Mike Doel’s Weblog

Mix:

• 1 part sunny day
• 1 part first day of summer vacation
• 2 parts kids
• 2 parts water cannons

Serves: family of four

This is Nate Arbabi. Born October 9, 2006 at 8:32pm (PDT) and weighing in at 6 pounds and 8 ounces. My new nephew. I’m so happy for Deb and Amir.

This is a picture of some coins I did this evening. I’m thinking of using it for this month’s Digital Story photo assignment submission contest. The topic for September is “circle” and I thought a close up of some coins might work. To make the shot, I put a plain white shee on my desk, setup a couple of coins on it, and mounted my camera (with flash) on a tripod. To accentuate the lighting and try to remove shadows, I had lights on the side and on top of the subject. Although I don’t have a true macro lens, I was able to use the 24-105 lens at maximum focal length for this. It’s capable of focusing fairly closely, though I couldn’t get closer than this without getting into trouble.

Today, Matthew and Julie were off doing DreamDinners together. This is a place where you prepare meals ahead of time, freeze them, and then use them for a decent meal without much preparation on the day you eat. While they were doing that, Cassady and I headed to Inniswood Metro Gardens. I had never been there before, despite having lived less than a mile away. It’s a pretty place with lots of beautiful flowers to see. This picture was taken with my 24-105mm lens set to maximum aperture in aperture priority mode with maximum focal length. The end result is a very nice diffuse background.

This picture was taken back in July during our camping trip (we go every year with a bunch of families from Church). As is apparent from this picture, the excursion was not withou precipitation and in fact we all ended up cutting the trip short by a day due to all the heavy rain. Nonetheless, one of the most enjoyable things for me over this past summer was watching the kids on their bikes. Cassady is still on training wheels, but I suspect that’s not true for long.

This picture is titled “A Dream Fulfilled”. My mother-in-law has always wanted to get an MG. Although this isn’t truly an MG (it’s built on top of a Volkswagon frame I think), this is still a very cool looking car. On Labor Day, she and my father-in-law brought it over to show us. Although I’m disappointed that her face was over-exposed, the rest of the image looks pretty good. To try and convey the timelessness of the car, I converted it to a Sepia tone. The image was shot in Program AE with my 24-105 lens.

This is my first picture of the day. I chose it because it was recently included on another website. Derek Story authors a podcast called The Digital Story that I listen to every week. It’s a terrific podcast and includes lots of great tips on how to improve your photography. Every month, he runs a photo assignment on the podcast where he encourages listeners to submit pictures that interpret a theme of the month. For August, the theme was “red”. I figured scarlet was close enough to red so I took my camera down to Ohio Stadium to see if I could get some shots. Fortunately, one of the gates to the stadium was open and I was able to sneak in without incident. This shot was taken with my Canon EF 24-105 f/4.0 L IS USM lens. This is the lens I use the most since the focal range is pretty good for most shots. The camera was set to aperture priority mode with an aperture of f13. This allowed me to keep a bunch of the seats in focus. It would have been good to try narrowing the aperture even more to see how that would have looked. Since the picture was taken on a tripod, I had the IS setting for the lens set to off.