This shot was taken in very low light, which lead to the graininess. The ISO of this shot is actually 3200.

I personally like grainy black and whites for some reason. I can’t really put my finger on a reason why, but they appeal to me.

A friend of mine took the original shot and asked me to work it up for him. When I opened the shot, the color really leapt out at me. Unfortunately he’d taken the shot as a jpeg instead of a RAW capture, so I was a little limited. I wish I’d had more data to work with.

I really enjoyed working this shot. The bright color of the petals made the black and white conversion quite a challenge.

Taken 6/17/2009 at about 7:30pm, seconds before the storm broke loose on top of us. The storm produced one tornado that passed about 10 miles from the house according to news reports.

I’ve been taking shots of just anything around the house so that I can have images to process into Aperture. It seems to make more sense to learn to use the software with my own images than it does with a bunch of canned samples.

For this shot, I tossed the cases of a bunch of my jazz CDs on the bed and started shooting. Then when it came time to process these shots, the thought came to process them as greenish monochromes rather than black and whites or sepias.

After going through the shots from the city fireworks show, there were more keepers than I’d originally thought there were. So there’s a new page listed up top … ‘4th of July Fireworks’.

Take a look! It’ll make you go “oooooooo … ahhhhhhhhhhhh …..” all over again.

55mm, f/5.6, ISO 100, Shutter 4.2 seconds

I tried to shoot star trails last week, but it was a little hazy. Last night was much better. Once the tripod was set up and facing the southern sky, the first thing visible was Scorpio. This is a 30 minute exposure.

32mm, f/5, ISO 100, 30 minutes

There he was this morning, sitting in the window, watching something play in the yard (probably a bird). I decided I wanted to end up with an old timey grainy black and white feel, so I cranked up the ISO to 400 for the shot.

Then I waited patiently for his tail to stop twitching …

55mm, f/5.6, ISO 400, Shutter 1/250

It was suggested that the magnolia shot be converted to black and white, and that seemed like a great opportunity to try working with black and white conversions in Aperture 2. I don’t know that I quite have it down yet, but there’s definitely more flexibility here than there is with iPhoto.

I saw this little guy working diligently in the front flower beds.

200mm, f/5.6, ISO 100, Shutter 1/160, Shot RAW and edited in Aperture 2.