Another photo hike with my son

Yesterday, Connor and I decided to go for a short hike in the Cupertino Hills which is only 15 minutes from the house. It gave me a chance to teach him some more about photography, but more importantly, to spend some nice quiet time with him.

Connor really liked this shot through the trees and so we spent a couple of minutes here shooting so that I could explain exposure compensation to him. (For those of you who are new to photography or never heard of exposure compensation, this lets you manually control the amount of light coming into the camera. This is very helpful in scenes like this where you have a lot of contrast between bright light and dark shadows)

Then we both looked up as we heard this woodpecker above us. The lighting was not ideal (since the sun broke out right before we took these pictures) but we enjoyed chasing him from branch to branch and trying to get a good shot of his red dome.

We came across a really nice field of California Golden Poppies and took many shots here. This one made me laugh since it looks like a showdown between the two insects.


This last shot was my favorite one of the day. With so many poppies, it took some time to scan across them with the camera to find the right composition. I like this one best for the following reasons:

* The lighting off the top of the flowers.
* The one poppy stands above the rest, drawing the eye to that flower.
* The bud about to open (to the right) and challenge the one highest poppy.
* Shooting this at f5.6 allowed me to keep my one favorite poppy sharp and blur the rest.

Another fun day of shooting.