The Pueblo Puddle

Today Abbey and I drove down to Pueblo for some fun at the reservoir. We went to the swimming beach which consisted of a moderately Small pond, where then it was further reduced to about 15% of available swimming space by buoys and roped-off-no-swim-areas. We nicknamed it the Pueblo Puddle. Still it was a lot of fun. So you're looking at a picture of the dam with a nice natural reflection, a picture of people tubing down the river fed by the dam, and yes, another fire hydrant, but with a dramatically different color scheme: Silver and Green.

Rain

It rained pretty hard again today, which is a nice afternoon treat. It's nice to not have to worry about water shortages. All of the rivers are running full power! I also added the picture of the Fire Hydrant because i had posted a similar picture awhile ago of a different colored one. Come to think of it, I've posted 3 fire hydrant's now, I guess it's become a series. Also just playing around with some depth of field with the red poles.

50mm Day

So I've been thinking about getting a 50mm Prime/Standard/Normal lens. A prime/standard/normal lens is a fixed focal length lens that doesn't zoom in or out, it stays the same. This idea is a little scary for me because I've only ever used zoom lenses. So to get myself used to the idea, today I shot a dozen pictures, all at 50mm. Here are a few different ones that show the varying perspective that can still be captured at a fixed focal length. For instance, I was only a couple feet away from the tires while I was driving, but nearly 15-20 feet from the power lines (I had to lay on the ground to get everything in the frame. And the checkerboard is an example of still being able to be close-up as well as the bandaid and banana sticker picture.

The benefit to a prime lens over a zoom lens is simply quality. Lenses with less moving parts are less costly to manufacture, therefore putting the most money into the components inside instead of moving parts. A prime lens in general allows the photographer to shoot 'faster'(at a higher shutter speed) in lower light conditions. Which is ideal for portraits, night photography, and places where you can't use flash and still need to have a handheld shot. Also quality is substantially better in the final image and a lot more can be done with the depth of field.

Contrast

During lunch today I stumbled upon a really cool area that I've never seen. It's partially open land, partially upscale developed. I took a lot of pictures of different contrasting images that I saw. A run-down train went tearing down the tracks with million dollar homes in the background. I saw a lot of different combinations of things that usually don't get seen together. The first picture below is of an old house that's falling apart and vacant, with a new replacement home to the right. You might have to enlarge it to get the details. The second picture was just funny, I've never seen a fire hydrant with an out of service tag.