Lauri Stumph Photography Blog » Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota based natural light newborn, children’s and senior photographer.

A couple abstracts for this week’s project…(and by this weeks, I mean this week in March).  I’m catching up, I’m catching up!

Texture - lots ‘o texture, thanks again to the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden where I could probably do project 52 every week and never get the same shot twice.  This is a shot of the Prophecy of the Ancients by Brower Hatcher.

24mm f2.8 1/4000 ISO400

Our assignment this week was a technical one…back button focus (BBF).  Most SLR cameras have two ways to focus; the first is pressing the shutter button half way down and the other is the ‘back button’ which is generally just to the left of your right thumb.

I could go on to explain it but this link explains it quite well!  (I apologize to Nikon lovers, myself included, but Canon did a good job on this).  Back Button Focus explained. This feature is on Nikon cameras as well.  Take a peek at your manual to see whether it needs to be programmed or if it’s a default feature.

And here is my BBF experiment.

I set my single focus point on the cherry, because of course, that’s the most important and pressed my BBF button.   I was shooting at f14 so a lot of the scene appears to be pretty focused but the background is not quite as sharp.    I was bending down as close to the ground as I could without sitting down.  But I don’t particularly like the composition.  It’s a little too even.  If I would have just tilted the camera up to capture more of the sky, there would have been a bit too much distortion for me (the buildings would appear to lean to the center even more than they do in the second photo).  To get more of the sky in the photo would have required me to lay on the ground and it was very…soggy.

So because I had pressed the BBF  before my first shot and didn’t touch it again, the focus was still locked at the exact distance to the cherry which would allow me to recompose without losing focus.  Instead of laying on the ground, I just put my camera close to the ground, took my shot and I like the composition much more.   The sky is more appealing than the soggy brown grass and the focus is exactly where I set it with my first shot.

Week seven’s assignment was…shoot what you wish.  So I grabbed a photo of my valentines day present.  I hope I can keep it alive.  I have a pretty green thumb outdoors but it’s the inside thing that I’ve never been good at.  There is a plant sitting in my kitchen window that is looking pretty sad right now…which reminds me, I should probably water it.  Have a good weekend!

This was our Valentine’s week challenge:  LOVE

Remember the day before Valentine’s Day?  The AMAZING morning when frost was covering all the trees?  I love that.  So I went for a little photowalk to capture just a bit of it.