Hobos Landing

All shot with a Canon Rebel XS and a 50mm 1.8 prime lens

Blue Duotone

Black and White

Strings in Blue Duotone

Brown Duotone

I went walking around taking pictures around the fence and the terrors from next door were actually on their own property. They still make cute subjects.

Sad Eyes

What choo talkin' bout, Willis?

Black and White Dog In Black and White

I once read a post in my favorite flickr group, Utata, that said when we lack creativity, we are reduced to taking pictures of farm animals.  Well, for me it works a little differently.  When I have no creativity, I take pictures of flowers.  I know, I know.  It seems odd.  But think about it.  It’s hard to take a truly ugly flower picture, so at least I can look at something pretty.  As you can see, today I am not feeling particularly creative, but I wanted to play with the 50mm prime lens.  Here’s the results…

Yellow Flowers

Yellow Flowers

Yellow Flowers

Yellow Flowers

My new lens arrived on Saturday, a Canon 50mm 1.8 II, nicknamed ‘The Nifty Fifty’ or sometimes ‘The Thrifty Fifty’ because of it’s extremely economical price.  Of course, when you get a new toy, you have to play with it immediately so I tossed it on the camera and started shooting Cooper the Wonder Dachshund.

Cooper vs Ball In A Stare Down

Cooper

Cooper

For those who are wondering, yes, the lens WILL shoot in color! I just hate the color of the carpet, so I changed it to black and white/sepia in the post processing. 

This pair is one of the banes of my existence.  They belong to my next door neighbor and they are not nice, plus she lets them just roam free to be not nice to the entire neighborhood.  That being said, I just discovered that they make neat photographic subjects.  They are parent and child and seem to be close to photo negatives of each other.

The Yin Yang Dogs

The Yin Yang Dogs

The Yin Yang Dogs

The Yin Yang Dogs

Moto-Diptych

A while back I wanted to try my hand at diptychs so I pulled up Lightroom 3 and set to work.  Unfortunately I discovered that there was no simple ‘setting’ or ‘feature’ for making them in LR3.  As any good nerd would do, I summoned my google fu and began searching the interwebs.  Jay Watson had a great video tutorial for this, but it was for Lightroom 2, and the features have changed enough in LR3 that this tutorial didn’t really work any more.  So I set myself to the task of trying to figure it out and this is what I came up with:

• To start, go to the Print module.  In the Layout Style box at the top of the right column, select ‘Custom Package’.  If there are any cells that are already in place, scroll down to the ‘Cells’ box in the right column and click the ‘Clear Layout’ button.
• Next, click the ‘Page Setup’ button in the left column and change the Page Layout to Landscape.
• Now drag two photographs into the work area.  Adjust one to the approximate size that you want your cells to be using the anchor points.  Make sure the ‘Lock To Photo Aspect Ratio’ button in the ‘Cell’ box in the right column is not checked.
• You now need to make the other cell the exact same size.  The easy way to do this is drag the smaller one on top of the larger one and then adjust the size to match with the anchor points.  Move the picture on top off and align them so they are evenly separated.
• Now in the ‘Image Settings’ box on the right, you can add a Border and a Stroke if you like.  I used a 4 point border and a 2 point stroke.
• To save this as a template, go to the ‘Template Browser’ box on the left and select the ‘+’ in the heading bar.  Give the template a name and a folder and you are set to go.

To use it later, simply go to the Print module, select your template in the Template Browser box on the left and drag your photos into the cells.