I LOVE birthday parties!!

We were at my niece and nephew's birthday party and I was able to capture my daughter with my niece as they were singing happy birthday.

I love trying to capture a low light picture with the candles glow on the kids faces.  I learned that it is an extremely hard picture to capture.  It is low light and of course the kids are singing and moving, so you can't have a long shutter speed or everything will be blurry, but too short of a shutter speed and you get nothing but a candle flame and no faces. 

Most of the time your camera will pop up the flash and it will blow out the picture including that nice warm candle light.  You will be able to see all of the faces and usually it will be a sharp focus, but just my opinion I think you lose the mood with that.  I am definitely not saying that using a flash for taking pictures like this is bad, just my 2 cents. 

I hope that you will try to capture a low light birthday cake sometime.  It is definitely harder than I thought, but worth the effort.  I am going to keep working on those low light pictures to see if I can get better pictures without using the flash.

Cool lighting in Chicago

When I was in Chicago last month I went to a bar called the Scout.  It was happening, the Bears were playing and the drinks were flowing.  There had to be a ton of tv's and they even had a DJ. It was cool when the game was on the DJ would play music during the commercials and switch back over to the game once the commercials were over.

The food was really good too!  They had all of the normal bar fare with nachos and wings, but they also had foot long toasted cheese sandwiches.  It was really good but it was so rich I couldn't finish the whole thing. 

One of the most interesting parts of the whole scene was behind the bar.  The bar tenders were amazing, great smiles and good service.  The lighting of the bottles behind them is really what caught my eye.  The green lighting and the clear liquors was a great combination.  I hope that you like the picture.  Wish I would have had my good camera not just my camera phone.  However, with a little help from Snapseed software on the tablet and the picture just pops.

If you are ever in Chicago I highly recommend the Scout downtown.