12 Days of Gladness: January

Merry Christmas one and all across both sides of the pond. For the next 12 days I'll post one picture for each month of 2012. It's been a very interesting year for me, so this will be a time to reflect on everything that's occurred and the photo techniques I've used. I'll be back in glad swing in January 2013.

January 2012: Experimenting with self portraits at the waterfall near my Scottish hamlet, using my new tripod!

2011 ended with a sleeper train from London to Scotland, and 2012 began with a sleepy evening in with my husband. He had flown to Scotland for Christmas, and we had visited family down in England before heading back to Scotland for a quiet New Year's Eve. When he was due to fly back to the US transportation in Edinburgh shut down due to hurricane force winds. Luckily I got an extra week with my long-distance partner, although we had to stay with friends in Edinburgh until the weather died down!  

Photo geekery: I used a tripod and long exposure to capture the flowing waterfall like in this picture, and took other short exposure pics to capture individual droplets. 

I also played around with the White Balance Shift/Bracket function, which takes three photos at once, emphasizing different colors. This photo is obviously green/blue. I have another version of the same photo which enhances the orange leaves and makes my hair look redder.

To compensate for the long exposure I had a narrow-ish aperture (okay, only about 9). I spent a while trying to guess the depth of field, but you can see I'm out of focus here. I had to stand as still as possible to cut down on blur. I also have some cool photos where I ran in and out of the frame and I look like a ghost.

I wanted to return in Spring and stand under the waterfall in a balldress but never got around to it. I think it would have created amazing pictures!