At the St. Louis Zoo yesterday, I watched this drama unfold. A bird landed in the prairie dog area and decided that it wanted the prairie dog to share its food. The prairie dog (and yet another prairie dog) remained stoic throughout this ordeal (this is a series of 13 photos), which begs for cartoon captions.
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Family is out of town. Ergo I've taken up a new hobby of trying to photograph coins dropping into a glass vase. The resulting images remind me of lava lamps.
And then I decided to redo my eyes. I use Photoshop Elements 10. It's a baby version of Photoshop, yet so packed with options that I probably only understand half of it, even after working with it for years. All of this was done with layer masks, and much of this strangeness was inspired by Sean Sharboneau.
If you'd like to have some fun with your DSLR, check out his ebook and website.
In the past few months, I've graduated to a DSLR, a Canon 7D. Since then, I've been amazed at how much time one could put into understanding how to make good use of such a high-quality camera. The path I've been taking is to simply try one thing at a time. Tonight, it was a good time to learn how to shoot fireworks. I would have liked to have shot from several vantage points, but it would have been difficult to move around once it got dark in the thick crowd at the St. Louis riverfront. There are many people with ideas out there on how to set one's camera. I started out at f11, 100 ISO and bulb shutter, making use of a remote shutter cable. I eventually moved to f8, in order to brighten up the arch and buildings better. I made a mistake by failing to set focus to manual focus, which caused the camera to struggle and delay on many shots, because it had a difficult time focusing on the darkness, which was when I often tried to open the shutter--I didn't realize that mistake until after the fireworks show.
It's great fun trying to anticipate the best way to compose these shots. Post-shooting production was rather minimal. Mostly I used Lightroom 4 to nudge down the highlights and the darks, plus add a bit of clarity. There are no filters on any of these 4 shots, though, even though they look a bit surreal. Click on the images for a higher res view.
It's not every day you see a helicopter do a loop. I was walking by the Arch in downtown St. Louis today and noticed this. The pilots were practicing for the upcoming holiday air shows at the Arch.
