highway 83 northbound.

Post 200

Abbey loves Geese, after laughing at these geese walking across the crosswalk, she told me I HAD to take a picture of these. By the time I was in a good position as far as the background goes, they were a little sloppy. About 20 seconds earlier they were in perfect formation, evenly spaced.

We went to Denver to look around and just get a change of scenery. We took Highway 83 up there for a more scenic drive. I spotted these and had a lot of fun taking a couple dozen different shots of these.

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.

Another Rainy Day

I was eating lunch when I saw this beautiful and bright red ball amongst the dark and neutral colors of the chair and floor and metal pipes and I needed to take this picture! I spent several minutes getting all of the settings for the shot just right to create an environment with highlights and shadows, bright points and darkness, and still be able to pull out all of that red.
The second picture was a cool find while I was driving around after work. I turned down a road next to the highway that I had never been down and saw all of the intersecting lines of power poles and the wires running through them. The bridge gave a nice horizontal line that mutes the effect of the power lines coming across the right of the image in contrast to its' size. You can just barely see the train tracks on the right going under the bridge. It was raining and the fog from a nearby creek was rolling through which gave some nice depth to the otherwise flat sky.