One of the techniques that I've learned to use and enjoy is selective black and white photography.  Sometimes there is a part of the image that I really want to have the viewer focus on, and the depth of field that's in focus isn't enough to do it.  If the background is too cluttered, it distracts from what I consider the main reason for the image.  I have to use Photoshop or Lightroom to do this selective black and white effect.  At first I only understood how to do this with an entire color spectrum;  In the picture of lavender, all the stems and leaves were green and the photo was too vivid/intense with that much green and purple, but I wanted to keep the nice purple from the flowers.  I figured out where I could select a specific color (green) and turn its saturation completely off, meaning anything that had been green became grey.  It worked easily enough in that photo, but there were other instances were the main focus of the photo had matching colors to something else in the photo (like the yellow double line and yellow cars, or the yellow stems of the yellow orchid), so I couldn't just turn the saturation of that specific color off.  I had to figure out how to selectively do it, and that's where I learned about the "burn" tool.  Basically, you can set the tool to do specific details over whatever part of the photo that you drag the burn tool across.  it's actually a technique that was once used (and still used) in darkrooms with film, where they could "burn" parts of the developing film by adjusting how much light hit certain parts of the film during the developing stage, thus changing the end resulting exposure of the photo.  In my digital darkroom, I figured out that I could "burn" out all the colors of my photos by dragging this tool across only the sections I wanted to turn into black and white, and suddenly I could be a whole lot more precise with the technique.

Maggie and I went down to her parents house for a relaxing weekend, and to drop off our wild child Sky (The mini-Aussie) for week-long summer camp.  I brought my camera and took some pictures while we were there.  I ended up spending an evening getting pictures of the dogs in the evening light.  It's always difficult to get nice crisp in-focus shots of pets, since they usually don't stop long enough for a photo.  The best way I've found is to let them play until they feel like stopping long enough for a breather.  Fortunately, with 3 dogs chasing each other and a river with sticks to throw, they tend to wear themselves out.  Shooting in evening light is nice; no harsh shadows from direct sunlight, and I don't have to wake up at 4:30am to shoot with dawn light. :)  I used my 50mm F1.4 lens to get a better/shallow depth of field (the amount of the image that can be in or out of focus).  It helped drop the background out of focus and draw the attention to the face of the dogs. The next issue is not making the depth of field too narrow.  I have to be careful not to choose too large of an aperture to keep the depth of field large enough to get the nose-to-ear in focus. I used an aperture of f2 to f2.8.  This way, the focus depth is enough for the face of the dog to look good, and the ISO can still be pretty low even in the dimmer dusk light to keep the final image nice and clean.  I still had some problems trying to hold the camera still enough at around 1/80th shutter speed; Sky's picture isn't quite as crisp as I would have liked, but it's still a nice portrait.