I used a Henry’s (Canadian camera store) gift card from Christmas to buy myself a Gorillapod SLR-Zoom mini tripod.  I had seen one in action a while ago and thought it would be a good alternative to a traditional travel tripod that I could easily take with me on vacations, hikes, bike rides, etc.

I got the one that came with a ball head so I can pan, tilt, rotate, etc.  I haven’t used it for anything practical yet, but I have been clamping it to things all over the house just to see what it can do.  I’m sure I’ll be glad that I got the ball head because it makes it a lot easier to straighten the camera once the tripod is clamped to something.  It’s even got a level and a quick release which is something I have found myself wishing for on my normal tripod.  I can even take the ball head off and mount it on my normal tripod (which is hurting pretty bad right now anyways) and take advantage of the quick release and ball joint as opposed to the pan and tilt.

Another item off of my wish list.  I really should add more to that.  I’m still just learning what I ‘need’.

I took this picture on my desk with my camera on my normal tripod with just the light from the window.  I used PS to brighten the background to almost pure white and played around with the fill light and blacks to get the Gorillapod looking right.  I will try to remember to post some pictures when I use the Gorillapod in interesting ways.  Should be fun.

A little lack of creativity to start it all off, but I was playing around with my new 50mm lens and ended up taking some pictures of my original kit lens, an 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 lens.

The picture was taken on a white desk in natural lighting from the window (I should really think about getting an off camera flash) and a small aperture (f/20) to keep the full length of the lens in decent focus.  Using centre weighted metering and slightly under-exposing to keep the black lens fairly black and not too grey the shutter speed was set to 1/3 sec. (using a tripod and delayed shutter release of course).  The ISO was 200.

I will try to be a little bit more creative in the future.  This is just a start and I will ramp up to more interesting pictures in the future.  I do however feel that learning to do this type of shot is important, even if it is not too exciting.

My first photo serves two purposes… It is the first photo of my photo a day resolution and it also shows off my new 50mm 1.8 prime lens.

I wanted to do sort of a ‘product shot’ to show it off so I balanced it on the back lens cover on my white desk and shot it from many different angles using only natural light from the window.  I played with many different exposure settings (using my tripod and a 2 second delayed shutter release).   The settings for this particular shot were f/11 to get a medium depth of field as to get most of the lens and cover in focus and the corresponding shutter speed was 1/1.3 sec.  I used centre metering and went a couple stops underexposed until I found what I thought worked.

In Camera Raw I cropped it, brought the Blacks up a bit to increase the contrast and fine tuned a few other sliders.  The biggest issue was that the lens cover was a bit over exposed because of how it was oriented to the window so I used a mask to adjust the exposure and brightness of just the cover.  I did the same thing again to the ‘NIKON’ logo because it was way too bright, so now it is toned down a little bit.

So thats day 1.  Hopefully I can keep this up.

I will try to show some pictures taken with the new lens a little later.  I am still figuring it out.

I bought a Nikon D90 with a 18-200mm lens. I was original leaning toward the Canon EOS 50d, but changed my mind after checking them out at the store. I will discuss more later.