How could I forget?!?!?

Thursday of last week I took some dirt jumping (BMX, if you will) shots of some people. I took my SX Trail and rode around feeling like a putz, but it was still fun. After about 20-30 minutes of practice shots, I realized how much photographers edit their photos. It's silly, almost. In fact, there was not a single shot I really enjoyed looking at until I did some major Picasa editing to each and every photo. Regardless of the time spent to make them look good, I'd say that a few of the photos came out pretty well. Here they are, almost a week late!

Thanks to Josh and Brently for letting me embarrass them in front of all of the other riders.

My little cousins

As promised, a few photos from an afternoon baseball game. My cousins did very well, and I now understand why so many people shoot with a 300mm lens, or at least a 1.4 teleconverter. Of course, with my little D40, my understanding is that I would have to manually focus, but there are worse things in the world. Oh, and I'd first need a good prime lens like a 200 f/2.8 or something.

Anyway, here they are.

A little more mountain biking...

It was a HOT-HOT day on Sunday, and lugging 25 pounds of camera gear, my Leatt, full face, and a 45 pound bike to the top of the hill was on the agenda. Absolutely wretched. BUT, I was able to get a few good photos out of it. As usual I opted for the 55-200, SU-800, and SB-600.


Not too long before this outing, just a few shorts hours earlier to be exact, I decided to go shoot some photos of my little cousins playing baseball. It was going okay until about 15 photos in I opted to change the settings on my camera to compensate for shadows. Needless to say, I'm an idiot, and when I changed shooting positions (the other side of the field), I forgot to change my settings back so most of my photos came out WAYYY too warm. I'll post those tomorrow.

Evening mountain biking...

So, I went out last night with Dom, Paul, Aaron, and Peter. Unbeknownst to us, the light of the day disappears around 6:45 now instead of 8pm like a few weeks ago. BUT, that did make for some 1/2-way decent photos (in this amatuer's opinion, at least).

Only had about 3 minutes setup time, and shot in aperture mode instead of shutter speed mode. I'm an idiot and forgot to even check my settings after the first shot. Guess I got kinda' lucky. needless to say I had plenty of bad shots come through. I think 11, 21, or 51 focus points would have helped in a situation like this. My D40 seemed to be a little lost on what I wanted it to focus on.

Also, another little progress in the making: Seeing as I don't have Adobe anything on my work computer, I used Picasa to go ahead and add my little ©mbB Photo logo to my photos. I like this font so I might stick with it for a little while. It's just not fun having to add it into each individual photo when Adobe PS will import the logo in batch format. We'll see what I decide to do.

Dom:

Paul:

Birthday Party for Jeffrey...

My little cousin (actually, I think the true relationship is second cousin) had his 7th birthday on Saturday, so of course I nabbed my camera bag and off we went. None of these pictures are necessarily spectacular. In fact, with how fast these kids were moving, I simply didn't have time to setup anything the way I wanted. Some photos are a little dark, some are a little too light, but there were the best of the bunch. After reviewing them, though, I wonder if I like them because of the facial expressions, and because they're family and I love hanging out with family, or if it's because they're actually good photos. Eitherway, it was a good time. 1 hot link, 2 hot dogs, chips, candy, cake, playing with Legos, and lots of kids running around and laughing made for a great day in the sun.

Mostly shot with my 55-200 and my Sb-600 (for the outdoor and cake stuff), but a few of the portrait style shots were done w/o flash and with the 35mm f/1.8.

The Birthday Boy.

The Birthday Boy's brother.

The wife and my mom. For some reason, my camera decided to focus on Jehn instead of both of them, so mom's face is a tad OOF (Out Of Focus). But still a good capture, I think.

Time for the Piñata!

My aunt and my mom.

Time for cake!

A few photos from the holiday weekend...

So, a few friends from our church small group invited us out on their boat for an early morning wake boarding session. I'm not terribly good, but I got up on the board my first try. So did Jehn, in fact. No photos to prove it, though, but I promise; it happened. Here's one of the wife with a huge grin before we head out on the water, and a few of our friend, and his friend John, on the water.

I never thought shooting on a boat with even moderate chop would be hard, but trying to balance the camera and get good shots was tough. The VR lens seemed to take a little bit of the hand shake out, but the general up and down motions that constantly had me cutting off people's heads and feet made it tough. But practice makes perfect, so I carried on.

On a side note, I've noticed recently that everywhere I bring my camera (which is almost everywhere, including work) that I feel "one-upped". As soon as we got on the boat, I popped open my camera bag and took out my camera. Our friend's brother-in-law then mentioned that he shoots wedding photography and has a D300. Apparently, wedding photos is what he does for a living. Haha... I just found that ironic.

Good ol' 35mm f/1.8:

55-200mm: