Make my.... UGHHHH

Ok, I couldn't bring myself to make my Monday yesterday. You want to know why? Because I somehow deleted ALL MY PHOTOS off my hard drive. Saddest day in the history of ever. That includes the Grand Canyon (three times!), Spain, weddings, Sewanee, all sorts of things! At least many of them are on picassa/facebook, but I won't have the original high resolution files.

To ease my troubled mind, let me share with you my new favorite photography thing: the F-STOP. Seriously, how did I even live before I was able to manually adjust the apeture of my camera? Now, I'm a total novice with no photo skills except for what I've read on the internets, so don't judge me too harsly when I share these photos with you! Plus, you can learn from my mistakes!

Waiting for the fireworks on the 4th
left photo: Exposure: 8.0 sec, Aperture: 7.1, Focal Length: 29mm= bright as day!
right photo: Exposure: 3.6 sec, Aperture: 13.0, Focal Length: 29mm= dark and mysterious!

Downtown Asheville
Exposure: 10.0 sec, Aperture: 13.0, Focal Length: 29mm= streetlight flare!

Petey!
Exposure: 1/3 sec, Aperture: 5.3, Focal Length: 38mm= shallow depth of field= bokeh (I think I acheived it)= you can't see my messy floor!

Now the only think I adjusted in these photos was the aperture, I let my smarty pants camera do the rest of the work for me (determining shutter speed and ISO). I would love to take a photo class one day, but for now trial and error is turning out to be very educational!