Shooting in the snow....

I've discovered it's rather hard to capture snow AS it's falling....it's tough to avoid the washed out white in the front of a picture that you know is snow. That's where manual focus comes into play instead of auto focus. The camera has a tough time focusing automatically on the falling snowflakes instead of whatever is behind them. I've had some fun playing around with this the past several weeks since all it does is snow around here! It was even more fun with my zoom lens.


When you switch to manual focus you can focus on the flakes instead of the background behind....it still takes some patience and tweaking though!



Red berries blissfully unaware that it's WINTER?!

The other thing I love to do in the snow with my zoom lens is shoot as close as it will let me focus so that only one thin strip of the snow is focused. Makes it look extra pretty sparkly to me!

I tried to adjust the lighting on this one in photoshop but I couldn't improve it while keeping the soft yellow light from the light on the side of the house.

I LOVE this one....the snow on top of our patio table....the dip in the middle is where the umbrella's supposed to go. This was with my zoom lens probably only 5 feet away from the table.

My favorite PRO

So my favorite professional photographer happens to be a French guy......Robert Doisneau. His specialty was everyday life in the Paris streets....and he shot in black and white. This first photo is probably one of his most famous...."Le Baiser de L'Hotel De Ville"....The Kiss @ City Hall. I love the candid simplicity of what he captured in his photos. When we were in Paris....one of our souvenirs was a book of his photos that you could take apart and frame. These following shots are hanging around the family room in the basement. I love them.....it's an everyday inspiration when I go downstairs. Would you believe me if I told you these are all actually photographs I took of the photos in their frames on the wall? Yeah....my camera is totally amazing.

Branching out

I figured I'd start a separate blog for all my artsy-fartsy photos and leave the other one just for updates about Chloe in her corner of the world. I'm having a lot of fun with my camera and editing shots in photoshop so maybe I'll start sharing more of them with anyone who wants to read/view.





I took this photo this summer with my longer lens. The sun was just off to the left and I actually shot this without looking through the viewfinder holding the camera down below hip level so the angle would be looking up. I tweaked it a little in Photoshop with the diffuse glow distortion filter and the accented edges brush strokes filter. I also increased the color saturation just a tad to make the sky look slightly bluer.