My My Dear Daughter, Perfect Blend of Girly Girl and Rough and Tumble Tomboy

Sorry that some of these are not composed or focused as well as they should be, I was in a hurry to snap the pictures because the kids wanted to disassemble some parts of this creation to make new things...  I decided to go full auto with my camera, and I didn't notice until the picts were on my computer screen that some parts were out of focus a little, but not too bad.

 My little daughter Danielle is quite amusing with her mix of typical little girl traits and  "Tom Boy" traits.  Here is the cute little play house she built from legos, typical little girl stuff...  well until you look closer:

 

Her dream home has a missile launcher.

 

And the woman of the house drives around armed with a pistol.

 The man of the house drives a car that is part fighter plane.

Water Droplets!!! Lesson 2 Assignment 3a, Fast Shutter Speed

Okay, my assignment for lesson 2 of my free photography course was to take pictures using shutter speed to create an effect.  My first effort at this was to use a fast shutter speed to catch a split second of time, shown in a water droplet.

I got further instruction on this from This Site. 

I added blue food coloring to the dish of water to get the cool blue color, of course the water dripping down did not have food coloring, it is just reflecting the color of the water below.

My settings for all these photos was manual,manual focus, shutter 1/200, aperture f/5.6, focal length 55mm, ISO 100, on-camera flash.

My best result came from one I cropped to focus just on the water drop:

Okay, so here is the whole series of shots.

New Goals for a New Year

Well, I have really not done very well at keeping up this blog, and it is not from a lack of interest in photography.  I have taken many pictures, hundreds in the last year, I just haven't been very good at POSTING many of them on here. 

So for the New Year, my goal for this blog will be at least two photos every month, and until the course is finished at least one of those two should be related to the completion of an assignment on my Free Jodie Coston Photography Course, after the course is finished, at least one of the two should be what I would call "artistic photography", that is not just a snap shot taken on full auto, but a photograph where I used at least some manual settings to get the effect that I want, I am trying to move more and more away from full auto, to at least using AV or TV modes, but also trying to get more familiar with the Manual setting.

For now though, I will post a few pictures from December 2010...

My son's 11th birthday party:

My daughter's sweety Dustin, playing with the rest of the children at the party.

Some Christmas photos, this first group is Christmas Eve, when Dustin came over and we exchanged gifts with him.  My younger kids really liked the presents from him.  My oldest was just happy to have him there.

 He was mezmarized by the box.

My younger daughter's Christmas gifts from Dustin, I wonder if he gave her the hamster just to other me... you see, he knows I call my favorite NASCAR driver's main rival "the Hamster". (My favorite is Jimmie Johnson, his main rival is Denny Hamlin.)

This next group is Christmas morning. Lots of pictures, pay special attention to what my oldest daughter got in her stocking.

 Okay here it is... she is trying to figure out what is in the envelope in her stocking.

"Huh? What?  Are you serious?"

It's a car key!!!