California Collection

Todays Blog is going to focus on a trip to California I recently took. I have a lot of photographs that display certain techniques and I have some tips and tricks when shooting stills.  I’m also going to discuss what lenses I used for what. Don’t worry one of them is the standard lens that comes with most Canon Rebels.  However, I also own a very inexpensive 50mm, F1.8 Prime lens.  My favorite lens by far, but I will go into that after the break along with the showcase of the pictures.

 This is a picture from our backyard and one of my favorites! If there is anything I can suggest when taking night shots is HAVE A TRIPOD! I unfortunately didn't bring mine so a flat surface worked wonderfully. When taking night shots I always think about what am i trying to focus on. Here I wanted not only the stars in focus but the tress. So I bumped up my aperture to about a F16 and then began to adjust my shutter speed settings. I also didn't want a grainy look so I kept my ISO as low as I could. After numerous shots I picked this one as my favorite. my shutter speed was at 30 seconds, aperture of f16, ISO 400. Because the moon was so bright I was able to pick up so much detail even with such a high aperture.

 This next pic was one of my favorites on the trip. Most of the time when you take a pic of the water you freeze the water right where it was and you see less of a smooth picture. However because the sun was so bright i was able to raise the f-stop like the picture above and even lower the iso to 100. I shot this at 1/10 of a second and it turned out beautifully. What also was great about the high aperture was that i got everything in focus that was around the water.

 This is the moon if you don't know and one of my all time favorite pictures now. this was more of a tricky picture because I couldn't let the shutter stay open for too long because the moon was so full and bright, but I wanted the depth and clarity like in the picture above. So I tried and tried until I came out with this. you can barley see the stars but the blackish blue color of the sky amazes me. When i shot all of these pictures a technique I use is I only will adjust one specific thing (shutter speed, f-stop, iso) at a time for each picture. This shot has a 1/15 of a second shutter speed, an f-stop of 10 and an iso of 800. Surprisingly enough the iso didn't affect the graininess as much as I was expecting and gave that light through the trees a little more umpth which brought the picture to life. In the end when shooting night shots the best advice is shot as many photographs as many different ways as you can. I shot these photographs on a Canon Rebel T2i with a 50mm lens and a 18-55mm lens.