Downtown Atlanta

Atlanta Photography

It's been way too long since I've been out and about shooting in Atlanta or the surrounding areas, other than getting a few shots around the neighborhood. 

Over the last week or so I haven't felt my usual healthy self, and I had a known Covid exposure recently, so I went for a test on Monday. In the meantime, I haven't left the house, except to walk. I wouldn't want to unknowingly spread the virus on the off-chance I have it. 

Without an SD card full of new photos to edit, I felt as stripped as the leafless winter trees.

Time to reframe my thinking!

Getting Creative

I have thousands and thousands of photos on hard drives. 

When I go out shooting, I usually take several hundred photos. I whittle that down to about 10 I like. Then I edit 1-2 of those.

Like most photographers, I'm picky about my work. 

I've had fun this week going through some old photos and editing some I didn't deem "worthy" at the time.

I love getting creative with my edits - pulling in a sky, moon, birds, or other objects from other shoots and combining them with a plain photo that had a good composition but didn't intrigue me enough to edit. 

I didn't like the sky in the original photo so I changed it

I'm still itching to get out and shoot but I'm not feeling as anxious since I sat down and started giving new life to some of my old photos.

I still feel like I've flipped through all these old photoshoots too many times, but I challenged myself to see them with a fresh eye and imagination. 

Photo Fun 

I also indulged another side of my photography love yesterday for a few minutes. A friend of mine gave me a couple of beautiful amaryllis flowers before Christmas, and they're blooming right now. 

One of them is past its prime and the blooms are withering. There was something so compelling about it. It reminded me of winter and the current climate of our country.

I didn't want to miss that stage of the flower, so I set up a quick ring light - I didn't feel like pulling out a soft-box and setting it up. 

I set the plant on the floor and threw a black blanket over a chair behind it. 

I took this with the Lumix mirrorless and a 25mm prime lens. This little lens is great - it opens all the way to f 1.7. It's the equivalent of a nifty 50 on a full-frame DSLR. (Thank you Lauren for teaching me the equivalency factor!)

This was a fun little experiment and practice for me. Here are a couple of photos from that little session:

I took this at f 1.8. That's a super narrow depth of field! You can see that the photo is only in focus on the exact spot on which I focused and anything else that was in the same plane.

The front flower is closer to the camera and out of focus, though it has a nice soft look. Since the background was plain black, I didn't need a nice soft bokeh background, so the narrow depth of field wasn't serving me, except to offer more light.

My ISO was set on 800. Shutter speed was 1/50th. 

It's amazing how low I can go with the shutter speed without a tripod when I'm using the mirrorless camera.  

I went ahead and changed my aperture to f 4.0 and shutter speed down to 1/30th and got another shot. Stopping down to f 4.0 gave me enough depth to get the front flower in focus. It's still a tiny bit soft, but I like it. 

I didn't use a tripod even at 1/30th!

This was my favorite shot. I cropped it in post to bring the flower in tighter - something I couldn't do in-camera because with the 25mm lens, I couldn't get as close as I wanted without losing focus.  

It's so important for me to reframe my thinking again and again. As so many photographers have demonstrated during Covid, even when you can't leave the house, you can still practice taking and editing photos!

I hope you have a lovely day!

See you between the raindrops!

xoxo,
Susan 

Let me know if you're interested in a flower photo, and I'll put it on my site!