First try at Macro photography

I think macro photography is fascinating - for any who don't know what it is, just do a quick google image search and you'll see some amazing close-up shots, such as this one of a cat's eye. How amazing is that?! To accomplish this type of shot, there are all kinds of specialty lenses you can buy (there's one I have my eye on that's about $400, which I can't quite swing right now, much less the much higher price ones that are out there!), or you can get ring extension kits to add to an existing lens to allow focus that close up. There is a "trick" to macro photography that you can do without any of these and I've been dying to try it; I finally had time this weekend to give it a shot with some hydrangea flowers I recently received.

Lilies

I was playing around in my kitchen to find a photo to submit for last week's topic of "Green", and these were some of the ones I rejected from that submission. However, I did like these (I was playing around with different DOF and lighting, and thought I'd share these here, partially because I'm too tired tonight to write a more detailed post on something else. 

My tiny dancer

Recently, my daughter had her first "big girl" ballet recital, which of course provided many opportunities to photograph her in her full dancing glory. I was able to take photographs of her on both her dress rehearsal and recital day; I wrote a big post about the dress rehearsal on my family blog. I had originally intended to do a separate post here of just portraits of my daughter, but ended up including the ones I would have posted here on the family blog. So, instead I'm doing a first and directing you to that blog for photos of her from the dress rehearsal.

http://aemacbeth.blogspot.com/2013/06/ballet-dress-rehearsal.html 

Changes are happening!

So, lots going on here at AbbeLynn Photography! I've had a busy couple of months, in both life and photography. The life stuff has mostly been detailed on my family blog and FB (Paris, moving, Foxfield, 10th anniversary, work travel, time with kids, time with family, time with friends...the list goes on, as it does for everyone!), but I realized this week that I'd had so much going on photography-wise that I wanted to get it all down in one place! I like to use my family blog as a way of getting down "on paper" a timeline of events that I can go back and refer to later, and I can see the utility in using this blog the same, to chronicle events as my business continues to grow! So periodically (when a lot has happened), I plan to try and get a summary out here - thanks for reading :) Let's see...where to start??

WPP: Another win!

Ack! times two - the first because this will be my first post in June (I didn't realize I hadn't posted anything since last week!), and the second because I fell behind in my submissions to the Weekly Photo Project again. And good news in this one - I won one of these!

Gritty black and whites

In the past couple of weeks, I downloaded a few free "mini" actions for Lightroom. They don't have the "full" utility that the sets you pay for do, but hey, why not try the free ones out? Turns out, for mini presets, they've added a lot to my photos! In particular, I'm LOVING the black and whites that I can now create.

This is why I love my "nifty fifty"

If you enjoy photography, and have not yet purchased a "nifty fifty" lens (50mm fixed focal length), please run out and do so. I obtained my 50mm f/1.8 lens off of amazon.com for about $100, and it was probably the best $100 that I've spent so far on my photography hobby. There are MANY other lenses that I'd like to  purchase, some of them ranging well up over $1,000, but I believe this one will continue to serve me well. The quality of light, depth of field, ability to focus on a very specific part of the photo...all of these contribute to beautiful photography. If you doubt, look at these amazing shots of my beautiful daughter (and these were taken on an afternoon when she had the stomach flu!).

Morning portraits: children

As I mentioned on my Facebook page when I shared this photo earlier this week, I have a lot of photos to share of the kids all dressed up for Foxfield. I had a lot of photos to share from our weekend in Charlottesville about 3 weeks ago, and decided to split up the posts - I posted an album on Facebook devoted to mostly our friends (the adults), a post on my family blog devoted mostly to my kids, and thought I'd highlight the more "portrait" shots of the kids here. The kids all looked so lovely, and they were so obliging of my photography efforts!

Baby Geese!

Stratford pond (just behind our house) is home to a lot of wildlife, but the most obvious are the many geese that make a home here. In particular are a mated pair that we knew would be having babies at some point. Two weeks ago we finally spotted the babies, as the family came out of the water to eat not far from our backyard. As I didn't want to provoke the parents, or scare the babies, I used my 75-300mm telephoto lens to shoot these guys through the trees from our backyard.

A different view

One of the things I like to do is photograph something from a new perspective. Yesterday afternoon I was looking at a vase of flowers on my table, and the flowers hanging down next to the vase jumped out at me. I thought I'd try this perspective, and I think it works!