Frosty Morning

Hello all, it's good to be back! I've been pretty busy with work, studying for grad school tests, working on grad school applications, and other such things. Additionally, the shortened daylight means that daytime commitments interfere much more with early morning and late evening photography (when sunrise is at about 5:10 am and sunset is about 9:15pm, as in the summer, it is a lot easier to keep those times free than 8am and 4:30 pm in the winter). But winter vacation is coming soon, so hopefully, this post will be the first of many in the next month or so.

(A while ago, I saw some hits from Ireland. If that's Christo and/or Mary, hello and I hope you are doing well!! If not, then I'm honored to have someone from Ireland reading my blog!)

First, I finally got out to take some pictures the other day. Magnuson Park was not as frosty as I had hoped. Since it sits close to the lake, I assumed that it would be one of the frostiest places around (as, indeed, it has been other times). This time, however, there was hardly any frost; the few places with frost were already beginning to melt. Nevertheless, since I was already there, I tried my luck in a few spots. I was surprisingly pleased with the results--the fact that the frost had begun to melt accentuated the colors of the frosty objects, and those colors' contrast with the frost itself. For instance:

I believe the leaves I was photographing belonged to a blackberry bush of some kind. I also got this one, the frosty remnants of what in the summer were hardhack blossoms:

Now onto other photography news:

-Lightroom. I went ahead and bought it (they had a Deal of the Week on Amazon), and have been liking it. Editing pictures in RAW format is proving to be much more difficult than I thought. I like the latitude I get with setting lighting levels, but it seems that RAW images need more computer sharpening than JPEGs, and I'm trying to figure out how to do that without ruining the image.

-Lens. I am going to buy a new lens, probably later this winter or spring. Of course, it's a bit subject to how my money situation turns out, but I'm probably going to do it. It will be a 10-20mm wide angle lens.  My main lens is 18-200mm, which is pretty wide. But there have been times when I've wished I've had something a bit wider. Additionally, the minimum focus distance of the lens I want is about 9 inches, compared with a less impressive 1.6 feet of my lens. I've seen some cool wide-angle close-up pictures in books and photography magazines, and want to try my hand at that technique. I could get even funkier and buy a close up filter for it.

Cheers, and I hope to write again soon!