Home Sweet Block is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures

C’mon – there’s a face in that, right?  He’s even got a different color for one eye.  That’s great stuff!  But yeah.  A sink.  I just liked it.  Getting a little photography wonky, it was a dark tour.  I took it with my 50mm, which goes down to 1.8, but when you’re being jostled by the crowd, you don’t have a lot of time to set up or a tripod, so you get what you can and I liked how this came out.  With low light, you can often lose some color, which made me want to try it in black and white.  Hit the jump to see that one!

For this I feel like it lost some of the charm of the color version, but it’s more dramatic with extra contrast.  I’m kinda on the fence.  The other is more playful, but B&W just sort of suits the theme, don’t you think?  Which one do you like?

Someone Has Got Some Cleaning To Do is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures

I was in a big hurry.  I only had my 50mm, which makes it hard to frame something this big from up close.  Unfortunately, farther away means standing in the middle of a major street or getting some unfortunate buildings and power lines in the background.  You shoot now and decide what you like later.  I surprised myself and liked the one shot I got with a very partial view of the sign.  I gotta remember that.

This Elephant Wants To Wash Your Car is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures

It is easy to take bad pictures with this lens.  Out of focus pictures.  Here’s the key.  In most situations, the camera is going to drop the lens all the way open in order to gain more light.  Unless you set the aperture yourself, this means shallow depth of field.  When you take a picture of two people maybe 8 feet away with one slightly in front of the other, someone is going to be blurry.  You see where I’m going here?  No?  Well that’s why I brought examples.

This, my friend, is Lucky the Cat, doing what he does (when he isn’t rapaciously eating or rapaciously scratching people).  Without moving the camera, but with a twist of the focus ring, you get this:

Lucky is a big cat, but he’s not that big.  This is shallow depth of field.  You can do some great stuff with it, but you’ve got to remember that it exists.  If you want more DOF, you have to dial your aperture down a few stops, which means you need a higher ISO speed or a longer exposure length.  This is the same with any lens, of course.  The only difference is with the Nifty Fifty, you have the option of going down to 1.8.  You’ll never have the shallow DOF problem with an f/5.6 lens because you’ll have your own, completely different problems instead.  I’ll take this one any day.

Two Photography Birds, One Domestic Cat Stone is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures

One thing this shares with the earlier one from the same series is they both have that creamy smooth bokeh going on, thanks to the 50mm lens.  It might be the cheapest lens I have but it’s also the only one that lets you blur the background just so.  I’m not sure this one has the punch that the other does, but I like the highlights around the SFD helmet and how when things are sharp, they’re sharp.

You Best Protect Your Neck is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures

I’ve been looking at these statues trying to figure out how to work a picture in since I started working in the area almost three months ago.  They’re not so big that they drown out the surroundings and they’re not so intricate that it’s macro lens material, but yesterday I had my trusty nifty-fifty with me and the big wide aperture seemed to do the trick.  The man means business, you know?

The Man In Charge is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures