garden, but i guess they replaced it. i can’t wait til this one gets older and more weathered!

kiteboarding at the spit

dave (my wonderful, tripod toting/setting up boyfriend) and i took a quick jaunt on the ATV the other day to photograph the kiteboarders/windsurfers. i took many, many shots, but these are the ones i was most happy with. there were a few levels/saturation adjustments to these photos. i did not, however, capture the one money shot that i really, really wanted, but hey with my hometown being the windsurfing capital, i’m sure i have lots more opportunity for that!

for all of these photos the ISO was set to 800 (I KNOW, super NOOB move but) it enabled me to use a shutter speed of over 1/1000, which made it INCREDIBLY easy to handhold (auto-focus) shots on my 300mm lens while fully zoomed in. and i must say, my sigma 300mm zoom was a FANTASTIC used buy! it cost me under $100 CAD and i’ve used it for many occasions. one thing i’m wondering, is high ISO noise worse/more noticeable in night shots? because i can’t really see much noise in these kiteboarding shots, but again like i said i’m a pretty big noob to all these things. anyways, here goes nothing;

they don’t call it the sea to sky corridor for nothin!

thanks for looking

canada day/shedding corn snake/squamish hike

haven’t posted anything in awhile…that’s cause i haven’t taken many pictures lately! unfortunately. the first one is a shot of me that i got my sister to take with my nikon

and here’s a few macros of a GIANT dragonfly that i saw up at the cabin. i took over 30 photos of this lil guy, it kept posing for me, and then flying away and meeting up with another dragonfly in the air, and then coming back. it was very still and patient, never getting spooked even though i was up to my waist in the lake and shoving a giant macro lens in its face

and here are some from canada day evening, FIREWORKS! this was my first attempt at fireworks. it didn’t work out as well as i had hoped because a) i was extremely intoxicated (surprised i even managed to setup my tripod without knocking it over) and b) there was NO WIND whatsoever to carry the smoke away. but alas, here are my first tries at fireworks (no post processing):

a kitchen fly, guess where it was sitting during this photo? on the lip of the garbage can. imagine that.

a photo of ryan and carla

and one of dave and i (funny you can really tell who knows the rules of composition here )

and last but not least, this panorama was stitched together using Hugin. this is 21 shots alltogether, a few adjustments in photoshop to make the colors pop a little, as the pano looked a little washed out originally. this one is really, REALLY worth looking at in full size, you can zoom in on every little part of my town, from 800ft up!

thanks for lookin!

weekend in vancouver

my boyfriend and i spent the weekend in vancouver, and it was delightful! we went on a giant photowalk around the city, he set up my tripod for me and helped me pick spots to take shots from. the only unfortunate thing, is i forgot my ISO on about 300-320, which unfortunatley made some of the shots a teeny bit noisier than they should have been, though honestly it’s not a huge deal. i’m still getting a grip on all the different settings and features that i can work with simultaneously, and sometimes i forget about EV or ISO or both. but, alas, the photowalk was amazing. i was THRILLED to see the moon popping out here:

and this was my first time doing a long-exposure with moving people in the shot (though not intentionally)

a colorful shot down granville street

this was a fun shot, as we were at some high-class hotel/residence taking shots of the LED lights (none of which were good, so they will not appear here) and one of the security guards/valets came over and basically told us to skedaddle, or else the residence will think we are peeping toms and confiscate our film (haha, i had a chuckle about the film part). so we told them we would leave quickly. then a guy in a lamborghini rolled up, so i asked to take a photo of his car. and he was all like, “yeah whateva!” like a snobby ass rich boy. so i did, and this is what came of it, one of my favorites (and my boyfriends favorite) shots of the night

and here’s some of the burrard street bridge

and a few of the granville street bridge, the first one has the moon high up above

and another of the burrard street bridge

ahhhh what a trek from our hotel room to pacific central. i also intended on getting a shot of science world, but APPARENTLY science world, AND IT’S LIGHTS go to bed at nightnoon. very disappointing. but this shot of pacific central made me so so so happy, my super-wideangle also makes me happy

the next day we decided to do a tandem-bike tour of the seawall. side-note, tandem bikes are SCARY!! if you’re on the back, that is. you can’t see what’s going on around you until it’s already behind you. plus they hurt your bum, but it was soooo worth it, i had tons of fun. here is a mallard, i believe, with a mallardling (teehee)

a goosey!

and some of this oh-so-adorable raccoon that we met as prospect point, right above the lion’s gate bridge. he was begging for an ice cream cone in the last one, sooo friendly, i just wanted to pet him!

i love crows so much, i may even get a half-sleeve tattoo of a crow and whatnot

leaving prospect point

aaaaaaand 2nd beach in stanley park, strangest place for a pool!

marina adventure, carnival!