Playing with HDR

It seems that almost of all my pics are of children. I love my nieces, and spend a lot of time with them, which gives me tons of photo shooting opportunities. But I love taking pictures of landscapes, and I hardly do that.

When I ran into an article about HDR, I was curious. Playing with it got me some conclusions, and I can’t wait to take more pictures and use it more.
One of my most important conclusions was to always photo shoot a landscape in RAW mode. This is much easier most of the time than getting 3 different exposures of the same scene.
The second conclusion, is to always take a picture in low ISO values, otherwise the HDR will come out too grainy.

So I’m just at the begining, but it looks like a fun journey 🙂
Here are some images I got the chance to play with.

Happy Passover!

Mine!!!

I just entered this picture to a small contest on d-spot and decided to post it here as well, since it’s one of my favorites. This was definitely a great spontaneous capture, what we used to call ‘a Kodak moment.’
My niece was eating a pita, and her ‘big brother’ decided he’d like to have a bite as well…

(Needless to say, they both enjoyed this pita 🙂 )

Has it only been a year?

I was looking for something on my Flickr, and I noticed some interesting stuff.

1. I have over 25,000 views on my Flickr which is really cool and surprising 🙂 When I first opened it and created a Pro account on last January, I wondered if this photography hobby is a temporary thing or if this should last, unlike my other hobbies. I’m glad to say it stayed, and that I am indeed getting better. And hearing that from friends and family feels absolutely great 🙂

2. I found this set while I was searching for another. This one was taken on Passover’s Sedder Night a year ago, with spontaneous lighting. Her smiles come from us singing that she’s actually a dolphin.
Next week it will be exactly a year since I took these pictures. I was sure it’s been longer, but it’s been only a year.
This darling has gone through so much this year – she moved to a new house, turned four, started to see full length ‘scary’ disney movies (I really waited for this one – she looooved Monsters Inc :)) and… yeah, she even got a baby sister a month ago.

So here’s the set. God, I love this kid 🙂
I wonder if I’ll be able to convince her to create a new set this year too, in the same place and lighting (she’ll probably give me that look that says ‘haven’t we taken enough pictures of me already???‘).

RoadTrip

I love surprises. Good ones, that is.

My latest birthday gift from Moran and Rina was definitely one of those 😀

I was told in advance I’d be kidnapped on Friday, so I shouldn’t make any plans.
The instructions were to wear comfy (yet not embarrassing) clothes, bring my camera and tripod, and well, me :).

They picked me up early on Friday morning and refused to tell me where we’re headed.
I soon realized we’re heading up north, but I didn’t know just how much north…

We made a few stops along the way – to shoot some pictures of the things we saw along the way, and to have a small, pre-breakfast picnic in one of the prettiest places I’ve ever seen.

The destination to all that journey was a pretty, intimate restaurant with a stunning view and delicious food.

This was definitely one of the best birthday gifts ever :). Click here to see the pictures from that day.

Welcome, Baby.

I got a new niece 20 days ago, cute and tiny.

While I don’t take as many pictures of her as I did when my first niece was born,
at least my SLR makes sure they’re in better quality 🙂

Here’s some pictures from that first set I took, when she was 5 days old.

Happy Birthday, kid, and welcome to the family 🙂

See the rest of the set here.

Photography Blog? Sure, why not?

I think this is the millionth time I started a blog. What’s different this time? Don’t know.

I just wanted a place where I could show recently taken pictures with some notes and information.

While I’m happy to use flickr as a storage site, I hate their lack of creativity, hence – my photography blog.

Some of you might wonder (like I’m sure my sister will) – why the hack does she write in English? Well, that’s what I feel like doing. Deal with it 🙂

Enjoy, and don’t hesitate to drop me a line and say what you think about this place.

taltal.

I wondered which of my favorite pictures I was going to use for this first post – this one won: my niece, 3 1/2 at that time. You can actually feel her joy.