GETTING SHOTS WITH GOOD DEPTH

One of the largest advantages to owning a DSLR camera as opposed to a point and shoot is the ability to control the depth of a picture you are taking. The main trick is to get your aperture as small as possible. If your lens shoots from f/4.0-5.6, you want it to be on 4.0.  The faster the lens the better. One of our best depth of field lenses is our 50mm f/1.8 lens. It really gets in there and blurs the rest. Another thing is to try and get some space between the light source in the background and your subject. That will make it easier to pull your subject out into focus. I like to use our telephoto lens, but that can be a little trickier because when zoomed in, your lens slows down. That means your are going to have to hold it steady to get that shot without any camera shake. The best lens I have ever used for this purpose is the Canon 70-200mm IS L series. It really made it easy.

DESATURATION TREATMENT

Sometimes when I want to shift focus on a picture, I alter the color composition. Sometimes a picture is too full of color and I want to bring the attention back to the subject. If I don't do a straight up black and white conversion, I do a desaturation treatment. In this case, I used a Color Efex Pro filter called Color Selector.  It lets you retain some of the color of you picture but pulls out other parts of the spectrum. It's not like color filtering or sepia tinting. It is different, and in some cases works well.

(Now that I actually put them side by side, I am not sure which version I like better. It's not the first time that's happened.)

SHOTS THAT MAKE YOUR DAY

Every once in a while, you are shooting and you get that one shot that makes the entire session worth while. It feels like, man, I didn't waste my time today. That is really cool. I had that opportunity the other day and it was just something that caught my eye as I was driving somewhere else.  

AN AFTERNOON AT THE RANCH

Mandy's sister is in town for the week and helping out with the kids and house. I had the opportunity to take our older daughter out for a walk at Dorris Ranch. We had lots of fun, ran around and took some pictures. You can take a look at some more over on the Travelogue page.

http://bradsphotographyblog.blogspot.com/p/travelogue.html