Note to fellow 365ers

Please, please, please feel free to critique my photos each day or tell me if there is something you would have done differently or something I should consider.  I value any feedback you can give me!

6/365 Spaceship

With the time change Sunday it seems if I don't get my picture taken by 4:00 it gets pretty difficult.  Today the lighting was not on my side.  It was dreary, rainy and foggy.  In November.  In Indiana.  I decided to just turn on the lights and do custom white balance, but my son insisted the room be dark as the box was his space ship and space is dark. So my ISO was cranked and I might have actually got it a tad overexposed. But, I think ISO 1600 would have been underexposed and in the program I use to do a little editing it seemed if I took it down a notch it was underexposed, so I dunno.

Which brings up a question I have.  On occasion I will see someone's post with a ISO of say, 620 or some odd number, do other cameras allow for selecting smaller increments because mine just has 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, 3200, and 6400 or was this because they were using a semi-automatic setting like AV/TV and not shooting in manual mode and the camera selected that for them?

Composition was also a little tough.  The light was so low in the room, my camera was having a hard time focusing and my son was moving too fast for manual focus (or at least for me to manually focus) so I just set my auto focus point in the center since it should be the strongest and then did the best I could to crop the image to add a little more interest than his hand in the very center.

f1.8

1/80 sec

ISO 3200

5/365 Baby Fingers and Toes

 f2

1/160sec

ISO200

4/365

I had a hard time deciding today so I'm posting 2.

For both:

f2.5

1/160sec

ISO 3200

3/365 Carrots

My mom planted a little vegetable garden this summer with D.  Today they harvested some of the last of their bounty...the carrots!

 f2.2

1/80sec

ISO 1600

2/365 Inauguration of the self timer

I'm kinda excited about today's photo.  I have been trying to get a photo of baby A's little hands while we are reading because he likes to help "hold" the book, but I had to figure out how to get the shot.  So, I used the self-timer for the first time.  It also gave me a chance to work out a few things I haven't thought about before. I set it for 10 sec. and continuous shoot so it takes 2 pics each time.  The camera was on a shelf in baby A's closet on a little table-top tripod.  I don't have a regular tripod yet.  Setting the camera up in the closet posed a few challenges, but was possible since my T3i has a variable angle LCD.  I am glad now I went with the T3i, even though there have been moments I wondered if I should have done the T3 and a non-kit zoom lens. Instead I kept the T3i, 2 kit zooms, and purchased a 50 mm 1.8 separately. It's serving me well, so far.

My next challenge was focusing.  I generally use back button focus since I mostly take photos of my kiddos and have from the "get-go" taken photos this way, after reading a tutorial on it.  Plus, I am not very steady and found it hard to focus and recompose.  I couldn't figure out how to focus in "live view" from the LCD without turning off back button focusing, which I felt too lazy to do.  First I tried to focus on something I thought would be in the same focal plane once the camera was in place.  This was a pain and didn't work very well.  Then I finally wised up and manually focused..duh! Problem solved.

On another note, I did convert this to black and white.  I have been trying to resist this since: 1) I love black and white and sometimes am tempted to convert everything, 2) I get tempted to think black and white will fix my photo issues...but I know this is not really true or ideal, and 3) I do not yet know how to do a true conversion other than just the "one step click" to convert to b&w.

But, I did convert ("one step") on this one because I thought it accentuated the light shining on baby A's face, helped the strange mix of colors in the photo, seemed to work well with the stripes on baby A's outfit and the other geometric details in the photo, and I felt it gave the photo a more intimate and timeless feeling.
I posted the color sooc below it.  Black and white or color, what do you think?  Would you have left it in color?

f2.5

1/125sec

ISO1600

Day 1/365 Baby A.

First official day of "Project 365."  This is my 5 month old, baby A.

Since I just got my dslr in October, a Canon T3i, (Ok, technically I received it from my hubby for my birthday at the end of September but it took me a few weeks of research to see if this was the model I wanted, and then about another week to get past the intimidation of opening the box and, thus, making the purchase final), I have not even begun to dive into photo editing or post processing, really.  I want to work on getting things as good as possible "in camera" first.  But, eventually, maybe toward the end of this 365, I do want to look into editing more.  Right now I am importing my photos into Windows Photo Gallery to organize and crop and I may adjust exposure and color for white balance, if necessary but I am just using some of their very basic options for this.  No layers for this girl yet.

So, that being said, this is an example of why I do want to start more extensive editing sometime during my  365:  the lamp coming out of the left side of baby A's head.  In fact, I have several pretty cute shots and all but one have the lamp sprouting from the top of his head, but I think this one would be fixable with a little cloning..if I knew how to do cloning.  Baby steps :-)

f2.8

1/125 sec

ISO 200

SOOC