365 Day Project: Week 1

Our Theme for the week 1 is: Just keep Shooting and they challenged us to take a picture using the Bokeh Technique on our Christmas tree before we put it away.  Only two small problems....I have no idea what that is and I already put our tree away.  Luckily I can follow directions fairly well and I modified the assignment and took a picture of my neighbors Christmas light on their house.  So here are my results from the week.

Monday:  Jan 2nd (because this is the 365 day project and there are 366 days this year they started on the 2nd)  No fancy techniques here just a shot of me and my new camera:

Tuesday: Jan 3rd 

Again nothing fancy, I just took a pic of what I had been working on that day.  It is a picture of pictures because I updated almost all of the pictures with new ones from the holidays.  I love having current pics of everyone I love!  (its hard to see but if you look at the bottom left black and white photo, even the baby has his sonagram photo framed!)  Now that im posting this I should probably take another picture to replace this one next week because I bought 3 new frames this week and added even more photos.

Wed: Jan 4th 

Homework time!  Like I said I took our tree down before I knew about this so I tried my best at the neighbors and honestly im not even sure I did it quite right.  It is blurry, which was the desired effect but I dont know.  Anyway here are the steps I followed to get this effect.  (im going to share these so that 1-if someone wants to try it they will know how and 2-if I want to try it again I can quickly reference back to my blog to remember how)

1-Set your lens to M (manual focus)

2-Set your camera mode to M

3-Set your apeture to the widest setting (or the lowest number on your lens range, mine was 3.5G) to do this press the +/- button (or exposure compensation button) and rotate the dial till you get to the lowest number

4-Set the Exposure. You want your picture to be under exposed so you have a dark background.  Look through the viewfinder and press the shutter half way to "focus" on your object.  Next scroll the dial so that your exposure line is a little to the left of 0 (this will underexpose your picture).  {this was the step that definately confused me the most, I think I got it right in the end but im still not completely sure}

5-take your picture 

And wallah here is what I got...I know seems like a lot of work for a blurry picture.  I will have to try this technique again when I am around some lights that I think it will work better on.  Even though it didn't turn out to be an amazing photo I did get out of my Auto mode comfort zone and try some new stuff on my camera, which is the goal after all!
 

Thursday: Jan 5th
Tea is definately my inspiration today.  I recently spent some Christmas money and went on a Teavana Shopping spree.  I got 2 kinds of blended Tea and a cool new cup that I can seep it in and then pour it directly into any cup.  Soooo good.  For today I played with my Aperture setting and ended up with this:

Friday: Jan 6th
I am kinda cheating today because I acutally took this picture on Tuesday with my droid phone camera.  Which they did say is ok to use any kind of camera in our picture taking.  No we aren't doing any official potty training yet but Rex pulled the potty out from the bathroom and this was the first time I got him to sit on it with no pants on.  He actually sat on it for several minutes while I showed him videos on my phone.  So it was a good first experience on the potty....even though we didn't get any potty.

Saturday Jan 7th

I had something planned to take a picture of today but it didn't end up working out so I will have to save it for another day.  So I think I will use a picture that I took over Christmas while we were in Kansas staying out on the farm.  I was having fun playing with some of the setting on my camera when I took this, especially the color select setting.

Well I have completed Week 1 and enjoyed it.  Also here is a link to the blog explaining the project and how you can be a part of it: http://blog.picaboo.com/tag/the-365-project/  ( or if you want to see how a bokeh picture should really look)

Also a side note on my other goals, just to keep myself accountable:  So far I have read my Bible passages everyday and have successfully completed my 27th week of pregnancy.  As of Monday the final trimester begins!