Waiting for Spring - snow - black & white - portraits

We wait for spring for a very long time here in New England. It will be cold, snowy, muddy and grey until April!

But wait, it's a good time to learn how to photograph snow, think in black and white or take your camera indoors for some natural light portrait photos or set up a mini studio with crushed black velvet draped behind your subject.

If you take your photography indoors find out about the white balance settings on your camera. Don't forget to change the settings to match the light source you are dealing with or you'll have color correction to take care of later. Another thing to keep in mind is the ISO setting. I don't advise setting the ISO to higher than 400 unless you want grain. Sunny - 100ISO, Medium light - 200ISO, Low light - 400ISO Use your tripod!

Setting up a small studio indoors is really easy with just a few basics. For a backdrop you can purchase a length of crushed velvet (no creases will be visible) or polar fleece to hang on the wall. Use available light from a window or one or two well placed lamps will provide side lighting along with ceiling lighting and get a hot shoe and a cord to connect your flash unit to your camera with a bracket or hold the flash off to the side. Use a diffuser with the flash unit. Use your tripod!

Snow reflects a lot of light to your camera and the lens shuts down to compensate. When that happens the snow looks grey and the whole scene is underexposed. You can over ride this by adjusting your exposure compensation to allow in more light. There is a scale that looks something like this: -3...-2...-1...0...+1...+2...+3 on your camera. Choose a setting on the plus side and keep changing it until you have the exposure you want. Don't forget the old saying, "Expose for the highlights and let the shadows fall where they may."

There are many opportunities for black and white photography in the winter: play with light and shadows, fill the frame with shapes,angles and objects, architecture, machines, basements and attics to name a few.

My other favorite thing to do after the holidays is to really examine all those images that keep piling up in my computer. You might find a great image with a fresh eye and a new crop!

Photo Frame - A Basic How To

My kids (the outside two) and their friends and our dog, Chance, who is hiding because she hates cameras!

Photo Frames - What a great idea! Once you get the hang of it, a digital photo frame is a lot of fun! You can create slide shows with very cool transitions from photo to photo. Display all of your photos from your last vacation or family event. If you are in the market to buy one I recommend doing some on-line research to help you choose. This article in PC Magazine gives great advice on how to buy a photo frame. There are many sizes and a lot of extra features that you may or may not want.
My daughter gave me my little toy for my birthday. It took me a few days to collect and size 65 family photos from the last 4 years and put them together for a digital slide show. Some photo frames have software to compress your jpegs (the only format they accept) to the correct resolution size but some do not. Mine does not. If the photo was too big then the edges of the picture was lost as if I had cropped it. At this point I started reading the manual (always a good idea) and found the resolution size: 480 x 234, which is about 4" x 3" at 100 resolution. This is a good size for a photo that you want to insert into an email - very small! Photos this small lose a lot of sharpness because they just don't have a lot of pixels.
So the challenge is to resize your images to the dimensions that fit the specifications of your photo frame. How can you do this? Use a program for editing photos that allows you to resize your images. And email or call me if you have any problems!
After I resized and saved these jpeg images in a folder that I had named "pix for the photo frame", I copied the contents of the folder to one of the SD cards I use in my camera. All photo frames will take all the popular sizes of cards. The 1 GB cards are fairly inexpensive these days and you can easily overwrite with a new set of images. So you can put together several different slide shows and save them on your hard drive in separate folders.
I took the photo frame with me to Grandma and Grandpa's house for dinner, plugged it in, and shared the photos I had collected of all of us for the last 4 years. Everybody loved it!

Torrey Pines State Park, California

There is nothing like exploring and photographing desert like environments in the spring! It is so exciting to see the color in naturally brown and dry places like Torrey Pines State Park. Just north of San Diego yet still within city limits is this breathtaking natural reserve right on the California coastline. This state park is home of the rare Torrey pine tree and offers miles of beaches and walking trails. The views from the overlooks are stunning. I hope you can feel and see some of the beauty of this place as I experienced it in March. For more information check out their website at http://www.torreypine.org/

I only have space for five photographs per post. If you want to see more pix of Torrey Pines then go to my Flickr site: www.flickr.com/photo/kathleenmilsteinphotography/

Deep Sea Fishing off Plum Island

I love to bring my camera on family outings! It keeps me participating even if what we are doing is not my favorite thing in the world.

What can I say about deep sea fishing? My husband and my son love it! It can be peaceful, frustrating, boring, and exciting! A photographer is always welcome to come along. That's the good thing about photography - even if the activity is not really your "thing", if you bring your camera you are never bored!

We had all the "right stuff" for a potential catch-it-yourself dinner: the boat, the bait, the fishermen, the patience... But somehow we ended up with lobster for dinner!

When you are shooting on the ocean don't forget to bring your lens hood to combat solar flare, a circular polarizer and I suggest fast shutter speeds because everything is always moving. Also, remember that the ocean spray has salt in it, which can be potentially hazardous for cameras. You could use a rain sleeve and you'll find yourself wiping off the filter you use to protect the lens quite often.

If you want to see more shots of Plum Island, Mass. go to my Flickr website:

www.flickr.com/photos/kathleenmilsteinphotography/

Canobie Lake Park at Night

My kids have grown up with Canobie Lake Amusement Park. It is a small, beautifully landscaped and fun, family atmosphere park that feels a lot like Disney World. It began as a pleasure park at the end of the trolley line in Salem, New Hampshire in the very early 1900s. The original roller coaster is still there as well as an exciting new one with a loop de loop! Now this is not on the scale of a Busch Gardens but over the years it has grown to include some really scary rides! And the food is as bad as any amusement park you have ever been to!

Last month when Pearl (http://www.photographybypearl.com/ ) suggested we try it as a night shoot I immediately loved the idea. We headed up there with our tripods and cameras in tow for an evening of fun!

This was the first time I had ever done anything like this. I have not even tried fireworks. I recommend it, though, because there is nothing that will teach you faster about capturing movement with long shutter speeds. The lights are amazing and give some wonderfully abstract effects! If you use an aperture of about f22 the bright white lights will automatically give you a star effect. Try zooming in or out at the same time as the shutter is open for light trails.

So I think I'll head over to the midway at the Topsfield Fair this October and do it again. Happy shooting!

Cape Elizabeth Lighthouse, Maine

I have a friend who lives just south of Portland, Maine. Mary knows all the picturesque places to go for a day on the coast of Maine and enjoy a lobster lunch. We decided to drive to Two Lights State Park which features Cape Elizabeth Light and The Lobster Shack!

After lunch we set off on foot to explore the unusual geological formations of the coastline. Rock ledges rise steeply from the ocean in a jumble of huge broken boulders and slabs. What a playground! The ledges are metamorphic rock, which is deep sea sediment (sand and mud) hardened through pressure and heat into layers of rock. These layers have an interesting wood grain quality. Minerals in the rock recrystallized into mica, chlorite, phyllite and quartzite. What powerful stresses caused the fractures and threw it all up into a jumbled mass! This is a great place to scramble and climb and, of course, to photograph. The four of us enjoyed the unusual landscape and each other's company.

Newburyport, Massachusetts

On a lucky Monday evening during a break between thunderstorms I was in the seaport town of Newburyport, which is located at the mouth of the Merrimack River. Yes, this is the Merrimack River of the Industrial Revolution in our old history books! Newburyport was first settled in 1635 and became a town in 1764. It is now a thriving, picturesque tourist destination north of Boston with the nickname of Clipper City. Any evidence of the docks and ship building industry are gone today replaced by a beautiful water front park and whale watching boats.

I shot the city from across the river as the sun went slowly down. Then I climbed up the Highway 1 bridge and kept on shooting. This bridge is a great place to watch the fireworks of Yankee Homecoming! The light was warm and reflected off the shiny surfaces of boats and water. It was so much fun that I think I need to do it again!