February 2013

Here are a few images I took in February, but never ended up posting them... as always, with just my Nikon D60 and the basic 18 - 55mm lens... Actually, in February I got a 70 - 300mm lens with some birthday money (thanks to the generous family members that made that happen!!). It's only a f5.6, but still quite reasonable with good lighting and helps blur out backgrounds if you take flower closeups using max zoom.  Cheap way around not having macro gear, but works for the moment.  I will post more Spring pictures soon which will display that well.

2012-03-06

I managed to get my hands on Adobe LightRoom 3 recently (birthday cash + $200 off sale = new software for me!)  Here are my first processed images with LightRoom (instead of Google's Picasa)...

Here's my son Caleb, with his interesting Lego creations... Was conservative with effects on this one...

Here is my daughter with one of her Lego creations... I played more with the effects on this one (a blend of a downloaded preset and my own tweaks).

This is an image which I actually posted in my last blog update.  Seems like LightRoom has more options to offer to process the images.  Conversion from my Nikon D60 RAW files is definitely much superior to Picasa.

This was also a previously posted image.  Noise reduction in this one and colors were also much superior to Picasa.

For this one, the noise reduction was incredible!  This image was taken using ISO400 and was very noisy in Picasa.  I was able to manually tweak noise reduction settings until I get a very smooth and clean image.

Overall, LightRoom is very nice for processing RAW images.  I however don't think I will use it to REPLACE Picasa.  I actually think Picasa is awesome for image management and organization.  I think I may keep LightRoom for post processing images that I want to print or post somewhere.  LightRoom was a good buy for me at $90 instead of the regular $300.  Thanks to very kind photography hobbiest for letting us know about the sale!

2012-02-29

It's a leap year!  Very few years I actually noticed that there was a 29th day in February, but since I noticed it - I thought I should at least add a few winter pictures on my photo blog!  All these pictures were taken on our wonderful property or my dad's wood lot behind our house :)

I loved the clouds and this evergreen tree with all the snow... this was an early morning snowshoe run before starting work. This is the only time I ever did that, but it was some fun!  I was out in the woods before sunrise and got to enjoy sunrise from there - awesome!  If you've never done this at least once, very recommended!

After sunrise, everything light up... the trees almost looked like crystal - way more beautiful than what I could capture on film unfortunately!

More snowshoe tracks (from another day though)...

I took a few shots of the snowshoes and sun... a few of them turned out, but I decided to just put one of them.  This was one of my favorites!

My grand-father's old trailer... this thing has hauled tons (literally) of firewood out of the forest behind my house.  I actually worked a whole summer with him cutting and hauling wood (it was a LOT of work!).  My father still uses it to this day.

This one in black and white just for the fun of it :)