levi (1 of 1)

levi (1 of 1), originally uploaded by Brannon E..

Shorter lenses have their place in portraiture, no doubt. This was taken at 50mm or so. Old school. I caught a glimpse of Levi in the window light and decided it was time to make use of it.

American Girl

American Girl, originally uploaded by Brannon E..

I had my flash pointed at the ceiling. I wasn't expecting too much out of this one but after a little lightroom I've decided I like it. That flag in the background took a little doing to get it to pop without completely destroying the flesh tones. I feel like this turned out pretty good. Nice, contrasty fell to it. Plus I love the subject matter!

But Mom LET me play with the colored hair spray...

But Mom LET me play with the colored hair spray..., originally uploaded by Brannon E..

I totally screwed the pooch on this shot. If you look closely, you'll see her hair is in focus under her chin but her eyes are not. No amount of photoshop fixes that. Lesson here? Focus on the eyes, fool.

Carnage at the Estis Household

Ok. So I'm an idiot. I somehow managed to move my files from my overfull harddrive to my overfull backup drive and *poof* they're gone. I'm pretty devastated. As I write, I've got a file recovery program called StellarPheonix running and a brand new Seagate Terabyte drive running a long needed Time Machine backup as we speak. Won't be going through this again. Pthththht.

Pretty Cool Shot

baseball bombers (2 of 1), originally uploaded by Brannon E..

I was right behind the plate and made up my mind I was going to get this shot. I think it came out pretty damned good.

Baseball Game and Manual Settings

baseball bombers (1 of 1), originally uploaded by Brannon E..

Now, I'm no big sports fan and I really have no desire to get into that kind of photography, but this isn't bad. A photographer friend of mine told me once he sets the ISO to auto and just lets the camera handle things. Hmmmmm. Now I've been shooting about 95% of my shots in aperture priority and it works great for me, but it seemed that whenever I set the ISO that's where it tended to stay.

Well, I was playing with the settings on the camera and made up my mind I was just going to have to shoot in manual to get what I was after and 'lo and behold, the camera started choosing the ISO for me. Sooooooooo, if you're shooting a Nikon D40 and want Auto ISO to work, don't shoot in aperture priority.

I'm coming to the conclusion that before long I'll be shooting in manual mode 95% of the time. That camera is great, but I still don't think it's smarter than me. I spend a lot of time trying to overcome what a program mode is trying to lock me into.

Levi's Turtle

turtle (1 of 1), originally uploaded by Brannon E..

So Levi catches a box turtle walking down the road and saves his life. Now, when I was shooting on film back in the day I would have had to literally tie this guy down first, get on the ground with him and hope I could get him the viewfinder long enough to snap a shot. With this D40 I'm using I literally set that thing on the ground in front of him with my sb600 flash angled at 45 degrees and once the focus was done, snap. It took about 10 shots, but I finally got him and I didn't even have to get dirty. TTL and Autofocus rocks.