More things that grow

I take quite a few pictures of trees from the bottom up, but never from the top down. Maybe someday I'll go climbing trees with my camera.

 This next one looks like it was taken at night or against a dark background, but the sun was shining on the flowers and I metered for them, and the rest must have been a lot darker. (that sounds a bit confusing when I reread it, but oh well)

Flowers on top of hostas

birch leaf

Tiger lily, I think

 If you didn't notice, I tried to put the pictures as big as they go this time around. :-)

New Pictures!

I'm done with the pictures from Finland for now, I'll probably put more here later though.
The other day (night actually) I went out and played with some steel wool. It was kind of fun, but I guess some people would call it unsafe or even dangerous. It made some interesting pictures.

Tomorrow I think post pictures of some flowers, Tiger Lilies I think.

Finland Flowers

Here are a few flowers that I took pictures of in Finland. I think tomorrow (or whenever I post next) I'll put more pictures of people. People pictures are fun.

 Here's actually a few more that I uploaded but forgot to squeeze into a post:

I thought this might look cool a bit out of focus, so I tried it.

 As usual, any comments or suggestions are much appreciated. :-)

Ulvila Church

Oops, I saved this as a draft a few days ago and forgot to post it :-) Here it is.
We stopped in Ulvila next to see the old church there. The church is from the 15th century. A lot of my pictures came out blurry, because it was a bit dark in the church, and I did not have a good spot to rest the camera.

This had a weird circle on it, I think from the sun.

The circle with the cross is as old as the church

Collection box

Rauma

Rauma is an old city near the ocean, and I took some pictures there. Here are a few of them. Like in Tallinn, we were in the old part of the city. The clouds were pretty good I think for taking pictures, I think a bit more interesting than a plain blue sky.

Town hall I think

A church there

By the door

Inside

 A few links if you're interested in this place:
Rauma on Wikipedia
Another site

Estonia

On the second day we were in Finland, we hoped onto a boat and went South to Estonia. It rained a little bit on and off, but not enough to ruin the day. We went to the old part of the city (the city was Tallinn), where they had old buildings and suchlike.

Arch

There were these types of buildings

The rain made the street kind of shiny

 Today it's raining at home, too.

First Finland pictures

I ended up with a lot of pictures, so I'm not sure how I'll pick which ones to put here. I figured I'd start from the beginning and go in order for the most part. Obviously I won't put them all. ;-)
The first two are out the plane window, I think leaving to Chicago.

They have a lot of these pine trees.

Well I'm back from Finland

I'm back from Finland, as you saw from the title. I took quite a few pictures, and got them sorted into different folders and rotated (the computer doesn't do that for me).
I'll be posting pictures of the trip for sure, but for today I don't have any. I do, however, have an interesting link. It's something to do with how well you can see colors. You need to arrange them in order, and then you get a score. I got 11, lower is better.
Color test

Well I tried again and got 0! Yay! :-)

Experiment 2

I changed a few things, I think the most important thing was that I moved the light to the front (I used a work lamp from in the garage). This put more light into the middle of the flower. I also used my 50mm 1.8, at I think f/11 or 13 or so. I think they look a bit better, but still not quite what I want. I did adjust the levels and saturation a bit in GIMP, and also the white balance, but not too much.

Also, the background still looks a tinge blue, though I fixed most of it.

A little experiment

Today I tried taking just 5 pictures (well really 4). I decided to use my little light tent thing that I made. I turned off the lights, and opened the window so only natural light came in. This required a longer exposure, so  I got out my remote shutter thing and turned on the mirror lockup option. I put the ISO to 100 to minimize noise. I used my 18-55mm lens almost all the way zoomed.

The first picture here I used to set a custom white balance. It was just a piece of printer paper:

I looked around for a subject, and saw my gyroscope.
f/16
10 sec
ISO 200

pattern metering mode

Next I photographed a dried out rose.
f/16
15 sec
ISO 200

pattern metering mode

I realized that the pattern metering mode was making the flower too dark, so  I switched to partial metering (which I also like to use for bugs and flowers).
f/13
30 sec
ISO 200

partial metering mode

This is where I put the ISO down to 100, and used one of my homemade reflectors to put a bit more light on the front.
f/14
30 sec
ISO 100
partial metering mode

If you have any tips, hints, or suggestions about how to make this better or what I might have done wrong, please leave a comment. I think a few things that I'll do are: (ooo I found the bullet points)

• add more light to get rid of the lengthy exposures
• start with the ISO down to 100
• use my 50mm 1.8 lens, it is a bit sharper
• try a different background besides white

Some of my efforts with Photoshop

I saw a tutorial on the world wide web about a nifty thing to do with Photoshop, so I decided to give it a whirl.

 I think this was the link:
http://cgscdoc.tripod.com/lizshomework/id11.html
Any suggestions would be nice. :-)

One of my friends

Today I was digging around  in my old pictures (again) and found my violin ones. They were a bit hard to do, as I had to put the camera on self timer, and hope that I would end up in the frame and the focus would be fine.

On a side note, Photoshop Elements 1.0 has stopped opening for me, claiming that there is insufficient RAM or something like that. I haven't even got my $5 out of it yet, I don't think. I was hoping for it to suffice for at least 6-12 months before I felt like an upgrade would be nice. I had to use GIMP, which isn't bad at all, but I think Photoshop is a bit more well designed, doing things is faster and easier.

Anyways, here's my violin.

The ugly cousin of the violin: the viola.

I included a picture of  a viola (my sister's). They aren't actually all that bad, but I just had to put it in there.