Vacation on the Playa del Carmen!

The Milstein family flew down to an all-inclusive resort in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. We all agreed this was one of the best family vacations we ever had! Look at a map, it's just 45 min. south of Cancun and a 45 min. ferry ride to the island of Cozumel! There was so much to do that 5 days did not begin to satisfy us! I'll be sharing my blog with other photographers as I describe the fantastic adventures we had in Mexico!

Our all-inclusive resort, The Royal was delicious and relaxing! The food was 5 star and served with flair and friendly faces. We spent wet afternoons on the white sand beach in the warm tourquoise water and warm evenings strolling along the tiny town's 5th Avenue of shops. "Hey, amigos, come into my shop and have a look!" Stay tuned for a blog devoted to our scuba diving adventures in the reef just off the island of Cozumel and one of our exciting spelunking trip into the Rio Secreto!

New Lens - New Perspective

My main lens is a beauty! It is a Canon 24-70mm f2.8 and takes fantastic photos - very sharp. The more experienced I became the more I understood what other lenses I might want to add to my collection. I got a lighter weight Canon 24-85mm f3.5 for travelling. It is easier to hold and carry around on a day long hike, for example, or pack for a trip to Europe. The drawback is that the optics are not as good.

This spring I felt ready to invest in another lens. Did I want a wide angle or a longer lens? Because I wanted to actually touch, pick up and look through the lens I took my camera and I went off to shop at the biggest camera store in my area: Hunts in Melrose. I have been looking on line and I know that lenses can be thousands of dollars! So I was looking for the best lens that I could afford. I took into consideration several things: focal length, speed (this refers to the maximum aperture diameter or minimum f number of the lens), optics, image stabilization and ease of handling. Luckily I was helped by a very knowledgeable person and he showed me a used Canon lens 70-200mm f4.0 with very good optics for a great price. The pluses were the price, the focal length and the optics. The minuses were the speed and lack of image stabilization. I bought it.

I have been having a lot of fun with it in two situations. First, I can be further away from a scene and still zoom in. I had not realized how limiting my other lens was. Now, between the two lenses, I have the the choice of focal lengths from 24mm to 200mm! Second, I can really blur the background and/or foreground when I'm doing macro and portrait photography with the longer focal lengths. The images above are examples of the first situation. My next blog entry will highlight macro photography. The only thing I regret is the lack of image stabilization. My advice is to buy lenses with image stabilization.

ASE - After School Exploration: Photography with Sixth Graders

This is the 2009 After School Exploration Photography class! We met once a week after school for six weeks. It was so much fun teaching these creative 6th graders. We met at the school in the library/computer lab which meant that we were able to fit in some lessons on image editing as well as basic photography. We are all standing and sitting in front of the photography show of their favorite images that they created on a gigantic bulletin board in the hallway by the library. The girls thought it would also be fun to have a portrait of themselves as a flower of heads!

Our first class explored depth of field and aperture. Outside we found some good opportunities to show shallow depth of field. In later classes we talked about composition and moved on to shutter speed and how to capture motion. We had a great time learning panning using slower shutter speeds and stop motion using faster shutter speeds. We also roamed the halls and came up with some great abstract images proving that abstract is everywhere!

In the computer lab we used PhotoFiltre, a free downloadable editing software that the school has on each computer. It is fun and easy to use. What do you do with your photographs? Have a show, buy a picture frame, make a scrap book, make a Mother's Day card, decorate your room, decorate your living room. No matter what you do just keep on using your camera! Happy shooting!

Holiday Feeling in Newburyport at Night

It was cold!! But I braved the snow and chilly air for my first winter shoot at night shortly before the holidays. I headed to Newburyport about 4pm toting my camera, tripod and remote shutter release. I wondered about my sanity as I got out of the car and the frigid air hit my nose. I didn't have to walk far for my first shot of the park and the Firehouse Theater. Then I aimed my lens across the street at the walking area. After a short time my fingers went numb and then started to hurt. That made moving the tripod difficult! After just a few minutes my battery started to die. No surprise there! I think I had read about that happening in low temps but what did surprise me was how quickly it happened! Well, I learned a few things: dress warmly, carry a spare battery in an inside coat pocket and preplan your shoot to make the most of the short amount of time. Still, I was pleased with the images and I learned a lot. Happy winter shooting!

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/