Two KBers meet up to take pictures
Those of you who have been reading my Photography Tips series will remember that commenter Abby picked up a DSLR. She was in town this week with her family on vacation, so we met up at the Balboa Pier in Newport Beach.
She was hoping I could explain some of the concepts my posts have dealt with in person and help her figure out her camera, which I did. We also had lunch at the Ruby’s at the end of the pier and gabbed non-stop. Abby rules.
While I was waiting for her to arrive, I took out my camera and snapped a few shots, including this one:
That’s the fellow we later ended up asking to take a picture of us (Abby’s the tall one):
After eating, we started playing with Abby’s camera. First we talked about depth of field and shutter speed. Here are some of Abby’s pictures when she was trying out different depths of field/aperture settings:
Then we talked about different lighting situations, and went under the pier so I could demonstrate how to expose a shot when there are both bright and dark areas in the frame. When you expose for the dark area of the shot, the lighter area becomes overexposed and washed out. Here’s a picture Abby took of the underside of the pier:
Note the areas of the shot that have more light are just completely white. Here’s a picture I took where I exposed the shot for the light part of the picture and the dark part (the underside of the pier) is almost completely dark:
We had a nice cloudy afternoon, which makes for very even light, particularly somewhere like Southern Cali where the sun is usually so bright. Full sunlight makes for a lot of harsh shadows. If the sun had been shining when we took these pictures, the contrast between light and dark areas would have been more pronounced. (I’m not going to go into what you’d do if you want both the light and dark areas to be exposed properly, because in most cases it requires the use of flash, and I’m too lazy right now to go into it!)
We had fun. When do we get to do it again?
Posted on August 15, 2008, in Pop Culture. Bookmark the permalink. 20 Comments.
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So fun. Some good pictures, guys.
Wow, sounds like fun. One-on-one lessons with Susan, I think I may be skipping Sea World next February when we take our family vacation.
I’m only about 1.5-2 hours from San Diego.
Susan was great to share her wealth of knowledge of photography with me. Plus, it was fun to chat, eat and be on the beach. We’ll do it again next summer.
jjohnsen, we use to vacation in San Diego on a regular basis, until we tried the Newport/OC area – love it. If you try it, you’ll never go back! Plus you’re still close to Sea World and you could get some great photo tips from Susan.
Susan, I’m still dying to catch a glimpse of your amazing record collection.
Since you asked.
I like picture number 5 – under the pier!
Meems, I think you were the only KBer that came up in our conversation. I told Abby about the U2 treasures you sent me. She was as amazed as I was.
Yeah, Meems, how do I get on your mailing list?!?!?!
:)
You’re very sweet! I’m glad you liked them! I found the original cassette tape of our interview, and R. was going to digitize it for ya, but we never got to that project before we left. Oh well. Til next time!
I am SOOOO jealous.
Susan, my aunt and your MIL are good friends and only live 1/2 mile from each other. Go figure!!!!!
:)
Hey Susan, where’s your blog? Don’t tell me you’ve become a hiphop artist!
My personal blog is down and has been for about a week. Driving me insane. My web host is working on getting it restored.
Wow Susan, you took a picture of everything in your collection? Amazing. I have a picture of my collection as a whole but doing each individual album would take forever.
Well, actually, someone just gave me 60 more albums, which I haven’t photographed yet.
How long do you think it’d take me to photograph each of these?
(The white boxes on top are 45s – each box holds about 150).
I love you, Brian.
I bow to Brian V.
About 1/100th the time it would take you to listen to them.