I got to smile big time over two different beautiful views

[Mira]

A couple of friends called me and told me they were babysitting their 6 month old granddaughter and I could come over to see her.

Here she is on Grandpa's knee




Then my eyes fell on the mug of tea I was drinking from and that I had set on the foot stool.
Can you tell her grandmother likes the color blue?

[Celebration]

1. outstanding photos

Love the toile and fish mug one........I'm not even sure how you did the focusing effect. How far away were you?

And the kid? Adorable.

These are great even for you. :)

[Mira]

2. I"m so glad you asked about the focusing. Because it's been on my list of

things to do to read up on this 1.8 - 50 lens I bought off a guy on Craigslist, just to know what to really do with it. I bought it as a "Portrait lens" and it intrigued me because the claim to fame was that it can give really sharp pictures.

I've been putting the lens on if I took a portrait. But did not really know what, if anything, to do differently.

So your question made me look it up:

Sony's DT 50mm f1.8 is an ideal choice for portrait and low-light photography on a budget, although as a DT model, it's not compatible with full-frame bodies. Mounted on a cropped-frame body, the DT 50mm becomes equivalent to 75mm, a perfect length for portraits. Meanwhile, the f1.8 aperture can deliver a blurred background and gathers more than eight times as much light as the DT 18-55mm kit lens when zoomed-in making it great in dim conditions.

Since this unfortunately is not making enough sense to me, I'll have to put down figuring this out as a New Year's project on WJMS's list of them.

I learned today that it does not do auto focus fast enough to suit me.

Other than that, thank you for liking the pictures. The baby is truly adorable, and the cup and footstool photo did not portray what I was experiencing. In real life it looked as if the cup were growing out of the pattern of the chair.