The Downtown Burlington Artwalk 2014

Spring is officially under way and April is upon us and in the Skagit Valley April means the annual Tulip Festival. The Festival includes many art exhibits in the mix of official events for the month. This year for the Downtown Burlington Art Walk, I will have two of my photos framed and displayed at the Spruced-Up Thrift Shop for the duration of this festival as a participant in this year's event.

I entered two, an 11x14 print of my Honeybee and Hibiscus Flower photo and a cropped 8x10 of one of the photos I took of a Northern Goshawk. The Hawk photo won an Honorable Mention award in the photography category for the juried contest portion of the Art Walk.

If you are around Downtown Burlington during the month of April, you'll have to stop by and see my photos. They'll be placed on Tuesday by the end of the day and ready for viewing.

Blessings,

Jesse

Photos of Local Trumpeter Swans

Here in the Skagit Valley we are blessed to have large groups of Trumpeter Swans that winter in the fields every year. These beautiful birds are the largest of waterfowl and typically range between 54 and 65 inches in length. Living in the valley, I am blessed to see the wintering swans in local fields on any given drive away from home. Most of the time I don't have my camera, but one day fairly recently my lovely bride gave me a call to let me know the Swans were in a field close by and could make a good photo opportunity.  The two photos below are my favorites of the few I took on a quick photo trip.

Trumpeter Swan Stretching His Wings

A Group of Trumpeter Swans

I still want to get some more photos of the birds before they leave the valley for the season, especially a few photos of them coming in for a landing - or even taking off.

Blessings,

Jesse

ISO and Exposure

Of the three components of exposure (Shutter Speed, Aperture & ISO), ISO is the one that feels the most ambiguous. Shutter Speed is the easiest to understand: how long the shutter is actually open. And even though the math used to figure out the f number to describe the aperture is beyond most of us, the concept of smaller number equals a bigger opening and double the amount of light let in makes enough sense to grasp.

ISO on the other hand describes how sensitive the camera's sensor is to the light that it is exposed to. Uh, say what? With no other real explanation of how this works we are simply left with the information that each value doubles (higher value) or halves (lower value) the sensitivity.

So to get a good visual of how the ISO setting effects the final image, I set my camera on manual (after meeting on Program AE) and took a series of photos at the same Shutter Speed/Aperture combination and simply changed the ISO after each shot. I had originally metered the scene @ ISO 400 so there was room on either side to see the differences. Below is a composite with all six of the images (sized down to fit in one image) set in two rows to see how the exposure changes with just the ISO being different.

1/5 second @ f/8

Looking back, I wish I would have taken one more on ISO 6400 to see the difference next to  ISO 3200. But with the ISO 3200 image already starting to overexpose I decided not too.

Blessings,

Jesse