So, now I’ve had my new camera for a few days and it has some really great features and a few really fun things that can be done with it.  I have always loved limited color photos, where one or two colors are highlighted and everything else is in grays.  I tried getting that effect in software editing many times and so often it comes out with too many “bleed” points.  So if my primary color was red, too many areas that were some variant of red got lost or something that shouldn’t read as red becomes red due to the lighting.  This new camera allows me to do exactly that.  It’s called a “selective color effect” and it allows me to choose up to 3 colors (and possibly a couple of ranges of colors for each color) to focus on and the rest becomes gray.  It also shows me the preview of what my picture will look like before I take it, so I can change the color slightly if something is missing from my color range.

It’s tough to do when taking spontaneous pics of my son, but it works beautifully on nature.  My dandelion header was taken using that effect.  I love juxtaposing the concept that a dandelion is just a weed with the fact that it stands out so beautifully in that image against the greyscale leaves beneath it.

Here is a pic that I didn’t adjust the color range on correctly and got half gray and half green leaves.  It was not the desired effect, but it looked cool, so I took the pic!

Another thing that I love about my new camera is not really a special effect, it’s just something that I was never able to do with my automatic cameras.  Night Photography!  I love nighttime and the way everything looks so different and almost magical.  To be able to capture that on film is wonderful and I was able to get a few images, though to do a better job, I’ll need to pull out the tripod!  Below is last night’s moon behind the trees (around 9 or 10pm).