home sick

I've been home sick since Friday, and I'm not enjoying it. On the upside, we got a kitten on Thursday, so I've been able to spend a lot of time with her. She's adorable. Most of my photos have been of her lately, and I'm finding out how tough it is to take good pictures of a very active kitten.

This is Pepper (Pep-Pep for short, inspired by the Tim and Eric skit):

She's a little devil, so we probably should have named her Lucy. Those are probably the best two shots I've been able to get of her, and they're nothing too special. Photographing moving subjects isn't something I do often, so there's plenty of room to improve.

I also took photos of the fireworks display here in Amherst, MA on the fourth. This was my equipment:





Beforehand I read Darren Rowse' How To Photograph Fireworks Displays. I used a tripod, but I didn't have a remote release. I don't think this was a big problem, since most of my images came out pretty steady. Framing my shot was difficult because we were parked in the parking lot of a barn and there were trees almost in the way. I had plans of incorporating people into the shots, but that didn't end up happening. You can't actually control aperture on my Powershot, so that wasn't an option for me. As far as focal length, I pretty much stuck with having my camera zoomed out all the way and focusing on the part of the sky where the fireworks were. Nothing very exciting. I did play with the shutter speed quite a bit, ranging from 4-10". The article suggested I work with an ISO of 100, and I completely forgot about that. My ISO is on auto, and I haven't been able to igure out how to change it in the manual mode. I did turn my flash off, and I did work in manual mode. I did periodically check my results, which is why I varied my exposure times.

I played around with different settings and exposure times, eventually deciding that my camera's Fireworks setting didn't produce as good of results as the long exposures did. At first I had the long exposure set to 10", but that proved to be too much time. The shots ended up looking more like white bursts of light than actual fireworks:


Here are a few shots that I like the best, but overall I wasn't that happy with the quality of them.










I remember taking better shots at the display in Concord, NH last year when I was using my fireworks mode. I'm not sure why that setting didn't work as well this year. Hopefully by next year I'll have a better camera over which I have more control of the individual settings.

I'm postponing the post I said I'd write that would evaluate where I've come from in terms of my skills, so yea. Maybe another time.