Dogwood Week 7 - Portrait - Faceless

I had taken some pictures for this challenge earlier in the week but dismissed them as I thought that I could do better. So I tried to get a better shot using my wife and daughter as my models sharing an embrace on the couch. The back of one person's head would block the others. It looked great in my head but I couldn't get the camera to capture it.

So I decided to look back at the photos I took days earlier and I found one that I did like after-all. THE FIRST ONE I SHOT. My daughter was sitting down doing her homework and I took a few shots of her writing down math answers. It's just her little hands, but it worked.

Here is a breakdown of the camera settings:
Camera - Nikon D610
Lens - 24-85mm f/4.5
Focal length: 85mm
ISO - 100
Exposure - 1/10 sec.
Flash - Did not fire

Note: Those cinnamon hearts from the Candy challenge came in handy with teaching her addition and subtraction.

Dogwood Week 6 - Artistic - Candy

For the week 6 challenge, I wanted to use the lightbox that I had purchased for my wife to take photographs of the cards she makes. The challenge was to take a photo of candy in an artistic way and I figured some closeups with a white background might look great.

I played around with setting my DSLR to manual and reversing my 50mm lens to take some faux-macro images. Some of them worked out better than others, and you really had to pay attention to what you had in focus. I shot some cinnamon hearts in this way but ultimately felt that there was too much red in the image. Plus I felt like I was getting a headache from a bit of eye strain.

Then I moved onto the second bag of candy that I had purchased. (My kids loved me a little extra that day.) I first tried shooting a few shots of a pile, but then I started sitting the candy hearts up in staggered rows. I finally created the image below which I was happy with after trying a few different angles and focus points.

Here is a breakdown of the camera settings:
Camera - Nikon D610
Lens - 24-85mm f/4.5
Focal length: 85mm
ISO - 5000
Exposure - 1/160 sec.
Flash - Dd not fire