Feb 9: Bougainvillea and other backyard things

I must apologize to all you loyal readers out there, I've been missing a couple of days. Sunday was the Super Bowl, and since we had some friends over, I was too distracted to take a photo (I thought about taking a picture of them for the day's post, but I'm not sure what they would've thought about that. :-) ). Monday I wasn't feeling good, and actually went to bed before 8:30pm. So I'll post a few pictures from today's jaunt into the backyard after work.

From Runners Up

50mm, f/2.8, 1/1600s, ISO 100, no post-processing

• I played around in manual mode again, and tried some spot metering versus matrix metering. For photos where the main subject is different from the rest of the picture, the spot metering seems to be helpful, but I still tried under and overexposing to what the meter said. I guess you just eventually learn what you want out of a picture and learn how to expose it correctly.
• I started off taking pictures into the sun so I could practice exposing for the subject and overexposing the background. That didn't work with this shot, I'm guessing because the background was actually dark. But I do like the rays of sunshine coming in from the top right corner.

From Runners Up

50mm, f/2.5, 1/160s, ISO 100, no post-processing

• I'm not sure why this has a blue tint to it, but I like it.
• I probably should have cropped this so that the diagonal wood in the middle of the frame doesn't go directly into the corner (a big no-no according to my photography teacher).
• I think I took this photo horizontally, and the camera automatically made it vertical. I like it better vertical.

From Runners Up

50mm, f/2.8, 1/100s, ISO 100, no post-processing

• Not sure why I like this, it's just a bunch of rocks, right? I guess it could make an interesting background for something.