iPhone camera

I'm a bit of a tech geek and one of the things I really wanted when my old phone contract ran out was the new iPhone 4S.  I had read about the camera and that was definitely something I wanted to have with me.  I had tried multiple times (unsuccessfully) with my old phone to get pictures of our daughter and it was just too frustrating.  It took my old phone about 5 seconds to bring up the camera app and then another 2-3 seconds to actual take the photo.  Now if you know anything about kids, 8 seconds is enough time to miss 3-4 pictures let alone the original picture you wanted.  So I was pretty pumped about my new iPhone.  Well I can say without a doubt that this camera is great.  I had considered buying a P&S camera just to carry around when I didn't want my DSLR but now with my iPhone, the P&S seems completely unnecessary.  I haven't really gotten any great pictures of  Elena but that isn't the phone's fault (she abandon's whatever she's doing and heads straight for me whenever she see's me pull out my phone) but I did get a great shot on the golf course.  Here it is before and after post processing.

Not too shabby for a camera phone!

Simpson College

One of the blogs I follow DigitalPhotographySchool said in one of their posts here that you should take a camera on a walk and just pick a spot to take photos and really try and make a good picture out of what would apparently be pretty benign.  So I took our dog Kati out for a walk and tried to see what I could come up with.  For post processing I use Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2.

ISO troubles

So I have just recently figured out how ISO affects photos.  The higher the ISO (1600 is the highest my camera goes) the noisier (grainy) the picture.  Since I have so far been a photographer that has been learning on-the-fly, I hadn't realized that ISO was what was causing all that noise in my photos.  I had only realized that having the ISO up had allowed me to take photos at a lower aperture.  Both of those of course were helping me get low light pictures in my house.  I'm sure if I were to upgrade my camera (not an option since mine is only 1 year old) then I would get better noise reduction from a better sensor but now I'll just have to figure out how to get the photo I want in another way.  Maybe I'll try some reflectors to get more natural light into the room....we'll have to see if I can figure that part out.

First blog post

I've decided to start blogging and posting some of my favorite photos here.  I don't know if this will end up going anywhere or dying in a few months/years but I guess if I don't start it will never happen.

Here's a little bit about me.  I have a beautiful wife (Kim) and an equally beautiful daughter (Elena) and we have a little dog named Kati (a Peke-poo.)

I got my camera specifically to take pictures of Elena and I have decided that I really enjoy photography and would like to see where it goes.

The first photo is just the family picture I took about a month ago.