PHOTO POTPOURRI--

This is growing to be my annual picture of the Ferris wheel at the recently concluded Bellville Street Fair.  What is a bit different about this photo is-- it is not Photoshopped at all.  All the silliness in the image was done with the camera.

The squiggly lines were created by two events; 1) the ride was moving slowly during this 3/10 second exposure, and 2) I zoomed the lens while the shutter was open.

I used my Canon Rebel T3i camera at ISO 400 and my walking-around lens, Canon's EF 17-40mm, 1:4 L model.  The aperture was set at f/10.  With the wheel moving and me zooming the lens the camera "saw" the motion that occurred during that 3/10 second exposure and recorded that movement in the form of the erratic lines of colored light.

Fun things can begin to happen if you stray from the automatic setting on your camera.

In the lower photo we were Geocaching in a small city park along Straub Rd., and found the cache named "Bugs, Mr. Rico!  Zillions of them!"   Given the unusual name of this cache and not not knowing the cache owner's intent in authoring that name, we found this pleasant and un-pesky community of bugs quite interesting.

The photo was done with the same photo equipment  as above but this time I hand focused the lens at its minimum distance setting which is less than a foot then moved the camera back and forth from the bugs until they appeared sharp in the viewfinder.
 
The exposure was 1/60th second at f/4 and ISO 400.  That is a fairly slow shutter speed and the camera's widest aperture.  This was necessary because we were in the relative darkness of heavy woods and chose to work with no flash.

Finally, with the camera at that extreme, minimum focus distance and using it's widest aperture we dramatically lessened the depth of field of the image.  That's why the background is totally out of focus.

Once again, using the camera manually opens a box of very creative tools.