I’ve worn my engagement ring for nearly twelve years now.  David proposed on June 18, 1998 at the Northwood Inn in Waco, TX.  I don’t think the wedding photographer got any pictures of our rings, so I jumped at the chance to photograph mine today with my brother’s borrowed 100mm f/2.8L IS USM macro.  This first one is straight out of the friggin’ camera.  NO LIE.  No photoshopping (other than resize) and it… dang, it looks like a painting.

I know… my rings are filthy.  They’re also over ten years old, and I’ve worn them every day.  Here are the rest of my favorites from today . . . some of the 85mm are included at the end, too.

Let me introduce you to my new little friend, the EF 50mm f/1.4 USM lens.  This one is going to be working very hard for me.  I wish I could have afforded his big brother the EF 50mm f/1.2 L but, alas, who has $1300 laying around?  Not me!

And here are some of the first shots with it.  I am so pleased to have a nifty fifty  once again.

Dave, on the other hand may not be so thrilled.  This is Dave, NOT playing Halo.  He went grocery shopping instead.  Poor Dave.

Hop on over to my photography blog to see what happened this week if you haven’t seen already!  I am so excited!

I had the privilege of photographing a wedding in Fort Worth this weekend and brought along my brother as a second shooter.  I completely could not have done this without him.  I know I could have … but it just would not have been the same.  Totally would not have been the same.  I would have chickened out and thrown the camera in one of the automatic or program manual modes.  Jer stood by me and was the little angel on my shoulder reminding me to stop it down or crank it up and we ended up taking everything in full manual mode.  I can’t wait to share them with you.

So here we are.  A team.  Makin’ my mom proud.

I know I’m going to get asked about the gear so here’s the low-down.  I’ve got a 5D and 580EX around my neck with the strap from the XTi which explains there being “eos” on that strap.  That puppy never even got taken out of the bag this trip, but I had it with us just in case and it ended up that we needed an extra neck strap.  Always have an extra body with you.  That XTi is my second body on every shoot.  This night, my 30D became the secondary camera for me. On my right shoulder is the 30D with a 430EX.  Crossed over my left shoulder is a Shoot Sac loaned to me by an AMAZING wedding photographer from Waco (I absolutely fell in love with it!) which contained various additional lenses that Jer and I swapped.  Both cameras have the ultra-wides on in this photo… the 10-22 mm on the 30D is the equivalent of the 16-28 mm on the 5D, so both cameras had essentially the same set-up there.  On my belt is my memory card pocket and I eventually ended up putting the extra power supply for the 580EX on my belt. I always wear a belt.  Why I wore a necklace, on the other hand, is a mystery.

Note to Canon: Please flip the cable receiver over on the 580EX so the cable for the auxillary power falls to the rear of the camera instead of the front.  When you put a little prime on the dang camera, the cable gets in the way.

photo by Jerry Knight • 1/80 sec • f/2.8 • ISO 3200 • 180 mm • canon 5D mark II

photo by Jen Barnes • 1/50 sec • f/1.8 • ISO 800 • 50 mm • canon 30D

I have to say… that 30D was my secondary camera body and I am blown away at the images coming out of it.  ISO 800 and hardly any noise.  I’m still loving my little camera.  And my little brother.  He’s the best.

P.S.  I finally got to meet Kathryn and I absolutely adore her and her cute little pup, Punkin!  Kathryn, thank you SO much for the pointers and the lens and shootsac loan!

**cross posted on my photoblog**

Every year, our church has what they call a Concert of Praise.  It’s an evening service held with all of the Hill Country Bible Churches in the association.  This year, there were so many churches (due to church planting!) that the concert had to be split between “East side – West side” with two concerts occurring simultaneously.  It was pretty amazing.  Over 5,000 decisions for Christ were made in the last few months as a result of the Backyard Bible clubs, GO Trips, and various other ministry efforts.  What a joyous occasion to celebrate!

I do feel like I completely missed it, though.  I mean, I was there and all… but I had two DSLRs (with different lenses, so I didn’t have to switch lenses in the dark) between me and the “action” and I was continually looking for good angles and “the next shot.”  This was my first time shooting dark stage shots without the calming prescence of my brother and I was praying that I’d get an acceptable number of photos for the Worship Team.  I’d done the sermon shots on August 3rd… but the house lights were up for those.

Not a good pic at all (bad point of view) but here’s Dave.  He was “working,” too, see?

James was there.  He sat in the audience and reports from the parents I had him sitting with were very good.  We have a very well behaved 3 year old, apparently.  Go James!  Woo!

Here are some of my favorites from Sunday night:

That one with the balloons waaaaay up high, in the upper left hand corner is my favorite.  I just love the foreshadowing!

I shot with my brother’s Canon 400D and my Canon 300D.  I had the XTi set to save in RAW mode and the 300D to save in jpg mode (because I have lost my other 2Gig memory card) and I have to say… … … …I was blown away with the jpgs that came off of the 300D.  I was so blown away with them that I didn’t even bother opening them in CS3.  The thing that amazes me is that you probably can’t tell which ones were the unprocessed jpgs off of the 300D or the processed ones off the 400D unless you knew which lenses I had on which camera.  Heh.

Before kids, I was the one with the camera.  Everywhere.  Taking pictures.  Tons of them.  Even if it was annoying to other people.  Now that I’ve had kids, it seems I have traded “babies” and completely forgotten about being the shutterbug.

So, when we invited some friends over for lunch today, partly to show off the house, partly to celebrate David’s birthday… well, I completely forgot to take pictures.  I even borrowed my brother’s 5D and super lenses for church this morning (yes, some of them came out awesomely!) and have three digital SLR’s and about a dozen great lenses laying around with tons of memory cards and batteries and flashes to boot… yes, I forgot to take pictures.  I even bought him a birthday cake (boston creme pie cake!) and put these swirly colorful candles in the top… yes, I forgot to take pictures.  I used to be so good at remembering to take pictures.

BUT, I did take some church pictures.  Here are some of those.  Josh Davis was a guest during the sermon and it was obvious that Tim Hawks was having a blast being up there with him.

My brother recently had a birthday.  For his birthday, he got a new camera.  One of the way-cool features of this new camera is face detection technology.  I thought that was pretty neat.  Well, it turns out that my 11 week old has some pretty sweet face detection technology installed, too.

For Christmas, my parents got us and my brother (and themselves) each an iSight so we could video chat and they could see James. We’ve used it several times to chat with them. Even when there is no one online to video chat with, James still loves seeing himself in the monitor.

I want to get people to look at my pictures (isn’t that the point of a photo sharing community?), especially the ones that are quality photos, not just snapshots. Our photostream has been viewed over 6,000 times, and we’ve got one photo with over 700 views. But with the hundreds of thousands of flickr members out there, those numbers are just a drop in the bucket. In my search to become more popular (on flickr), I’ve made a rather obvious discovery: The more places people can access your photos from, the more people will access your photos.

Lately I’ve been keeping tabs on a new feature called interestingness. I’ve noticed that the most “interesting” pictures have loads of comments, sometimes have lotsa notes on them and usually belong to several dozen groups. My first thought was, “How did this picture get this many comments after just being uploaded this morning.” My second thought was, “Duh, the picture is in about 30 groups, so thousands of people are looking at it as soon as it is posted.” My third thought, “Why am I not doing the same thing?”

Things I’ve decided:

1) I’m now seeking highly specialized groups with large numbers of members to post my pictures in. For example, there is a group with more than 250 members dedicated to pictures that contain an animal yawning. Perfect. I’ve got three pictures of Mambo and Samba yawning. Less than 5 hours after joining that group, the photos had been favorited 6 times, with 7 comments total.

2) If you have 40 pictures that fit into a certain group, you shouldn’t add them all at the same time. Add one or two at a time. Each time you add a picture it goes to the top of the group photo pool, pushing the next most recent photos down. If you space out your additions of photos to a group, the better your chances are of people actually viewing them.

3) Tags are your friend. The more tags a picture has, the better the odds that the picture will actually get a hit from a search. The new clustering feature also seems to benefit from multiple taggings on a picture.

4) Notes make a picture more “interesting.” Case and point, someone took a screenshot of their OS X dashboard with about 30 or so widgets crowding the screen. Then they labeled each widget with a note. This picture made the top 50 most “interesting” pictures on flickr on August 3rd, without having many comments, views, or favorites. Also, I added two notes to the picture below, and it immediately jumped from our 6th most “interesting” picture to the 4th (it now happens to be the 2nd most “interesting” picture in our photostream).

Moral:

Don’t try to do this to all of your pictures. Select a few of your favorites, or pictures that you just want to show off. Once you have the picture, start adding notes, tag it like crazy and add it to as many groups as you can. In the near future, I plan to select a few more pictures, and go over the top with the above four items, just to see what happens. I’ll keep you posted to let you know how it goes.

Finally, if you don’t know what flickr is, or haven’t tried it yet, get on over there right now, and set up a free account. If you like looking at stuff and things, you’ll thank me.

My USM lens has been having problems ever since I got my fancy-pants camera. I noticed that it would focus but wouldn’t zoom in or out very easily when I put it on the camera to try out for Jer’s graduation, so I went with my basic Canon EF 80-200/4.5-5.6 lens instead, thinking that it would be better suited for the inside of the Ferrell Center.

David pulled out the USM lens this weekend at my parents’ house where he walked their land with camera in hand. He noticed that it, indeed, had stopped focusing in automatic mode altogether. This probably isn’t much of a problem for him, seeing how his eyes are pretty good and you can coerce the lens to do what you want in manual mode… but my eyes are not that great – especially my left eye which I use to look through the camera by habit – and my glasses are pretty scratched up at this point, so any photos I shoot while manually focusing will be out-of-focus when the shutter opens. (I discovered this problem my junior year of high school when I was on the yearbook staff as a photographer and had trouble getting any of my prints in focus in the darkroom, back in ’93 before I wore glasses.)

I don’t know what happened to the lens. To my knowledge, I have never dropped it or gotten it wet and I didn’t notice any problems with it on my other Rebel body before I bought the 300D. So I wonder if it would be cheaper to get the USM lens repaired, go with another lens entirely to add to my stash, or get an eye appointment and either replace my glasses or get fitted for contacts? (rhetorical question – just “thinking out loud”) I will probably look into getting it checked out, though it might be worth the investment to go with something a little different than what my current lens stash provides to “replace” it with.

I have the Canon EF 35-80/4-5.6 lens as well as the Canon EF 90-200/4.5-5.6 lens which I use pretty often… but… I wouldn’t say that either of them is well suited to portraiture (especially indoors in a dark apartment) which I’m probably going to be shooting a lot of in the future. So, I’m shopping around. I’d love this or this, as I will be shooting a lot of baby shots in the next few years and these are both known for being good portrait lenses, but we’ll just have to see about the $300-$400 price tags. Too bad they don’t sell Canon lenses at Babies ‘R’ Us (so I could add one to my baby registry!)