Lover of dirt roads, plate lunches and country music.
Welcome to the Delta!
Cleaning my desktop today! Here are some photos that never made it to the blog…
Sorry for the delay, everyone. When you live in the booneys, your internet connection likes to go down for several days at a time and when you call your service provider to troubleshoot, they play this fun game where they transfer you to so many people for so many hours that your cell phone battery can’t handle the pressure and goes dead. Those ungrateful little urchins! I’m a paying customer with a sunset challenge photo winner to announce. No internet for eight days was tough, but I survived. Thanks for being patient!
Okay let’s look at some cell phone photography and pick a winner!
Shall we? We shall!
I love the colors in this sunset! Gorgeous! by Jane Marie Dawkins
This one is amazing. I just wish it were larger! Davilla, Texas by Drew Donnell
Beautiful! Grand Isle, LA by Camp Murphy
Love the clouds in this one! Taken by my sister Carrie in Austin, TX!
Duck blind! Great shot by Drew Donnell
Spooky sky in Indianola by Jim Whitfield…
Sunset in Hawaii by Mike Whitsitt.
Wish I was on that boat with a cold margarita right about now….
Majestic! The only black and white submission! by Camp Murphy…
Thanks to everyone for submitting photos! I had so much fun looking through all of them and it was hard to choose a winner buttttttt…..
Congrats to Jane Marie! I love this sunset photo so much. The colors are so vivid and the trees framing the bottom and sides adds so much to the photo. Great shot!
Email kallie@hellodelta.net to order the 11X14 print of your choice!
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have eight days of online shopping and YouTubing to catch up on. Peace out!
Today I really wanted to share these Delta sunset photos that were taken by my friend John Montfort Jones using his iPhone.
Thanks for letting me share these with everyone, JMJ!
I’m always blown away by what we are capable of capturing with our cell phones, especially iPhones.
There are some good tricks and tips to be learned from John Montfort when it comes to taking photos at sunset.
Tip #1- The best sunsets happen when there are clouds in the sky.
The cloud cover shouldn’t be so thick that you can’t even see the sky, but rather thin cloud cover that has several breaks between each cloud.
When you have a lot of clouds with breaks in between them, the colors of the sunset will illuminate through all of the clouds making the sky look majestic.
And sometimes the rays will even show making it even more beautiful…
So the moral of this sunset story is…
Always look for those cloudy evenings! But not too cloudy…
Tip #2- Add a prop.
Throwing a tumbler that reads ‘I love the Delta” into this photo made it the perfect Delta sunset photo.
+ 50 creative points for JMJ….
What other props could you throw into a photo? Being creative is sometimes difficult but necessary…
Tip #3- Timing is everything.
Even on an evening without clouds in the sky, JMJ makes the photo gorgeous by timing the sunset with this red tractor.
Do your research and know when the sun is setting each evening. Then find something, like this red tractor or the grain bins above, that you can photograph at the right moment.
Such a great idea!
Tip #4- Take a LOT of pictures.
Ask any photographer–professional, amateur or iphoneographer–and they will tell you, taking more pictures than you will actually need is the key to getting the winning photo!
You never know which photo will be the best until you upload them to your computer. Take a bunch and then go home and choose the best one! Two steps to the left, two steps to the right, a little lower angle, a little higher angle–could change the photo dramatically. Try all the possibilities and give yourself options.
So HERE is the challenge! Submit your best cell-phone-sunset photos by next Tuesday, October 11th, and I will post my favorites and choose a winner! Your photos MUST be taken by a cell phone. (I can open up the file and see sooo be honest!)
Winner gets a free 11X14 Hello Delta photo of their choice!
It doesn’t just have to be an iPhone photo! Any cell-phone-sunset photo from the past or present has a chance to win. Follow the JMJ tips, be creative and I’ll announce the winner next week!
Submit sunset challenge photos to kallie@hellodelta.net
My sister Casey called me last night.
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Hey sis, wuddup?
Oh nothing. Wuddup with you?
I have a photography question.
Ok. Shoot!
I was at the ballpark the other night and started taking pictures of Henry while he played baseball. Something happened and the “click” on the camera was super slow and all the pictures were coming out blurry. The field was all lit up so there was enough light to take the photos without a flash, but the pictures were still blurred. How do I get my camera to take clear pictures in that situation?
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I feel like so many people don’t know what to do about taking pictures in low-light settings without using the flash. I just wanted to tell you about ISO and hope it helps in your next low-light situation!
Once again, let me make it very very very clear that I am a SELF-TAUGHT photographer with no professional schooling on this subject unless you consider YouTube an accredited university in which case I would hold my Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Photography and Watching Snooki Fall Down When She Is Drunk.
I’m not going to get into what ISO stands for or how it affects aperture, shutter speed and all that jazz. I’m just hoping that you will go outside at sunset and experiment with your ISO setting. Then if you want to know all the technical lingo that goes along with it, you can hit up google.com and eat your heart out.
But for all of you who want to skip the books and get straight to the results, here we goooo! You don’t have to have a big two-thousand dollar camera to talk ISO. Even Nikon and Canon cameras in the $100-$300 range have ISO settings that can be changed.
Ready? Let’s get started…
The first step is to find out where your ISO button is! I can’t tell you these things because you aren’t sitting in my living room right now with your camera. But check your user manual, google your camera model or try YouTube. Those are my three go-to’s anytime I want to know something!
Manual, Google, YouTube.
College is so overrated.
Just kidding. Stay in school, kids….
Okay so after you find where your ISO button is and figure out how to change the numbers up and down, it is time to experiment. (On my camera I hold down the ISO button and turn the dial on the right to increase the number.) The number should start at ISO 100 and depending on what camera you have, it can be bumped up all the way to 800, 1600 or even 3200. All cameras are different.
Experimenting with ISO’s is important because the higher the ISO, the grainier the photo. Some people like adding grain to their photo and some people love clear and crisp, buttt you should expect that anytime you bump up your ISO number, your photo will become grainier.
How much grain is added to a photo totally depends on what kind of camera you have.
I have a Nikon D200 and after experimenting with my ISO, I know that I’m still able to produce clear photos around ISO 300 or 400. Anything above 500 and it turns into Grain City. But sometimes I just have to bite the bullet and take grainy photos because there isn’t enough available light to get a clear photo without bumping the ISO up all the way.
My friend and fellow photographer Jay Adkins has a Nikon D700 and he can bump his ISO all the way up to 3200 and his photos still look clear and beautiful. That is why I covet his camera and dream at night about the day that I own a D700. However, please don’t think that you have to go buy a $2500 camera just to take great photos. That is not true at all. You can learn how to take amazing photos on any camera if you just learn how to use the camera properly. Capeesh?
Okay so here is an example…
I was on the boat around 6 p.m. and took this photo of the dogs sitting on the bank. I could hear the shutter speed slow down and when I checked the camera screen, they were all coming out blurry.
I bumped my ISO to 300 and took the photo again.
With my camera set to ISO 300, I was able to capture them clearly, including the reflections. After editing in Photoshop to enhance the colors and sharpen, it was ready to go!! (I’ll go over some Photoshop tricks at some point down the road…)
So the moral of the ISO story is….
If your photos are coming out blurry and the shutter speed or the “click” (as my sister Casey would say) sounds like it is too slow, bump up your ISO and try again! My suggestion is to start at the bottom and work your way up. So on the dog photo above, my camera was on its normal setting which is ISO 100. Instead of jumping straight to ISO 400 or 500, I bumped it up to ISO 200. The shutter speed was still slow and the photo was a little blurry. I then bumped it up to ISO 300 and bam, it was perfect! Better to start at the bottom and work your way up so that you don’t put unnecessary grain and noise into a photo.
After you experiment with your ISO, report back and let me know how it went! And as always, feel free to email me at kallie@hellodelta.net if you have any questions.
I heart photography. Love, KK
A lot of you have emailed me wanting to know what photography equipment I tote around and I’m finally getting around to posting about it. Sorry for the delay. I was busy puttin’ out a trot line.
Kidding.
Not really. My fingers still smell like chicken liver and I’m immediately regretting my offer to bait all the hooks. I was a little hesitant to participate in putting out the newest trot line because earlier this year, we were involved in The Great Turtle Massacre of 2011.
It was awful.
Let me paint the picture.
Gorgeous day. Family in town. What should we do? Put out a trot line, of course. Unfortunately, we used actual chicken livers instead of the chicken liver dough bait. The next morning we woke up and scurried to the bank to check the line and there they were, dead and floating with hooks in their mouths. No fish. All turtles. Ten, fifteen, maybe even twenty turtles, all floating belly up.
I cried.
Who knew they liked chicken liver so much? Seriously, make sure you bait yer hooks with King Bait chicken liver dough bait. Unless of course you want to eat turtle soup for a month.
Wait…what were we talking about before all this turtle drama?
Photo Equipment.
Ok Ok…here I go…
CAMERA: NIKON D200
I bought the D200 on a whim. A guess. It was kind of like me walking through a store and saying “oh that camera looks big and complicated and expensive! I think I’ll buy it!”
Yeah that is pretty much how it went down.
Actually that is exactly how it went down.
Now that I have actually learned what equipment is best for this and that and you and me and farms and food and low-light and bright-light and dogs and deer and kids, I wish I would have purchased the Nikon D700. It is the BEST camera that you can buy to date. In fact, I’m about to sell my D200 to Adorama and put the money towards the D700. I’m real excited. Like, peeing my pants excited. What makes it so great is its ability to capture images in LOW-LIGHT settings. Yes, I said it captures clear and beautiful images in LOW-LIGHT SETTINGS! AMEN AMEN AMEN AMEN AMEN and AMEN!
Do you know what it feels like to take hundreds of photos in the best blues bars in Mississippi of musicians that will probably go down in history and have historical markers praising their amazing talents– and all of the pictures come out yellow and blurry?
I do.
Do you know what it is like to sit in your kitchen and photograph the most gorgeous salad you have ever made to date and then cry as you scroll through one picture after another because they look nothing like the actual salad sitting in front of you?
I do.
And that is why we should all save our money to buy the D700. Hear Hear!
LENSES:
I do have the best wide angle lense that money can buy for a Nikon camera. It is constantly attached to my D200 and I have used it for landscape, portrait, architecture, on the tractor, off the tractor, on the boat, in a deer stand, in a bar, in the church….you get the idea.
I use it a lot.
Uh-lot Uh-lot.
Nikon 12-24mm
It is super sharp and super wide. You can get your toes and the clouds in the same picture. If you live in a big city, this is amazing for buildings and downtown areas. The possibilities are endless. For me personally, I can get within fifteen feet of a combine and have not only the entire machine in the photo, but the crop and landscape behind it! It has changed to way I photograph the Delta.
Wam-bam-thank-ya-nikon.
For photographing children, babies, puppies or any portraits where you want that beautiful bokeh behind your subject, I use this lense. It isn’t the best, but I love it for the price. It has been real good to me.
Feel free to email me at kallie@hellodelta.net if you have any questions.
I don’t know a lot of technical talk when it comes to photography. All I know is that this makes that look like that, and that makes this look like this, and sometimes when you press that button and go up to +1.0 it makes stuff brighter.
I’m a genius, I know.
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