Saturday, Oct 29, 2011

Decent Exposure

Thank you, our sweet unborn lovechild, for providing the justification for blowing a ton of money on a fancy DSLR camera. We've long lamented the fact that we never take enough pictures, a trend we wanted to reverse before Baby Girl comes.

The Houston Arboretum, inside Memorial Park, has long been a favorite place of ours to go for walks, and after the hottest summer on record in Houston, the weather this weekend was absolutely amazing--a little crisp in the mornings and turning warm during the day--so that's where we spent some time Saturday afternoon. Sadly, the trees in the park, like many of the trees in Houston, haven't survived the drought. It was sad to see so many Xs painted on the trees that need to be removed.

This one was one of the lucky ones not marked for destruction.

This one made me one of the lucky ones, too.

The wide aperture soft focus effect is so cheese, but it's a lot of fun.

We took turns playing photographer during the walk, although we were really good about not fighting over the new toy. However, except where obvious, we're really not sure who took which pictures. There is a GPS add-on for our camera that allows for geotagging of photos in addition to the meta data its already storing; we need a similar feature that lets us easily designate the shooter.

Our sweet little kickboxer. She was very well behaved during the outing, which cannot be said of her behavior the last couple nights while Lara has tried to sleep.

By this time, it was late in the day, and we were working with some really harsh light, but still came away with a few that we were pleased with.

The zoom lens we got is a beast to hold, but it is a lot of fun.

Plus, we really like turtles.

I love how the light picks up the flying critters in this picture. (You can click to see a larger version of any of these.)

We weren't the only ones on the trail, and there were often others passing us by as we had our little photo shoot. I had just been playing with the settings and framing my next shot, but of course, this throw-away shot turned out to be my favorites.