Day 165 - Conquering the camera

No, I don't mean my DSLR, because that obeys my commands - well, most of the time!  But right now I'm talking about my phone camera that has caused me grief on numerous occasions.  I never seem to be able to get the right focus, the right settings - well, nothing goes right.  But today I spent a few minutes, albeit in a light drizzling rain, to check out why my camera misbehaves.  I can't admit to finding anything wrong with it, per se, but I did manage to get a somewhat decent shot.  Ok, a few decent shots.

This shot is almost straight out of the camera, except I added a little bit of vibrance and saturation to it because it was missing those.

Last night I downloaded Photoshop CS5 to try it out after hearing a lot of people rave about it.  I am exhausted after my project submission today, but I still spent a little time to play around with it.  Other than slowing my computer down terribly, I think it's a great tool.  It's got a ton of features that I could use for my daily photos, but the price is prohibitive.  And, ideally, I would like to keep Lightroom as well.  But I can no way spend a grand on photo editing tools right now.  If I spend that kind of money, I'd rather buy the new lens I've been wanting for so long by adding a few more hundred bucks.  Or, buy myself the Canon EOS 7D, which I have been wanting to do for so long!  

Anyway, more on that later.  I have to hit the hay now because I have a ton of stuff to do, besides office work over the weekend.  No Thanksgiving weekend for me!

Day 158 - On the phone

No.. I don't mean I'm on the phone.  Today's shots were taken on my phone camera.

One wet day, today!  I saw a little bit of blue sky and was really excited hoping it would stay that way.  But the weather has a mind of its own - it decided to throw down buckets of rain instead.  I saw such pretty colours on my way home that I had to stop and admire the scene, sans camera.  And then I thought - wait!  What did I pay the big bucks for my phone for?  It has an 8 MP camera on it and so I whip it out to get some nice shots.  Of course the megapixels don't really have anything to do with the quality of the lens, but you do expect a moderately good piece of glass in a hi-res camera.  Well, at least I did!

I have used it before on a nice, bright day, but this evening was a completely different story.  I couldn't believe the grainy shots I got, no clarity or sharpness - nothing.  I am certain there are settings on the camera that I could have manipulated, but I have never really taken the time to get familiar with this one.  I made a mental note of that - make friends with your phone camera!

What a bummer it was!  Anyway, out of the 15 odd shots I took, I discarded most of them.  The following remain:

To add a final note. the first three shots were processed in LR3 and the last one is SOOC.  I think the difference in quality between them is noteworthy.

Day 145 - Raindrops

Well, the most obvious subject after a rainy day would be raindrops on anything and everything.  I went out armed with only my macro lens and my tripod, but the high winds rendered the tripod useless.  The evening was dark and gloomy so I had very little light to play in.  Therefore, high ISO and noisy pictures were my lot for today.  I tried to remove some noise in post, but just not satisfied with what I got.

The following shots are definitely not worth my trouble, but I somehow liked the shape and the pattern of the droplets on the red leaf - they kinda all appear to be within the lines that are the veins on the leaf.   

This second one has this drop caught in between two leaves - I found that interesting.

More photos from today's outing in my Flickr photostream.

Day 101 - And the rains came

Been busy and not posting.. neither clicking everyday.. bad, bad, bad!

These shots are from 5 days ago!

I wish I could have had a better background to show off the raindrops in the last image but being limited to a small balcony corner didn't afford much option.  Enlarging this shot will probably make the raindrops a bit more visible.