Jenn Huls Photography

Not there yet...

In the past few weeks I have started to feel a lot more comfortable in Manual mode on my camera. You have some success, and it really gets you excited. Then you take more pictures, thinking you are starting to know what you are doing, and realize that you are not there yet. I had so many frustrations with picture taking this week, it just made me realize how little I still know about it. I managed to get a few photos to show you this week, but these are the best out of literally hundreds I took.

Some of my failed attempts include: a beautiful sunrise (part not knowing what settings to put it on, part getting set up a little late.), indoor birthday pictures of my daughter ( I tried some new things out with my flash, but still couldn't get them to look the way I was hoping), and a portrait session I did today with my three daughters. We were going on a trip up the canyon to see the changing leaves, so I decided to do their hair a little more than I would have, and take my camera along to snap a few photos of them. I still am not sure what I did wrong, the settings seemed to be right, but when I got home I was really disappointed with the majority of my pictures.

I managed to get a few good ones of my oldest daughter, here are the best of the worst (of course I am speaking of the photo quality not my daughter, she manages to look cute despite the photographers shortcomings):

This next one is not quite in focus but I actually kind of like it that way, she has kind of a dreamy look on her face, and the soft focus plays into that mood. I guess sometimes accidents work in our favor.

This one was a bit of a surprise. On a photo blog a friend recommended, a famous photographer said she had been given a challenge to take photos from a moving car without looking through the viewfinder. I decided to give it a try. Most of my attempts were not worth a second glance, but this one I loved! And I would have never have gotten such a great shot if I had stood there and planned it. I love how crisp the background is, and then the blur of the foreground from the moving car. I may have to try this experiment more often.

This was an unplanned photo as well. I was trying to take some landscapes of a waterfall, (they all turned out okay, but uninteresting) Then I happened to see these honeybees buzzing around at my feet, and I stopped to take a few pictures of them. They turned out way more interesting than the waterfall.


Okay, I must be obsessed by bugs, just be glad I didn't get my hands on a tarantula that was in my neighbors yard. This guy was on my driveway. I gave him a ride to some of my flowers and then took his photograph. My girls loved this one. We zoomed in really close to look at all the details. I do think Praying Mantis are pretty cool bugs, and really great pest killers too.


The neighbor boy left his bike laying in my driveway. So before running it over with my car (just kidding) I took a cool close up of it. I did the fake HDR technique on it, and liked the effect.


Speaking of miserable failures, I even borrowed a tripod to take pictures of the full moon. But with no telephoto lens, they just were not that great. My plan was to take photos of the moon rising in the evening, then get up early and take photos of the moon setting. The photos of the moon failed miserably. So instead of wasting more time on the setting moon, I focused my camera in the opposite direction. I ended up getting a much more satisfying long exposure shot of my neighborhood, with the lake behind, just as dawn was starting to show behind the mountains.


This last one is not the greatest. It was a photo study I did on motion photography. You can get the idea of what I was trying to do, ( a crisp in focus subject, with the background blurred) But lack of proper equipment got me again. I need a better lens, with a better zoom, to make the background really blur properly. Also, you can tell by the look on my daughters face, that she really wasn't trying to go that fast.