Light Box

The newest rage for food blogging is having a light box. The biggest reason I rarely update my food blog in the winter is because of the awful lighting in the house after 5pm. Today I decided to try to make a light box by myself. Before I lost my job I considered buying one off of ebay for $35 or something like that. Doing it by myself only cost me $1.91 for 2 pieces of heavy duty cardboard, plus some supplies I already had on hand like a box and tape. That's it. I'm getting quite thrifty in my unemployed days.

Anyway, I decided to play around with the camera after I finally got the light box done. I tried taking some pics of a black and white seashell my friend gave me, but I think I need a stronger light bulb because the pics were just not turning out that great. So I was thinking, "what can I photograph that has a lot of color?" Personally, I just love colorful photos. So then it hit me - I just bought a box of Fruit Loops (I love kid cereals). So here are the results:

Hayley

My girlfriend Nikki had a sweet little baby girl 7 weeks ago. I had the pleasure of playing around with the camera some more during a visit with Nikki and Hayley yesterday. Thank goodness for the awesome SOOC quality of the pics that my Nikon produces (and the adorableness of baby Hayley), because my skill is just totally lacking:

She has the cutest little winter boots!

I love the nostalgia of this one:

I LOVE Flowers...

I have an insane obsession with flowers. They're one of my most favorite things to photograph. They're just plain one of my favorite things to look at.

For my 2 year anniversary (and to help cheer me up after losing my job), my awesome hubs ordered a flower arrangement from the florist who put together all of the flowers for my wedding. The arrangement was almost an exact replication of my wedding bouquet, just with a few changes. Despite the changes, I was absolutely in love with the flowers, I can't stop looking at them, and I of course had to photograph them.

This photo is my ultimate most favoritest picture I've taken with the new DSLR yet:

Daisy

When you're playing with your camera, you need things to take pictures of. The easiest thing for me is my dog, Daisy. She's adorable. But she hates having her picture taken. It's pretty evident in the pictures I take, but it's so funny when she runs away when she sees me pull the camera out.

My living room is painted this amazing blue color. I took the opportunity to play with some daylight photography since losing my job last week. Here are a few of my faves:

The Beginning

So a few weeks ago I purchased my first ever DSLR camera. The Nikon D60. It's my new baby, my pride and joy. I'm having a ball getting familiar with it. My ultimate goal is to just have fun with it. So far it's brought me loads of joy. I can only imagine how much fun I'll be having with it when Spring finally comes and there's more exciting things to take pics of outdoors.

In the meantime, check out the progression from day 1 with the camera to now:





Finally I was able to take a few quick pictures outside with Daisy in the daylight:









And eventually I got so sick of trying to figure out how to take correct exposures indoors with the awful lighting we have so I purchased Understanding Exposure: How To Shoot Great Photographs With a Film or Digital Camera by Bryan Peterson. This book is incredible. It was beyond enlighting by page 20 of the book. The picture examples to help explain things were beyond helpful. It's a quick read and definitely a book that I will be referring to as needed in the future. I definitely recommend this book to any new DSLR user.

So once I started playing around with what I learned from the book, I was able to get these pictures which were leaps and bounds better than the above photos:

The moral of the story is - I've still got a ton to learn, but I'm going to enjoy it in the meantime :)