Pictures from today and some photo experiments...

One of our favorite restaurants had a Hooter's move in next door. There's a fairly small parking-lot between the two, and shortly after Hooter's moved in, all the Tortilla Marissa's parking instantly filled up with trucks. Tortilla Marissa's put up signs trying to encourage the Hooter's crowd from taking up all the parking-space in the lot... It didn't work.

The problem with putting up a sign like the above is, apparently, the Hooter's crowd can't read. ;-)

I was messing with my camera more today. For example, the above two pictures were taken with different shutter speed. I learned today how to do a manual focus with my new camera, but there's no way that I can find to let me force a shutter speed.

However, I can usually force it. The left one was taken at a shutter speed of 1/2000th of a second, and the right one was at 1/500th. As I said, I can't really force a value, but I can usually fake it. For example, here I pointed the camera more towards the sun, pressed the "shutter" button down half way, then returned to the original scene, in order to get the 1/2000 value.

In these pictures I did something similar... On the left is the picture as it would normally have come out. Because of the metering, it was using more of the inside scene to determine the metering level, and outside was very washed out.

For the picture on the right, I pointed the camera at the window, focusing on the wood triim in the middle, which is about as far away as LBK. This time the frame was mostly filled by the outside, and so it brought the shutter speed way up. I pressed the shutter button half way down, moved back to LBK, and took the picture with the flash on.

The flash really helped in this situation because the scene was back-lit by the window. It provided a lot more light to the close objects, preventing them from showing up really dark.