Beautiful Bokeh

First shot taken with my new prime lens. A Canon 50mm f1.4 lens. This shot taken wide open of course to test out the bokeh (out of focus area) and shallow depth of field. Details: 1/640 sec at f/1.4 ISO 1600

Happy New Year

Spent a couple of nights in colourful Canberra to see in the New Year. Travelling light I only took my Canon S90 and the above photos are an example from the little point and shoot camera. However it was not that simple. The graffiti shot is an HDR created by combining 3 bracketed shots. The S90 is a bit slow for the three shots taken handheld. However Photomatix does a great job of aligning the three images together. The second photo was taken handheld again with a shutter speed of 1/6th of a second. Amazing image stabliser. Exposure Compensation was -2/3rds of a stop. It should have been a full stop but I would really need a tripod because the shutter speed would be lower and would have caused motion blur. Got some bargain photography books at the old 'Borders' bookshop, almost all books only $5.