Strawberries in water: Round 2

This time, I decided to try it out on a white background with high key lighting. I had to use my flash to get things this lit up and I used my 50mm f/1.8 to get the nice sharpness. What do you think? I like this set better than the first set.





Couple more here: My PicasaWeb

Super excited yet disappointed

So apparently I have 135 views on my favorite strawberry in water picture (this makes me super excited) although no one left any comments and I don't know how they found my picture or who's viewing it (this makes me disappointed). Come on PicasaWeb, don't you have these stats, can't you show me? Also, what makes people want to comment? Do you have to know them? Do you think about the possible ramifications that can come out of it? Or does it really just have to be a really awesome picture? Now, I understand that the picture isn't that great, but I'm just curious.

In case you don't know what I'm referring to, it's this picture, and you should comment!
http://picasaweb.google.com/vashthest/StrawberryInWater#5394081330948927874

Just for fun: Self Portraits

While taking photos of strawberries, I decided to experiment with some portrait photography as well. However, none of my roommates were home so I had to take photos of myself. Man is it hard to pose yourself and think of what it'll look like on camera! After taking a few with just a t-shirt on, I decided to spice things up and dress up like a cowboy. What do you think?

Strawberries

I've been watching Youtube videos about photography everyday and I came across a pretty cool idea from Bryan Peterson: shooting a strawberry dropping into a vase filled with sparkling water. Here's his video if you're interested and here are my shots.

This one looks like it's drowning:

I like this semi-symmetric dive:

Super bubbly!

I think this one is my favorite:

You can see some more here: My Picasaweb

PicasaWeb vs. Flickr

Does anyone that likes photography use PicasaWeb over Flickr? Am I just too much of a Google fanboy to not switch? Every time I look at my photos on PicasaWeb, there are tons of artifacts in the images and they are not as sharp. I know Google wants to reduce latency and provide a faster user experience, but can you not do that by sacrificing image quality, especially after I've gone through and painstaking post-processed each picture?

I also would like to see the stats that Flickr has on PicasaWeb, mostly because no one looks at my photos, so it's nice to know when it happens. On PicasaWeb, they have a view count, but they don't have a dashboard or easy way to see what photos have been looked at by people recently, or better yet, what the most viewed photo is. Surprisingly, I have around 65 views of this one flower shot that I took a couple days ago (the one of the side of the flower with the greenish background in my earlier posts) but I don't know where they came from and how they even knew it existed.

Anyways, I'm thinking of switching over until PicasaWeb can do something smarter.

Henry Vilas Zoo in Madison, WI

I went to the zoo this past September when visiting my girlfriend in Madison, WI and I loved it. Even though the zoo was free, it was very well maintained and had a good amount of animals (although they had red pandas on their advertisements, the exhibit wasn't there yet). Here's one of my favorite shots (I think he's purposely posing):

And this is a close up:

And here's the lion they had:


I'll post more pics later, but if you are in the area, you should definitely check it out. It's totally worth it.

Another flower shot

This is the kind of picture that I've always wanted to try. Luckily, the pedals on this flower look nice and I was able to post process this image to get a colored rose on a unsaturated background. What do you think?

Flowers!

Took a few shots of some flowers by my house.