VA & OBX

This past weekend, we drove down to Virginia and spent a wonderful few days visiting with our relatives. On the drive down, we crossed the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel (A-maz-ing...if you haven't heard of it, check out this website.) just as the sun was setting. When I first saw the bay, the water was a stunning blue- almost Carribean, or possibly ultramarine. As the sun sunk lower, it turned into a rich, deep blue. The pictures don't do it justice, but I have awesome images in my head :).

I have to say, this was probably the most spectacular sunset I've ever seen.

I love the curves of the bridge in this picture. For having been taken in a moving car, it turned out fairly well.

 Just as I thought the best was over, rays of light poured over the horizon. You can't see them too well here, but you get the idea. 

On Saturday, we took a trip to the enormous sand dunes in the Outer Banks, NC. My brothers, my cousins Lauren and Isaac and myself had an awesome time jumping down the sides of steep dunes, and Lauren and I spent some time walking around. I took a couple pictures, but most of the time, I left my camera safe in the capable hands of my mother :).

The walk up to the dunes. You can see where they begin in the distance

This picture was edited to get the colors right. Because I just wanted to snap some shots quickly, I put the camera on Program mode. I'm not too happy about the exposures, but at least I have the pictures. 

My cousin Lauren.

My brothers, cousins, and myself jumping down a dune. It was a lot steeper than it looks in this picture.

There was a gorgeous view. I had never seen anything like this in my entire life. There was a really big drop after this - you can kind of see where it begins.

Well, while I'm at it, I might as well upload some more pictures from the trip. This was part of the walkway up to the dunes. 

I have no clue what this bridge is called, but we drive over it every time we go to VA.

And this is the Delaware Memorial Bridge. Cool, huh?

I was going to stop there, but since there are already so many pictures, one more won't make a difference. This picture was an accident - I was trying to take a picture of the airport lights, but the shutter was really slow and we went over a bump right as I clicked.

Sorry about the copious amount of pictures :). Hope you liked them.

Oh, yeah...

...I forgot to upload this one the other day. I know it's underexposed, but what do you think?

...And Yet Another Free Shoot!

We had another free shoot this week so that we could spend more time practicing the new techniques we're learning and applying the old ones. My work was rushed (all my life is rushed right now), so all things considered, I was pleased with the picture I submitted for this week's homework. Here it is: 

Yes, that is a typewriter. And yes, that is my history being typed on it. Isn't homeschooling so cool?

And here are a few of the other photos I took. I'm not excited about them, but here they are anyway:

One of our trees. *sigh* One of the many knocked down by Sandy.

Mi cuaderno de español.

Water that collected on the cover to our fire pit.

 

I took some pictures like this earlier in the year, and just gave it a quick try tonight. This isn't the best, and the highlights are clipped. Given some time, I could make this pretty good. I'll have to do that...

 

Swords!

Well, actually just one sword, but there are multiple shots of it ;). This is Narsil, a replica of Aragorn's sword from Lord of the Rings. My brother got it for his 13th birthday, and I found it too cool not to photograph.

Another Free Shoot

Apologies for the lengthy delay between posts. Life has been crazy, and I haven't had the time to slap a new post together. 
This past week we learned the finer details of using light meters and histograms, and also spent a lot of time learning about the Zone System. We were given the assignment of (1) taking pictures of a white object, using our light meter and histogram to expose them in the five different zones, and (2) practice using the Zone System to expose our photos by taking a minimum of 40 frames, preferably in different light settings and with different subjects. All of the pictures in this post except the one directly below were taken using this technique. 

 This picture was an accident - I just pointed the camera and pressed the shutter button. If you enlarge it, you can see the little sunbursts in the water droplets. 

A cool shelf fungus.

I was trying to capture the beauty in the patterns on this birch log. I think it's better in real life, but it's still a cool shot.

A branch on one of our Dogwood trees.

I was sitting at the computer, and just happened to glance up as a sunbeam was coming through the window and hitting these egg shells. (This was one of the pictures I submitted for my homework)

Free Shoot

During thanksgiving break, my class was given the assignment of doing a free shoot on Manual, playing around with SS, ISO, and aperture to achieve the desired exposure.

 

This is the trunk of our once-vertical Norway Pine. It has a really interesting texture.

Sap droplets that formed on the ripped edge of one of the limbs from our White Pines. (This picture and the following three were cropped a bit so that you can see the textures better. My lens wouldn't let me get close enough, so I did the cropping on the computer instead of in my head ;) ) 

 

The sun was getting low in the sky, and the way it hit these sap droplets, it turned them all into mini rainbows. This picture doesn't do the scene justice, but it's still pretty.

Back lit sap. This was so much fun to photograph :).

This is a bad picture, but I like how the weak shaft of sunlight accentuates the area that I focused on.

 

We were singing after our Thanksgiving meal, and I took the opportunity to snap a few pictures. This one is (obviously) of the hymn book. It's underexposed, but was taken with my aperture as wide as possible, my ISO as high as possible, and my shutter open as long as I could keep it without getting camera shake :\. I think I'm going to play around with the book, lighting, and maybe a tripod to see if I can get better shots.

Japanese Maple

These are some pictures that I took of the tree in front of our house. This Japanese Maple is one of my two favorite trees - it's absolutely gorgeous, no matter what time of year.

This was one of my homework submissions for the past week.

The composition isn't good in this one because I really couldn't see where things were in the frame :). I still like it, though. 

First Snow

We got the first snow of the year! It started snowing last night, but when I woke up this morning we only had about three inches. Dang. Anyway, this was our chickens' first time seeing snow, and they were so nervous about it that they stayed in their coop for hours before getting enough courage up to step out the door. (an extremely unusual occurrence - they're usually up with the sun and itching to get out) 

They sat in the door like this for forever

As soon as one worked up enough courage to step outside, another decided to follow. 

Jump!!

Bigfoot, the most dominant of the four, took the longest to emerge.

I opened up the side door to take their food out, and Bigfoot promptly marched over to see if it was safer on the side.

Once Bigfoot finally made it out the door, the other one came down with no problem. Bigfoot, however stood on the ramp for a good few minutes before stepping onto the ground.

Sorry if I bored you, but it was too good to resist posting :D

Aperture 2 & Photo Challenge

This past week, we had a mixture of assignments. We had to visit one of the online forums and post our feedback on two pictures, we had another photo challenge - this time the subject was 'endurance' - and we had to take five pictures of something in a line (books, cupboards, etc) using different apertures ranging from f/5.6 to f/22 to demonstrate how aperture affects the depth of field.
Apologies for the quality of my photos this week. Nearly all of my free time was occupied hauling wood and branches from our backyard, so my assignments were rushed. 

f/5.6

f/22. 

I'm only uploading the first and the last, because looking at all five isn't too interesting. 

 Because my creative genius was severely lacking for the photo challenge, I just stuck with this. Nothing like good old Shackleton coming to the rescue :D

I had to crop this picture down a lot, so please excuse the graininess. If we were allowed to edit our pictures, this would have been my 'endurance' submission.