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.