Special Christmas Service and High ISO

37/365

 Every December my church holds a special pre-Christmas Sunday evening service.  That service took place two days ago. We sing many Christmas Carols from the hymnal, there is a lot of other music and Scripture is read chronicling the prophecy of and the birth of Christ.  Following the service there is always a food reception, the reputation of which precedes the event and spreads far and wide.  

I always go about an hour early. That way I can photograph to my heart's content without interfering with the somber but joyous nature of the event.  I refuse to use flash though and because the service takes place at night when there's no ambient light from outside, I have to bump the ISO up pretty high.  Even after all these years of using a digital camera and experimenting with high ISO and knowing how good the cameras of today are, I still almost hyperventilate when going past 800 or so.

But I had to go high in spite of my stubborn innate resistance. So I tried 1200--no good.  Then 1600--no good.  Then 2000--still no good but getting close.  Finally up to 2500 and knew I didn't have to go any higher.  Whew, I was getting nervous.  My camera is excellent at those ISOs, I need to learn to relax and just go with what's necessary to get the images.

It was a great evening and I'm pretty happy with the images.  They'll be a nice addition to the church history scrapbooks.

The Waterfalls

70/365

A couple of weeks ago, I signed up to attend a photo field trip today to a location that is a short hike to a really beautiful waterfall.  After my hike yesterday I was pretty weary and half determined not to get up at 5:15 am this morning to get to the carpool location on time.

But then I thought that if I didn't go, I'd just sit around the house, bored and unproductive, so why not get up and go?

Although it was very cloudy and drizzly this morning, it never actually rained, thank goodness. 

The cloudy conditions contributed to the intense colors of the foliage and rocks, and it was easy to 

avoid the sky at this particular location.  So all in all, it was a good day

and I'm glad I convinced myself to get out of bed and get there on time.   

I don't know the people in this first image, but I love the image anyway.  I love how they are relatively sharp, while the waterfall in the background and the tree branch in the foreground are soft.  

I recently purchased Photoshop Elements 10.  It has some fun special effects that are very easy to do.  Since the images in most of my recent posts have been straight, traditional images, I decided to try a couple of the special effects in Elements 10.  All but one of the images in this post have had an effect applied.  Such fun.