Mary’s a great photographer. Unlike me, the point-and-shoot queen, she composes, controls and most importantly, understands what she’s doing. A few days of enforced residence meant that there was rather more opportunity to spend time exploring the possibilities than normal and Shimelle’s bonus “In Focus” pdfs arriving daily offered rather a lot of inspiration.
First, we played around with candy canes, in and out of focus. With a manual camera, controlling the focus would be fine, but here we were with two automatics and getting a bit of blur wasn’t easy!
Next, we played around with bokeh. Once again, this wasn’t easy to achieve on our super-clever cameras which kept on producing the pin sharp shots when we wanted otherwise. Finally, I discovered a setting I’d not used before and bingo, I got some bokeh shots.
Whilst we were fiddling with our cameras, other members of the family kept their focus elsewhere.
As the days passed, nothing was left unrecorded. The Christmas Eve breakfast croissants were used to explore the “sharp foreground-soft background” challenge
and I discovered the “food” setting on my camera!
I also discovered the limitations of a point and shoot when it comes to keeping lines straight and minimising the distortion.
When darkness fell, we went a little crazy.
Once the celebrations were over, a new challenge dawned: the choir’s Christmas concert CD cover. The light outside was super and we were all in need of some fresh air.
We’d noticed how the colour red “pings” off the page in such light conditions, so set up a shot on the theme of “A Taste of Christmas” and three cameras began clicking.
Except that one of us was distracted by the wonderful frost patterns on the summerhouse windows.
This weather has been truly remarkable and now the thaw has begun, it’s hard to recall how very, very cold it was!
As we returned to the warmth indoors to review our work, there was one last chance to capture that strange and rather unusual snow texture. Surely the Eskimos will have a particular word for it?
Of course, there’s no stopping us now. Whilst we enjoyed tea with friends, we spotted coloured lights and couldn’t resist getting the cameras out and playing around a little more.
And just to prove I can bokeh, there it is again.
Except there remains one unresolved challenge.
