I like this photo because it pretty much captures my cats personalities in one pic.  It would have been a bit better if Forge was better in focus with Havok, but I decided to post it anyway.

Forge is stupid and crazy.  Which is pretty much exactly what he looks like there laying on the table.  Havok, on the other hand, is smart, cool and collected.

Not a perfect photo, but my first with my new 55mm-200mm lens.  I can get better pictures of the cats by zooming in from afar because they tend to change their behavior if I’m in their face with a camera.  Go figure.

Before talking about the picture, I just want to say that the cat toy pictured here is absolutely, without a doubt, the best cat toy ever invented.  It’s the only toy they seem to never get tired of.

It’s back to cats for this one, but that’s because they’re such interesting subjects and I can photograph them no matter the time of day.  I wanted to play with my 35mm prime in low light and Havok was engaged in a game so I thought it would be a good test of capturing motion.

He wasn’t just standing still when I snapped this photo, but I managed to “freeze” him in place with a wide aperture, flash, and high shutter speed.  The ball was moving faster than Havok, so it blurs a little but it makes for a neat effect in this case.

While on a recent trip to Arizona, my wife and I had some time on our hands so we thought it’d be fun to tour some model homes in the Phoenix area.  We settled on checking out a development by Fulton Homes and off we went.

I don’t know when or if I’ll ever have the chance to get a new customized house in such a development, but we absolutely fell in love with the floorplan pictured below.

It’s such a perfect use of space.  So many of the models we looked at had formal dining rooms or two living rooms.  Wasted space.  I have little ambition to host a fancy dinner.  We don’t even have a complete set of china to serve it on.

The front Den would be outfitted with blackout curtains, surround sound and a nice big television; 55″ or so should suffice.  The bonus room would be floored with the same flooring as the garage for climate controlled storage and cat litter boxes.  Ideally, I’d put a door that led from there to the garage.

The master shower is a glass block shower.  It’s awesome.  It’s not a container like other showers.  You just walk into it.  You don’t have open a door or any such nonsense.

The kitchen is large but not overly so, and the pantry is absolutely amazing in its size.  There is no shortage of places to store dishes and food.

I’m not sure if a house such as this is a goal or a dream, but I like it enough to blog about it.  That’s something.

Because sometimes the primary purpose of a camera is just to have some fun.

This is a picture I took of the Gila Valley LDS Temple on a recent trip to Arizona.  It’s my first display of architectural photography and I immediately see some of the challenges.

For one, the wide angle I used on the lens makes it so that the lines aren’t going upward in a perfectly straight line.  That makes sense considering our eyes see much the same thing, but internally I think we have a tendency to “straighten” out the lines when we look at it.

It was a good time for a photo with the sun literally right behind the steeple.  It gives it that otherwordly glow that a temple should have.

The jpg compression really did a number on this one.  It looks much better in its RAW format.

I finally made time to venture outdoors to see what I could do with my camera.  I saw some squirrels and birds that I would have loved to photograph, but I don’t yet have a telephoto lens so that will have to wait for another day.

In retrospect I think I could have made this photo look even better with my 35mm lens at f/1.8.  That would have focused more tightly on the flower.  As it stands, I used the 18-55mm kits lens at 55mm.

I wasn’t able to get the camera to focus well enough when I was super close so I actually cropped this down from a larger image where the flower took up less of the frame.  It’s the first image where I feel like the jpg compression took something from the photo.

I think some post processing could have also helped with the overexposure on the right.  But maybe that’s part of its allure?

After reading all of the reviews about the 35mm f/1.8 lens I had to buy one.  This is my first picture on the blog from it. It can be set to a much wider aperture than the kit lens which allows me to get some better blurring.  As you can see, I was able to focus very specifically on Forge’s paw.

I used the SB400 flash to bounce of the ceiling and did a small amount of post processing to the RAW file using Nikon’s software.  This isn’t quite the same as ‘photoshopping’ it.

The RAW files store all of the information the camera captured at the time of the photo so the values I tweaked were things I *could* have done with my camera… if I knew what I was doing.

Havok’s never been to Texas, but I’m sure he’d love it.

I took this photo with the 18-55mm kit lens and the SB400 flash bouncing off of the ceiling.  I like this photo because the color composition really jumped out at me.  With the red bag, purple blanket, and orange cat it just made for an eclectic mix of color.

It’s also the first photo I’m putting on the blog that doesn’t rely on depth of field.  The entire frame is [mostly] in focus and I think that’s a skill I need to master as well — especially indoors where wider apertures are necessary for light.

This photo isn’t really that great.  I chose to put it on the blog anyway, though, since the whole point is to document my learning experience.

This book is special to me because it was given to me as I graduated high school by a very dear teacher who was one of the most influential teachers I’ve ever had.  I loved reading Le Morte D’Arthur in her class.

She wrote inside the front cover, “To Josh Barnett (a curious mixture of computer tech and medievalism), When computer programming makes you feel something is missing in your life, open these pages.”

I like this photo for its focus on the title while blurring the rest of the cover, but the background is a little too saturated.  I don’t know how to fix that while taking the picture, but perhaps there is a way in post processing that I need to learn.