Nature's Mugshots

More High-Speed Fun Times

2011-01-22T21:27:00.000-07:00

Aside from a little experience with which depth-of-field settings work best with various objects, and things like that, not much has changed. I just wanted to share another few shots from the Camera Axe that I felt were successful.

Aperture: f/4
Shutter Speed: 4 seconds (1/50,000th effective)
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 50mm
Tripod

Aperture: f/11
Shutter Speed: 5 seconds (1/50,000th effective)
ISO: 400
Focal Length: 100mm
Tripod

Aperture: f/8
Shutter Speed: 5 seconds (1/50,000th effective)
ISO: 200
Focal Length: 100mm
Tripod

Anyway, here's to Maurice Ribble.

High Speed Photography with the Camera Axe

2011-01-10T22:46:00.000-07:00

Right from the get-go, I have to bump Maurice Ribble, the inventor and creator of the Camera Axe system. He single-handedly designed, acquired parts for, and began distributing this system online. Check out the Camera Axe site for more details. What it is is a controller with a number of sensors and cables that can be attached to it. I personally just got the projectile sensor, which allows you to precisely place a projectile of any kind in your frame. Just hook up the sensor to the Camera Axe, hook up a flash to the Camera Axe as well, align the barrel of your projectile-launcher (I use a pellet gun from Walmart) so the pellet will pass through the sensor, and fire. The Camera Axe receives its information from the sensor and triggers the flash at exactly the right time, freezing your projectile and exposing your picture.

After receiving my Camera Axe in the mail today, I had my electronics-whiz little brother assemble it for me and then experimented with a friend and my brother for a couple of hours. Here's the best of our results from tonight:

Aperture: f/8
Shutter Speed: 3.2 seconds (1/50,000th effective)
ISO: 400
Focal Length: 50mm
Tripod

Aperture: f/4
Shutter Speed: 4 seconds (1/50,000th effective)
ISO: 200
Focal Length: 50mm
Tripod

Pretty rad. I'm particularly happy with the card shot. Looking forwards to taking pictures of shooting all sorts of stuff in the future.

I know that first part sounded like a commercial. Don't worry, Maurice Ribble isn't paying me. The Camera Axe really just is that awesome. Go buy one.

My Best Work from 2010

2011-01-02T12:17:00.000-07:00

I didn't think I would be doing one of these posts, but I got the idea of assembling a set of my own personal favorite photographs I took during 2010 from another user on Flickr.

At the end of February this year, I will be leaving on a two-year mission for the LDS church to Samara, Russia, and the surrounding area. Before then I will have to sell my beloved DSLR. It will be interesting to see what kind of work I can produce in Russia with my old PowerShot A590 IS on my weekly preparation day. I did some work I was quite happy with using the PowerShot. It's a fantastic and solid little camera.

Without further ado, here is my best work from 2010, presented in slideshow format.

I want to take this opportunity to be cliché and thank everyone who has, at one point or another, read my blog. Here's to a successful couple of months, and then hopefully a successful two years of Russian photography!

2011, here I come.

Aquarium Photography

2010-12-30T13:35:00.001-07:00

I recently took my camera down to the Sandy Aquarium not too far from where I live. Despite bringing some of the fastest glass I have access to (50mm f/1.4, 85mm f/1.8, 100mm f/2.8 Macro), I was maxing out my skills at holding a camera steady, even on a monopod at 1600 ISO.

Many aspects of my photography still have a "trial & error" approach, but I can't remember the last time I shot so many pictures with such a low percentage of keepers. I think I had 2.5 keepers from the close to 200 shots I took.

Along the way, I learned a few valuable lessons about aquatic photography that I figure I'll pass along to you guys. But first, the pictures.

Aperture: f/2.8
Shutter Speed: 1/160
ISO: 1600
Focal Length: 100mm
Monopod

Aperture: f/4
Shutter Speed: 1/30
ISO: 1600
Focal Length: 100mm
Monopod

The first thing I picked up pretty quickly was that you need support. I am somewhat of a perfectionist with the technical aspects of my photography. Therefore, high ISO settings, motion blur, etc. really bother me. I don't like shooting at ISO 1600 when I can avoid it, but I couldn't here. A tripod really would have been the best choice, but I didn't bring mine. A monopod was a fair tradeoff. Even with really fast glass and a maxed-out ISO setting, I was getting barely usable shutter speeds for most of the aquariums. The other tip I can give you is to use a rubber lens hood. This enables you to support the end of your lens against the glass of the aquarium, giving you a couple of advantages. First, it's another point of support, turning your monopod into a bipod. Second, if you're shooting perpendicular to the glass (more on this later), it blocks out light from the edges and helps prevent glare.

Another important aspect to pay attention to is white balance. The different aquariums all had radically different lighting. Definitely shoot RAW. I left my WB on Sunny and just fixed the keepers later in Lightroom. If you are going to shoot JPG, try a few different settings on each aquarium to see what works best for the image you're trying to achieve.

Focusing was the most frustrating aspect for me to get down during the shoot. There was rarely enough light in the aquariums even for my USM AF drives to lock onto something. I ended up manually focusing most of the time. I was continually finding myself unable to achieve sharp focus at all, even on completely static subjects. Eventually I figured out that any kind of curved glass is likely going to nuke your ability to achieve perfect focus. On aquariums with flat glass, you have to shoot as close to perpendicular through the glass as possible. The steeper the angle you are trying to shoot through, the more the glass is distorting things and it doesn't take long to ruin your ability to achieve perfect focus.

So to sum things up:

-Shoot supported, using a rubber lens hood if possible.
-Pay attention to WB.
-Focus manually whenever necessary.
and
-Shoot through glass at a 90° angle whenever possible.

Happy shooting!

My Guitar

2010-11-29T15:22:00.000-07:00

I don't recall if I've posted about my guitar on this blog or not, but I finally generated a nice photo of it.

Long story short, I started building a custom guitar for myself about 18 months ago (last July). Lots of things like school, etc. got in the way of my having as much time as I wanted to work on it, so it took a really long time. But now it is very nearly finished. I am expecting to sand flat the last 10 coats of lacquer and then cut polish to a finish this Wednesday.

But for the time being, the guitar looks awesome in the sunlight. The slightly excessive amount of lacquer on it is extremely reflective, but not yet flat; so the reflections take on interesting textures.

Aperture: f/2.8
Shutter Speed: 1/125
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 50mm
Handheld

I'm proud of the guitar, and have been enjoying playing it—the tone worked out to be exactly how I planned it back when I was first selecting my materials.

Shooting a Ghost Town

2010-10-27T09:59:00.000-06:00

Not far out of Death Valley, there's a small ghost town called Rhyolite. It's the first opportunity I've had to shoot anything like this, and I really really enjoyed it. The ruins really made for some awesome black and white shots, and the clouds were being particularly cooperative.

At any rate, here's my favorite shot from there, although to be fair, I haven't tried editing any of the others yet.

Aperture: f/8
Shutter Speed: 1/250
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 18mm
Monopod

Depending on the weather (it snowed 4 inches here last night), I may try to hit a bunch of ghost towns in Utah and do some photography.

Sometimes You get Lucky

2010-10-24T15:03:00.000-06:00

When we were in Death Valley National Park this past week, I had something really awesome happen to me. As my dad and I were driving from one part of the park to the other, we passed a coyote walking up the road in the opposite direction. I'm not much of a wildlife photographer, but I figured it would be worth the picture. So we stopped in the middle of the desolate road and turned around. By the time we were facing the other direction, I looked out the windshield and saw... the same coyote, running back towards our car. It proceeded to sit politely about 5 feet from my window, waiting for me to feed it something. He didn't seem to mind when I switched lenses twice to get a variety of different shots. And at one point, when I had the 100mm f/2.8 macro lens out, he yawned, timing it perfectly with my burst shooting.

Aperture: f/5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/160
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 100mm
Handheld

Aperture: f/2.8
Shutter Speed: 1/400
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 100mm
Handheld

So let's stop for a moment and list all of the things that converged for these lucky shots:

1) We saw a coyote
2) This coyote had been fed, and was therefore extremely tame
3) I was within easy reach of my camera gear
4) It was overcast, in Death Valley (which happens maybe once a year), providing bright, but very diffuse light
5) It was 78°F outside, rather than 120°F, which I suspect is why the coyote was out in the first place
6) He yawned just like that exactly when I had my best lens on for the job.

I couldn't have planned for better conditions. Thank you, nature.

Delicious Black & White

2010-10-23T18:01:00.003-06:00

I just got back from a lovely vacation with my dad, where we hit various photo locations, saw family, etc. One of my favorite pictures from the trip was taken at Seal Beach in Orange County, California.

Aperture: f/16
Shutter Speed: 1/20
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 18mm
Tripod

It was an uncharacteristically cloudy and rainy day at the beach, which had several nice side-effects: diffuse light, awesome moody clouds (recovered from the RAW file via Lightroom), and very few people at the beach to clutter up my shot. The one guy standing about halfway down the pier kind of bothers me, but he fits in with the shot okay, and I didn't want to spend an hour cloning him out.

Anyway, I got this and a whole bunch of other shots I'm very happy with on the trip. More to come as I get around to editing them.

Fall Success... Finally

2010-10-06T17:22:00.000-06:00

Remember when I used to post on this blog? Yeah, I know I've been awful. The worst part is that I don't even have any excuses. On the contrary. I have tons of free time. I've even been shooting a lot of photos. Just not posting.

Anyway, there's your sad excuse for an explanation. On to the photos. I've been going out and about, up various local canyons, etc. for a couple of weeks now, looking for those magical fall landscapes, especially waterscapes. I went a long way up American Fork canyon this morning/afternoon with my dad and finally got some good shots.

Aperture: f/16
Shutter Speed: 1.3 seconds
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 18mm
Tripod

Aperture: f/3.2
Shutter Speed: 1/200
ISO: 200
Focal Length: 100mm
Handheld

Aperture: f/11
Shutter Speed: 1/6
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 18mm
Tripod

On an unrelated note, Flickr stopped letting me get to the actual URL of where my images are hosted, because they had problems with people hotlinking without putting links back to Flickr. I proudly say I was never part of that problem. But regardless, my images will be a little differently sized now, and clicking on them leads to the Flickr page rather than a direct enlargement. If you want to see the photos bigger, you can do so from the Flickr page.

August 2010 Calendar

2010-08-03T09:21:00.000-06:00

Here's the calendar for August 2010. I know of a couple of people using these that have odd screen resolutions, so if I haven't uploaded one that fits your screen and you want one, just let me know in the comments and I'll throw one together. It only takes me about a minute.

1600x1200
1920x1200

I apologize for those of you using the 1600x1200 aspect ratio version—neither black nor white turned out to be a good choice all the way through for the calendar part due to the spots on the leopard. I tried to make it look readable at least throughout the whole thing but it's not exactly pretty.

The Importance of Editing

2010-07-30T21:31:00.000-06:00

I know there are some "purists" (see "snobs") out there who refuse to do any post-processing on their work, claiming that any editing ruins what the scene really looked like, or is dishonest about portraying the photo, or any other number of pretentious reasons. Today I went to the zoo, and after editing one of my "keepers," it really drove home the point that editing can have a HUGE impact on the quality of a photo.

This isn't to say I support over-editing. There's definitely a line, and all too many people cross it. But those purists would have ended up with a shot looking like this, even if they were using regular (daylight balanced) film:

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/60
ISO: 200
Focal Length: 300mm
Monopod

Granted, it's not too bad of a shot. But the evidently fluorescent bulbs used to light the habitat gave off a pretty greenish tint which was very apparent with the white-balance set to "daylight." Also, because it was a moving subject and I didn't have time to make EV adjustments between shots, I underexposed by a bit.

Between fixing those things and other regular optimizations I do to every photo in Lightroom, I ended up with this:

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/60
ISO: 200
Focal Length: 300mm
Monopod

It's just a better photo now, thanks to regular editing techniques. Now for this photo, I actually took it a step further and cast the whole thing in a strong monochrome blue with added contrast to make it really punchy.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/60
ISO: 200
Focal Length: 300mm
Monopod

In this case, I think this more extreme treatment works for the photo. However, it's somewhere on the line of "too much post-processing." I'm okay with that as I have a "regular" version to call the photo. This isn't so much a photo as a creative manipulation of a photo. I wouldn't say either of the two images is "better," they're just different.

Feel free to share your own thoughts on post-processing in the comments.

Also, for those of you who noticed/cared, I did switch the links on the images back to a large version of the photo rather than a full-res version. If you want to view the full-res version, just go to it via my Flickr link.

Improved Portrait Retouching

2010-07-23T23:00:00.001-06:00

Oftentimes at work when there are no customers, I find myself reading books about stuff like studio lighting, Lightroom and Photoshop techniques, etc. Today I learned about adjustment brushes in Lightroom. I kind of already knew they existed, but just figured there wasn't much point to learning how to use them when I could do all the same stuff in Photoshop, and more easily.

Anyway, I was wrong. Between adjustment brushes and a few other tricks I read up on, I was able to revisit a portrait I did of my friend Linnea (one of the photos from this post) and make VAST improvements on the final product. See for yourself:

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/4
Shutter Speed: 1/30
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 85mm
Tripod

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr Aperture: f/4
Shutter Speed: 1/30
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 85mm
Tripod

The first one looks good. But the second really crosses a few lines into looking more professional, in my opinion. The irises are more saturated, the whites of the eyes are brighter and cleaner, the overall exposure is more pleasant, the skin tones are just right, the browns in the hair are more pronounced, the portrait is sharper where it should be sharp and softer where it should be soft. I would like to take a moment and personally thank Adobe for making such delicious, relatively automatic skin retouching features that make everyone look like a model with perfect skin.

July 2010 Calendar

2010-07-13T14:35:00.000-06:00

Sorry it's so late. I was determined to have fireworks for the calendar, and it took me longer than I thought to find some and photograph them.

Anyway, you know the drill. Share with your friends or whoever.

1600x1200

Happy July!

Trip to Stanley

2010-07-11T22:04:00.000-06:00

Just got back from a week long vacation in Stanley, Idaho, as well as camping for a family reunion. Which is why I still don't have the July calendar up yet. Luckily, I did shoot some fireworks in Stanley, so I'll probably put it up tomorrow.

Stanley is a beautiful area. I think I have more shots that turned out well, but these two were the first to immediately grab my attention after I dumped my memory card. Thank goodness for polarizers... now I just need a wide-angle lens that has better optics than my kit. Which would be virtually any other wide-angle lens. Wide angle lenses are expensive though. So for now, I'll settle for the kit.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/22
Shutter Speed: 1 second
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 18mm
Tripod

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/10
Shutter Speed: 1/5
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 18mm
Tripod

I'm a little disappointed in the depth-of-field on the second one. Should have gone narrower than f/10; the mountains are not crisply in focus. Guess I won't be printing that one as a 30x40.

More to come as I find more time to dig through the photos in the last card dump. And I'll try to remember to get that calendar up tomorrow as well.

More Fun with the Speedlite

2010-06-28T17:08:00.001-06:00

I did a little reading, and it turns out external flashes don't actually get brighter or dimmer. How a flash simulates getting brighter and dimmer (how it adjusts its "power" output) is actually by staying on for an infinitesimally longer or shorter period of time. So if the flash is your only effective light source (your shutter isn't letting in really any ambient light at ISO 100, inside, 1/200th of a second shutter, and f/10), your effective "shutter speed" is much faster than a camera is really capable of. So when my dad's 580EX Speedlite is set at 1/16th power, for instance, I have an effective shutter speed of 1/11000th of a second. Perfect for freezing REALLY fast-moving objects.

Like water droplets.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/200 (effective: 1/11000)
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 100mm
Tripod

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/13
Shutter Speed: 1/200 (effective: 1/11000)
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 100mm
Tripod

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/13
Shutter Speed: 1/200 (effective: 1/11000)
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 100mm
Tripod

The first was shot in "Tungsten" white-balance, which casts it quite blue. The second was shot in "Sun" white-balance, which is pretty much irrelevant as I converted it to monochrome. The third was shot in "Sun" as well, but I played with it for fun in Photoshop using a few masks and recolor layers.

One thing I found interesting was that in the third one, you can see motion blur in the tiny specks of water zooming away from the splash zone. They must be moving incredibly quickly if 1/11000th of a second isn't freezing them.

The setup for this is quite simple; much more simple than for smoke photography. Just put your flash off-camera using a TTL cord or wireless system. I set mine to the left of the camera, at about a 45° angle, pointing at the same bowl of water as the lens. The bowl of water was directly in front of the lens. I varied the height of the camera on the tripod via the center column a few times during the shoot; it's not critical. Behind the bowl of water was first a sheet of white paper (in the first photo, the light was bounced off a plain white sheet of paper, giving it that smoother look), then a sheet of rather crumpled aluminum foil (as seen in the second and third photos). That's about it. Use any method to drip water steadily into the bowl. If possible, try to make the drops hit the same area of the water; this will make your focus end up better. Manually focus your camera (and re-focus every time you change angles or anything) by placing some object exactly where the drops are hitting, and focusing on that. A pencil works great. Then shoot a whole lot of photos.

You will quickly learn about the different stages a drop of water goes through. The drop of water hits the surface from above, causing a crater-like dent in the surface, quickly followed by a column of water rising from the center which launches one or more round droplets of water in the air; they then fall down and the surface returns to its original smoothness. So the first photo is near the end of the cycle. The second is at the apex of the column, and the third is just before the column begins to rise.

Experiment with various backdrops to bounce different colors, styles, etc. of light through your water. Also play with white-balance settings, flash and aperture settings, compositions, etc. Lots of trial-and-error. I imagine you can play with ISO as well, but I had no trouble leaving mine on 100, even with rather closed aperture settings for the deeper DoF, which is easier to work with. Keep in mind that you're halving the amount of light you let in every time you double your effective shutter speed, so use your aperture and/or ISO settings to compensate accordingly. And leave your shutter speed at 1/200th (or whatever your maximum sync speed is), it doesn't affect anything.

Smoke Photography, Part II

2010-06-26T14:40:00.002-06:00

If you remember a while back, I was playing around with smoke photography. Due to the fact that I didn't have a DSLR, or an external flash, I had to use a bit of a workaround. Now that I've upgraded my camera, and have access to my dad's 580EX Speedlite, I was able to do the "correct" setup this time.

The basic technique involved is to set up some smoking object against a black background (I used a black posterboard this time instead of just shooting in a pitch black room). You have to make sure light hits it from the side without spilling onto your background (which you want to remain totally black with no detail). In order to do this, I made a crappy snoot out of another piece of black posterboard. It wasn't pretty, but it got the job done. Since you want a wide depth-of-field to capture the smoke throughout all the planes it wafts through, a small aperture is required. To avoid any image noise, you must have a fast shutter speed (which also freezes the action) and a low ISO. So to counteract all of your settings that tend not to let in a lot of light, it's necessary to introduce a vast amount of light from your side light source. I cranked the flash brightness REALLY high. It worked.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/14
Shutter Speed: 1/250
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 48mm
Tripod

From there, you just light something on fire. I used paper because the incense I bought for this purpose freaking smells like someone died. It's that bad. So paper got the job done. Once that something burns out, smoke plumes start going up. Generally if you're in a ventilated room (which I highly recommend), the smoke will go smoothly up in a nearly straight or straight plume. To disrupt it and make a slightly more interesting picture, you can block the smoke's path with an object, fan it lightly, blow on it, etc.

Once you have your shots, take them into Photoshop and adjust the levels to make sure your background is true black. You may also have to use a black brush to flatten a few areas and remove distracting pieces of smoke from others. Many people choose to invert their image at this point to put the smoke on a white background. I felt the colors I used looked better on black. You can then use any method you want to colorize the smoke if you so desire. I like to make multiple layers of different colors and then blend them with masks so the smoke is multicolored.

As a last step, you can add some contrast or adjust levels further. Be careful with adding contrast or saturation; this tends to cause posterization very quickly. The blacker you get your background in-camera and the better you separate your smoke (hint: more light), the less contrast you will be tempted to add, and the smoother your smoke will turn out. The above example is actually posterized pretty badly.

First Paid Portrait Shoot

2010-06-25T21:41:00.000-06:00

Okay, so she's a friend of mine, and I'm letting her pay with cookies. But it's progress. And I've decided I like fixing the white balance to fit the mood of the photo. These were summer portraits, it must have been 95 degrees when I shot them, so I warmed them up quite a bit.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/1.4
Shutter Speed: 1/400
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 50mm
Tripod

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/4
Shutter Speed: 1/30
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 85mm
Tripod

Right now I'm pushing REALLY hard to finish my guitar, so things on the more creative side of the photography front are a bit quiet. I'll pick it up soon though.

Golden Hours

2010-06-12T14:56:00.000-06:00

So before I continue with my post, I'll say that I've realized I can't really continue trying to post a photo a day here. I don't take a photo I feel is worth sharing every day, and my time is somehow more limited now than it was during the school year. So I'll be posting photos whenever I feel like I've taken one worth sharing from here on out.

I just spent three days in southern Utah on a camping trip. Photography opportunities were a little more scarce than I had hoped, but I still got what I feel were two good shots.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/7.1
Shutter Speed: 10 seconds
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 39mm
Tripod

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/8
Shutter Speed: 1/250
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 18mm
Tripod

Turns out sunset and sunrise are really good times for photography. Who knew?

I admit to some artistic recoloring of the first photo, that probably got a bit out of hand. But I decided the red was a little more interesting than a completely blue photo. Looking at it now, I think I'll go back and re-do it to look more believable sometime. That red of red is overkill.

The second one I really like, except I'm kicking myself for not using a narrower aperture and really cranking an awesome star-flare out of the sun. Oh, wait, I did. But somehow on all the shots I took at f/22, the entire picture was overexposed without my correcting for it in-camera. And since I forgot to switch to RAW shooting before I took this, I didn't have the tools to fix the exposure and keep my flare. Oh, well. Live and learn. There are other great places to shoot sunrises.

More Perspective

2010-06-04T13:02:00.000-06:00

I noticed a cool-looking flower today while doing some yard work. It looked pretty symmetrical from the top, in an interesting way. So I decided to photograph it from that angle.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/8
Shutter Speed: 1/40
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 100mm
Tripod

Didn't turn out quite like I hoped. Though the angle is good and the DoF is okay, I think I want to be more careful on the focus for the very top part of the flower. Also, as the top of the flower is a definite highlight, the exposure was clipped to high for it. So I'll probably go back and re-shoot this one on a cloudy day (or using some sort of diffuser to block the sunlight).

Last Free Portrait Session

2010-06-03T09:16:00.000-06:00

This is it, now that my site is launched and my portfolio is filled out, I will no longer be doing free portrait sessions. I have yet to decide on prices, but no more free ones. Anyway, I think it's a good thing I did all these free ones though - it really helped me get used to the settings and equipment I need to get good portraits.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/2.8
Shutter Speed: 1/60
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 85mm
Monopod

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/3.2
Shutter Speed: 1/200
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 50mm
Monopod

I've definitely noticed some growth in my skills as a portrait photographer. Out of my favorite two shots, neither of them had to be cropped; I had them framed and composed correctly in-camera. This is nice because it makes for faster editing later on. Also, there were fewer necessary adjustments to get everything correct; most notably that I didn't need to use the "Recovery" slider in Lightroom this time around.

I think I'm ready to head into the world of paid portraiture.

June 2010 Calendar

2010-06-02T21:12:00.000-06:00

Sorry for the late post this month. Here's the calendar. Feel free to distribute freely, as usual. Also, if you need an aspect ratio other than 4:3, I can do that no problem, just let me know in the comments.

Click to enlarge

Also, I think I turned the opacity on the calendar layer down a little more than I usually do. Sorry about that.

Intro to Light Stencils

2010-05-31T22:31:00.000-06:00

Today I was able to make use of all my new equipment, namely my new tripod head and my remote shutter release. I was trying a technique called a "light stencil." It's a form of light painting that involves the use of a stencil cut out of paper to shape the light. It seems quite simple but is in fact difficult to execute. It took me the better part of an hour and lots of experimentation to get this one, and it's not even that great.

When light painting, the aperture has less to do with the depth-of-field, and is really used only as a deciding factor for how bright your various light "paintbrushes" will look. Shutter speed can be as long as you need, and I use ISO primarily to balance out distance between me and a flash, if I use one.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/7.1
Shutter Speed: 26 seconds
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 18mm
Tripod

More to come as I improve on my methods here. I will say light painting is infinitely more fun when I don't need to worry about fitting everything in in 15 seconds.

Artsy Portraiture

2010-05-30T21:42:00.000-06:00

To finalize and round-off my portfolio before I print it, I've been going portrait crazy for the past week. I decided I had enough "standard" style portraits in there, so I went for a couple of different-ish ones.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/5
Shutter Speed: 1/200
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 50mm
Monopod

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/4
Shutter Speed: 1/100
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 50mmHandheld

I mostly decided to go black & white because it makes the photo's tone a little more serious and reflective, which helps compensate for models that have a hard time not smiling. :)

Anyway, these are the last two portraits I'll show you for a while. Last night I did some fun light painting with a new remote shutter release I bought (infrared) at a sick discount from the camera store where I work. Makes things very fun. And in case you were interested, tomorrow I buy a joystick-style ball head for my tripod and monopod. Buying camera gear is the bomb.

In other news, today I began construction on my official website at http://www.andrewbphotography.com. There's a link on the side of this page if you don't feel like typing. It won't be done until sometime this week probably. I am also looking at a real domain name (andrewbphotography.com) and pricing for a host, etc. So this site might not be around for very long. We'll see. Hopefully this will help me get some paid portraiture work over the summer and kind of jump-start my semi-pro photography "career."

Successful Shoots Continue

2010-05-26T16:51:00.000-06:00

Another shoot today. This time, just one person. In a way it was kind of nice because I never had to worry about chopping off parts of one person's face or something. Basically it just changed the dynamic. I did have one photo that I am going to convert to black-and-white, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/3.2
Shutter Speed: 1/125
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 50mm
Monopod

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/2.8
Shutter Speed: 1/200
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 100mm
Monopod

I must say, I've been very happy with most of the close-up headshots. Eyes are fun to work with in post-processing when they're big, have juicy catch lights, and are the main focus point of the image.

I also learned that before you take the photo, you should make sure that the model does not have any hairs on his/her face that would be distracting. Especially make sure that said hairs do not cross over the eye of the model. Otherwise you might spend 45 minutes in Photoshop, carefully cloning them out.

Results of Today's Photoshoot

2010-05-25T21:26:00.000-06:00

As I mentioned last post, I sort of took out an ad on Facebook in an attempt to pad out the "Portraits" section of my portfolio before I get it printed. The first resultant shoot of that ad was today. I must say, it went quite well. I had a number of good shots, got a lot of good experience working with models, various lenses for different types of shots, and other equipment. Great learning experience, great fun, and a few of my friends got some free portraits out of the deal. Here are my favorite two from the shoot, which will be going into the portfolio.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/2.8
Shutter Speed: 1/40
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 100mm
Monopod

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/2.8
Shutter Speed: 1/40
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 50mm
Monopod

The top is among my favorite portraits I've ever shot. I made a really concerted effort to get the lighting, catchlight, depth-of-field, angle, composition, and focus just right, and I think I may actually have succeeded on all counts. Not to brag, or anything :)

The 2nd was my favorite from all the landscape-oriented portraits I took. Is that an oxymoron?

More HDR Experimentation

2010-05-24T13:01:00.000-06:00

Ugh. I haven't ever been this bad about updating my blog. My apologies. I'll get better, I promise.

Anyway, here's the update: I've been reading a LOT about the Zone System and HDR lately, and been wanting to try both. I decided a scene where there were pretty deep shadows and a very bright sky would be a good candidate for HDR, so I gave it a shot (or 5 bracketed shots).

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/11
Shutter Speed: (bracketed)
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 18mm
Tripod

The Good: HDR definitely brought the colors to life, though I think they're a bit over-saturated. This is predominantly because I still suck at tone-mapping. Everything seems to be exposed correctly. The left side was a single exposure, which I set to be somewhere in between correctly exposed for the sky and the rest.

The Bad: HDR made my mountains look fake, and really bad. I knew beforehand that it tends to kill detail in midtones, which is why most people who are good at HDR like to use exposure blending (which is essentially masking out various places of the HDR and substituting a real photo) as well in their HDR photos.

The Ugly: Despite the fact that I checked the "fix ghosting errors" box in Photomatix, the clouds look like an acid trip. I think the solution is to actually use my AEB setting in-camera rather than bracketing manually. That would allow me to get three frames bracketed 2 stops apart in less than a second, minimizing cloud drift, etc.

I'll continue to experiment with HDR. I feel like I totally understand the concept, I just need mucho practice at tone mapping.

As my place of work is starting to print and bind photobooks now, they have offered all the employees a free 20-page hardcover. Which is rad. I'll be using mine for a portfolio, so after roughing out what the design would be like, I concluded I needed more portraits to round it out. Approximately 38 seconds after offering to shoot free portraits on Facebook, I filled up the next two weeks with shoots. So expect a lot of portraits in the near future.

Boring Flowers

2010-05-20T21:23:00.000-06:00

First, the good news. I spent a lot of time studying up on HDR today, and some on the Zone System as well. I'll definitely be delving into those more deeply, and soon. But for today, you get boring flowers. Not that the flowers are boring. Just the fact that I shot them exactly how I shoot any other flowers.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/5
Shutter Speed: 1/8
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 41mm
Tripod

Hopefully better stuff will be up soon.

In a Rut

2010-05-19T13:33:00.000-06:00

I haven't been feeling very inspired for the last few days. I know this happens to everyone, but it's a frustrating situation. Anyway, here's today's shot: a toy Rolls Royce in a DIY softbox. I was going to process it to go in the Motionless set, but it didn't seem to fit the theme very well.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/4
Shutter Speed: 0.3 seconds
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 100mm
Tripod

I kind of liked the color here, although it's not my first choice for a multi-million dollar car. Yeah. Hopefully something more interesting will enter my head soon.

Wood Shop Season Starts Again!

2010-05-17T12:27:00.000-06:00

Now that we're FINALLY starting to get some nicer weather around here, we have kind of "re-opened" our wood shop. As it's nearing the end of the school year, I have begun to make pens for some of my teachers. One teacher in particular (who teaches the Newspaper class, as well as some English classes) really enjoys writing. As in, poetry. I figured she would probably appreciate a fountain pen. But I wanted one that would really fit her personality. She's unique, not not in a negative, weird way. She's just awesome. So is Fig-Asian Satinwood, as I discovered.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/7.1
Shutter Speed: 0.3 seconds
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 53mm
Tripod

Even though I was working with a light tent, I wanted some directional light to try and capture the "holographic" effect the flame in this wood gives, especially under polish. I don't think I did it justice, but facing the open side of the softbox into the light helped a little bit. It also gave me that rather obnoxious glare coming off the main barrel of the pen. I guess that's a fair trade off.

Also, because I haven't been very good with keeping up with this blog (or photography in general) the past few days, I have already noticed a really big oversight in the process of taking this photo. I got to the "pick the best photo to use" stage of post-processing and realized... I shot all of my exposures at f/7.1. I didn't vary the aperture once. f/7.1 happened to be a reasonably good aperture for the job though. If it hadn't, I would have gone back and shot again. I need to be doing photography, every day, otherwise I start slipping. It doesn't take long.

One final piece of news: I got hired at a camera store nearby! Dream job, here I come. I start work in... 2.5 hours. Woot!

Digging through old Musical Shots

2010-05-13T22:25:00.000-06:00

Today was the final choir concert of the year at Timberline Middle School. I went there, I love singing, and the choir teacher there is the one who taught me how to sing, and how to love singing. So I make it a point to get to as many of their concerts as possible. I'm glad I went.

Also, while I did have an interview for a job at a camera store, I didn't actually get around to taking any good photos today. So I figured it would be a good time to draw on my mostly untapped roll from Hello Dolly at TMS.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/2.8
Shutter Speed: 1/250
ISO: 800
Focal Length: 135mm
Monopod

I do wish I had gone with a slightly faster shutter speed here, but I still think this turned out pretty well. The action was mostly frozen anyway.

Fun with Low-Key Monochrome

2010-05-12T17:31:00.002-06:00

I was in a creative mood today, so I decided to try something interesting. Before I go any further with this post, I've realized that I need to explain what "Assassin" is, which will both help this photo make a lot more sense, and explain the title of the photo from this post.

Assassin is a game being played at my school by about 70 people right now. Essentially, we are given a "target" by the person running the show, and our job is to eliminate that target using a whisk. Then we report our kill, and receive a new target. We are also being constantly hunted by someone else, but we are not told who. I always need to be watching my back. Last man standing wins $50. It's a blast.

Anyway, I decided to take somewhat of a satirical picture showing what might happen to us all psychologically in the long run.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/5.6
Shutter Speed: 0.6 seconds
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 42mm
Tripod

The lighting and setup for this shot was ridiculously complicated. I used three separate desk lamps, each with a custom-shaped DIY snoot. One was about 10 feet to the left of the camera, about the height of my head, pointing at my face and the chair. That light provided the illumination on the right side of my face. There was another one just to the left of the camera, barely above the level of the table, and pointing slightly up. That one provided the illumination on my right hand and the wire whisk. The last light was on the right side of the camera, higher up, lighting the back-right corner of the table, which provided most of the ambient light as well. Other than those three directional desk lamps, the room was pitch black.

The "beverage" was actually just water with green food coloring. I chose green because there was no other green anywhere else in the shot, so I figured it would give me very independent control over the tone of the liquid. That idea worked out nicely.

I'm extremely pleased with the way the lights behaved. It took a lot of effort and experimentation. I had no assistant, which meant I was stuck with guessing at pre-focusing, setting the self-timer, hitting the shutter release, running to the chair and posing, then checking out the results. Then I would tweak the lighting slightly, rinse, and repeat. In the end though, it paid off. It's nice when plans come together perfectly, with the lighting, pre-planning of drink color, etc. for post processing, and everything else that went into the creation of this shot.

More Proof you need a Tripod for Macro

2010-05-11T15:16:00.000-06:00

I try to use a tripod for macro shooting whenever possible, but sometimes I see an opportunity and I don't have mine handy. This is what happened today. There were a few problems with this; first of all I was using a 100mm macro lens, which is quite a long focal length to be shooting with handheld anyway, but especially for a close subject. Second, it was windy, and therefore the subject was moving. And third, various clutter around the subject was confusing my autofocus enough that I switched to manual—something I usually hate to do when I don't have a tripod.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/3.2
Shutter Speed: 1/125
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 100mm
Handheld

I shot anyway. Considering all the factors involved, I think I got a pretty good result for a 1/125 shutter speed, handheld, with manual focus. But the sharpness issues (caused both by motion blur and slight positioning adjustments after focusing) become quite apparent when you view the full-size image.

Either way, there will be a redux of this sometime when I have my tripod and a spray bottle handy to create water droplets.

Experimentation with Shadow

2010-05-10T17:48:00.000-06:00

Don't ask why the title of this photo is "Assassinate." It's a really long story. And not the kind that's funny, just the kind that makes you say "I wish I hadn't asked why the title of that photo is 'Assassinate.'"

Anyway, I was playing around with different directions and distances of light. I found that when the light source is further away from the subject, the shadows are more defined. Not wanting too many harsh shadows that would make the photo too busy (and distract from the simplicity that is one of the features of the Motionless set), I opted for one of the shots that had the light source closer.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/8
Shutter Speed: 1/10
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 55mm
Tripod

I'm pretty happy with how this turned out. If I could change one thing, I would have made the light a little more directional from the side. The image could use slightly more contrast. And the DoF is a little shallower than I wanted, but that's not too distracting.

A Serious Attempt at Food Photography

2010-05-09T09:34:00.000-06:00

I've done a little bit of dabbling with food photography, but nothing too serious. It's quite a challenge apparently. Well, there's nothing I like more than tackling a photography challenge. Before I started, I noted that most professional food photos I've seen have:

-Shallow DoF
-Frame-filling subjects
-High-key, relatively uniform lighting
-Simple backgrounds
-Utensils
-Camera tilts for odd angles (something I'm not a huge fan of)
-Either spot-on lifelike white-balance, or a slightly cooler cast

The food I had on hand for this was muffins, which generally don't require much utensil usage. I guess in hindsight I could have used a knife, but oh, well. I used my kit lens, usually at around 35mm focal length I think, and at a wide variety of apertures as experimentation. The counter in my house is corian, so it reflects light from windows nicely, but it's also quite uniform. It gave me a ready-made professional looking background. I set up the muffins in various positions to emphasize texture, etc. and started shooting (foregoing the camera tilt... maybe I'll try it next time).

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/8
Shutter Speed: 0.6 seconds
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 34mm
Tripod

The last thing I did after my regular contrast/sharpness/exposure adjustments in Lightroom was going through the steps from this post to get the white-balance exactly right. I tried it with a blue cast first, but it didn't look so good with brown muffins.

I think I could have gone a bit wider in the aperture, but otherwise I'm pretty satisfied with the shot. Sure, there are things to improve on, but considering I basically set a couple of muffins on the counter and shot a few photos, they turned out pretty good.

Weeping Hearts

2010-05-08T16:03:00.001-06:00

I know that title sounds ridiculously corny. But it's the name of the plant featured in this post, and I must say it's pretty accurate. Once again, I shot this indoors, so I didn't have to deal with wind. I love that.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/8
Shutter Speed: 1/2
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 100mm
Tripod

I liked the lines from this shot, although the angle wasn't super creative. That being said, my original idea of having the line start closer to the lens and go further away from it, and at a slight angle to create more depth, didn't work out. Even at f/32, I had too much blur.

To compensate a little for the boring angle, I added a tiny bit of Orton effect. I had to try a lot of adjustments and stuff before I was happy with it... too much Orton looks bad; I've found myself getting more and more subtle about it with each time I apply it.

Dry Ice Experimentation

2010-05-07T22:34:00.000-06:00

I bought some dry ice today in an attempt to take some photos for this contest. I had a few ideas in mind, but unfortunately none of them worked out this time. The problem was, I had a pound and a half of dry ice left. So I was drinking a SoBe and figured I could cool it down pretty quick with some of the leftover dry ice. It worked. It also looked pretty cool.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/1.8
Shutter Speed: 1/80
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 50mm
Tripod

Not a particularly great photo, but it was more for fun than anything. I really think this dry ice thing has some potential if I can figure out how to get the vapor to behave.

On another note, this bottle exploded shortly after this was taken. Turns out putting the lid on with dry ice inside will cause that. Good thing I foresaw that possibility and placed it outside. It was loud.

More Musical Shots

2010-05-06T22:19:00.001-06:00

I didn't shoot anything particularly creative today. So I'm falling back on some more Hello Dolly pictures. Cheating, I know, especially when I'm up against things like this, but I'm tired. Today was my last AP test, so I should have more time and energy to devote to photography starting now.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/2
Shutter Speed: 1/250
ISO: 800
Focal Length: 135mm
Monopod

This guy and his partner were pretty impressive. He looks confident up there on that unicycle... a skill I don't have.

Lost Kangaroo?

2010-05-05T20:05:00.000-06:00

I saw this on my way home from working on my guitar today. I'm rather confused. There were tons of these signs everywhere. Either it was a very elaborate joke, or someone actually lost a kangaroo.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/320
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 55mm
Handheld

So not much photographic value here, but I thought this was funny.

Shooting another Musical

2010-05-04T21:35:00.000-06:00

My little brother was in his school's production of Hello Dolly, and I went to see it yesterday. I have to say I was quite impressed. The singing in particular was top notch, especially for a Jr. High. Needless to say, I took pictures. 340 of them. I haven't looked through all of them yet, but there are bound to be some keepers.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/2.8
Shutter Speed: 1/250
ISO: 800
Focal Length: 135mm
Monopod

Her face is a bit too contrasty and washed-out here, but this stage was well-lit enough for me to go down to 800 ISO and still get pretty impressive shutter speeds, In fact, it looks like the lens wasn't even maxed out aperture-wise here. Good job, TMS techies.

May 2010 Calendar

2010-05-03T12:48:00.001-06:00

I was pretty happy with this photo, although maybe I should have switched the photos for April and May. At any rate, here's the calendar.

1600x1200

As always, feel free to share, etc.

Edit: I would also like to point out that I'm an idiot for including "April 31st."

Wide Angle + Clouds

2010-05-02T13:56:00.000-06:00

Up front, I'll apologize for not getting posts out recently. I was gone on a hike all day Friday and Saturday. On the bright side, I got a few good photos on the way. Also, if the weather decides to cooperate instead of snowing again (yes, in MAY), I'll have a new calendar out tomorrow.

Anyway, here's my favorite photo from the trip.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/11
Shutter Speed: 1/250
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 18mm
Handheld

I love the way the clouds look when you shoot at a wide angle. One of the first lenses I will buy is a really, really wide one for shooting breathtaking landscapes.

This was taken about 2/3s of the way through the 18-mile hike. It was grueling, and it really put things in perspective for me when I could be standing on top of the most recent hill, take a photo like this, and then realize that about an hour or so previous, we were beyond the farthest mountain visible in the shot. I'm glad I did it though, it was a cool experience.

Disappointing Macro

2010-04-29T17:23:00.000-06:00

I shot it on a very windy day, handheld. Recipe for blur, even at f/2.8, because it was a cloudy day with limited light.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/4
Shutter Speed: 1/60
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 100mm
Handheld

So in an attempt to cover up for the motion blur, I applied a light Orton Effect. See! It's blurry, but on purpose.

Also, I just looked at the EXIF, and I guess I shot this at f/4. But even that was kind of pushing it... the DoF is almost too shallow anyway.

More Faces

2010-04-27T13:19:00.000-06:00

I was browsing through my shots from the night I took pictures at Peter Pan, and I found another keeper. Halfway through the shoot that night, I remembered something I learned at a newspaper conference, during a seminar taught by a local photojournalist: look for the moments that the emotion peaks, and you'll get the best shots with the best faces. He was right.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/2
Shutter Speed: 1/200
ISO: 1600
Focal Length: 135mm
Monopod

This was shot with my dad's 135mm f/2 prime. I didn't think it was a particularly practical lens when he bought it recently, but it fit the role of low-light indoor musical shooting lens perfectly. It also has the added bonus of being the single sharpest lens Canon produces, something that maybe is harder to notice when shooting at 1600 ISO.

But I'm very happy with these results. Both of these guys were perfect for the roles. Yes, that is Captain Hook's real hair, although Smee's nose is fake. I'm excited to share these photos with the cast.

Indoor Macro with Window Lighting

2010-04-26T06:13:00.000-06:00

I love shooting plants indoors because I never have to worry about wind. And I love shooting plants outside on a cloudy day because the lighting is perfect. So naturally, when I get the chance to take the best of both worlds, I go for it.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/8
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 100mm
Tripod

I'm not sure what this plant is called; it's some sort of succulent my mom is growing on a windowsill. And after I took a few shots like this one, I busted out my friend the spray bottle and tried some water ones... they didn't turn out. I don't think it was the water, just other things went wrong. So I may revisit this one with the water droplets again sometime.

Other than being maybe a little bit too busy, I'm pretty happy with this. At least I can say it was composed pretty well and there's a definite point of interest. The the lighting. Oh, the lighting.

Shooting Stage Productions

2010-04-25T17:26:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I went to see Peter Pan at the high school for the second time. Frankly, I should have been in Peter Pan. I love doing shows, and every single person in the cast is a friend of mine, but I didn't think I would have time once I got a job again.

That aside though, my camera performed admirably in the low-light conditions, with the help of my dad's three fastest lenses: 50mm f/1.4, 85mm f/1.8, and 135mm f/2. This particular picture was shot with the 85mm, but I think I used the 135mm for the majority of the 300 photos I shot that night.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/2.2
Shutter Speed: 1/200
ISO: 1600
Focal Length: 85mm
Monopod

Good times. I was forced to use 1600 ISO the entire night, but with the speed of the lenses, and using TV so as to avoid continually making aperture adjustments while trying to capture the action, I was getting shutter speeds in the 1/200-1/250 range, which is just right for what I was trying to shoot.

Moral of the story: buy fast lenses.

Also, apologies for not posting yesterday. I was helping to run, and performing in, the state Solo & Ensemble festival.

Time Lapse Sunset

2010-04-23T12:41:00.003-06:00

Yesterday I went up to a high vantage point near my house, set up my tripod and intervalometer with fresh batteries, and attempted to time-lapse a sunset.

See it on Flickr

On the bright side, my intervals seem to have evened out. On the not so bright side, there wasn't much of a sunset last night, and I have some experimentation to do with exposure settings before I'll be able to get this right.

Happy Earth Day!

2010-04-22T17:57:00.000-06:00

In celebration of Earth Day, I went way out of my comfort zone and took a nature macro photograph. Sadly, I forgot to shoot in RAW as I had left my settings on JPG last time I used the camera. Bummer, especially since this was a planned B&W conversion.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/8
Shutter Speed: 1/10
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 100mm
Tripod

I'm still pretty happy with how it turned out though. Not as much contrast as I like due to the JPG format, but I'm okay with that. Since I used my newest friend, the spray bottle, to take this, I should have no problem going for a redux later on.

One really interesting thing to do is zoom in to 100% on the full-res image by clicking the photo itself. Check out individual droplets. A lot of them have silhouettes of the tripod, me, the camera, etc. in them.

In a Hurry

2010-04-21T17:59:00.000-06:00

I was heading home from working on my guitar, and I was running a little late for an errand in which I had to pick a couple people up. It was raining. So, despite my time shortage, I busted out my camera and got a few photos of the raindrop-covered leaves on a tree.

There were better pictures in the area, better lenses for the job, and taking the photo properly would have yielded better results by far. Nevertheless, this didn't turn out too bad.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/20
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 55mm
Handheld

I'll have to go back sometime with a tripod, a macro lens, and about 10 minutes. Hopefully I'll be able to try some different angles, etc. Also, even if it's not raining when I go back, there's a dirty trick I can use—you just bring a spray bottle of water. It looks very convincing. :)

TI-83+ Calculator Intervalometer

2010-04-20T17:40:00.000-06:00

I mentioned a while back in this post that it's possible to make an intervalometer from a calculator. I actually entered the code listed on the tutorial into my calculator weeks ago, but today I finally got ahold of a 12mm audio jack (link cable). I'm happy to report that it works.

See it on Flickr.

As stated in the guide that showed how to convert the calculator to an intervalometer, I seem to have gotten some slight variances in time between shots. Apparently the accuracy of the intervals is determined by the freshness of the batteries. Unfortunately, even slight variances are pretty noticeable in time-lapse. You'll see that the video above appears slightly "choppy." I'm also convinced that having a video editor that will do 1-frame-photos will also help me smooth out my videos a lot.

I can't remember the last time I changed the batteries on this calculator, and it gets used for Calculus homework almost every day. So before I get too upset about the inaccuracies of the calculator, I think I'll put in some brand new batteries and try again.

This was a test run; from now on I'll try to to shoot time lapses that have more points of interest than clouds moving in the sky and my little brother lounging around on the trampoline.

Flowering Fruit Trees

2010-04-19T17:59:00.000-06:00

Ahh, new card reader got here today and I was finally able to unload about 2 gigs of RAW files from my card. Not only that, I was able to finally EDIT some RAW files on my computer and get the best results I'm capable of again.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/8
Shutter Speed: 1/20
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 100mm
Tripod

I hadn't realized just how dependent I've grown on using RAW whenever possible. I love it. Anyway, we have a flowering plum tree in my front yard that will probably be cut down this summer, so I wanted some photos. Besides, it looks really good this time of year. Once again I can thank my dad and his macro lens.

Also, I'm pretty proud to say that the thought of cropping this photo didn't even cross my mind during editing. I think I'm finally starting to get better at framing things. The more things I can get right in-camera, the better.

JPG Flowers

2010-04-18T18:15:00.000-06:00

Flowers are finally coming up around here. Today I went out and shot tulips and daffodils. It was the first time I ever used the RAW+JPG setting on my camera, because while I want to keep the RAW files and process them later, I'm currently unable to transfer anything but JPGs to my computer. My new card reader should get here Tuesday at the latest though, so I think I'm in good shape.

So today's photo was shot in JPG, but hopefully the results still look pretty good.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/8
Shutter Speed: 1/30
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 46mm
Tripod

I've been trying to get more triangles in my compositions; apparently they're subconsciously pleasing. I fixed my watermark, too, by the way.

Also, my apologies for not posting yesterday. I was at a wedding all day, and at a date all night, with little or no time for photography in between.

A Wasp

2010-04-16T22:01:00.001-06:00

Turns out that with my transfer cable, I can't actually move RAW files onto my computer. Which is rough. I had to dig through the few JPGs I shot yesterday and pick the best one, which still isn't all that good.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/2.8
Shutter Speed: 1/320
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 100mm
Handheld

It probably looks like some astounding close-up, but I cropped that shot majorly. The light is awful, although it's hard to be picky when photographing something like a wasp.

So, bottom line: I can't wait for my new card reader to get here.

Lightboxes = Professional

2010-04-15T12:52:00.002-06:00

As I mentioned yesterday, I did do a number of product shots in a paper light box. I'm happy with how they turned out. Just as in this post, I'm continually impressed with the professional-looking results that you can achieve with 4 pieces of paper to diffuse the light.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/8
Shutter Speed: 0.8 seconds
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 100mm
Tripod

I used the 100mm f/2.8 macro lens and a tripod that belongs to the newspaper staff. It was interesting shooting these, because I knew they all had to turn out really well. I wasn't just shooting for myself, it was a semi-professional job. As I had an odd mix of cloudy window lighting and overhead fluorescent, I had to manually set the white balance. Not a big deal, but it turned out excellent—I wanted to be sure the colors displayed were accurate.

So if you like what you see, head on over and check out my friend's business: http://cuteasabuddon.blogspot.com. Hopefully soon you'll see some of my photos on there, when she has time to update the site!

More Commerical Photography

2010-04-14T19:22:00.000-06:00

My friend once again needed a photographer today for her business (shameless bump), so I got to do some more commercial photography, which I really enjoy. First I shot product photos in a light box to make the necklaces and bracelets she displays look professional. Then I took a couple of models out on a shortish shoot to display the product in action. It's nice that I knew the models and "employer" beforehand, but I can conceive of a situation that I might not. And I don't think it would be that bad. Working with models that aren't stuck up is pretty easy, especially if they like the results. Both models asked me for copies of the photos I took of them, which is an easy thing to do.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/4
Shutter Speed: 1/160
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 50mm
Handheld

I used my dad's 50mm because the shoot started inside and I desperately needed the f/1.4 aperture to compete with the crappy fluorescent lighting. As we went outside, I just left the 50 on, but shot at f/4 instead. It's a great portrait lens either way. So basically, I got to help out a friend, practice directing models, practice portraits in general, and have some fun that ended with good pictures. So, definitely a cool experience.

A few notes: sorry on the late post today, my card reader is broken and I had to hunt down an old USB-to-mini-USB cable to transfer my photos, which took a while. I have ordered a new card reader, which should get here Monday or Tuesday, but until then, I have the cord handy.

Also, I am going to follow everyone's suggestions in changing the watermark to just my name in a larger font. I just haven't gotten around to it yet.

Watermarking

2010-04-13T12:55:00.000-06:00

After reading a DPS post on automatically watermarking your images, I've decided to adopt a watermark. Now that I have full-res photos available on Flickr, it's probably a good step to protect them a little more. I will strive not to make my watermark distracting. Here's a sample. If there are any changes you would recommend, speak now or forever hold your peace.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/400
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 300mm
Monopod

Should I just put the name? Just the site? Smaller text? What do you guys recommend?

Foreground in the Landscape

2010-04-12T06:01:00.000-06:00

First of all, an exciting announcement: I finally buckled and bought a Pro account on Flickr. The cool part of this is, (among other things) I can now upload my photos in their original resolution. Woot!

So one thing I learned while reading up on how to take better landscape photos is that you need to consider the foreground of the shot as well as the background. Having one point of interest in each area of the photo allows for a better picture that people are more inclined to look at for a long time.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/11
Shutter Speed: 1/250
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 18 mm
Monopod

I'm not as happy with this photo as I was with this one, but it didn't turn out too bad, and it's a good one to illustrate this concept.

Double Exposures

2010-04-11T08:01:00.001-06:00

Here's a really simple technique that I had fun experimenting with. With film SLRs, you could literally expose your film twice. You would just leave the camera on a tripod, underexpose a photo by one stop, rewind the film, move something in the photo, and expose the same frame again. With digital, it's pretty hard to do that in-camera. But it's really easy to do it in Photoshop (or GIMP, or any other editor that supports layers).

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/3.5 (both frames)
Shutter Speed: 4 seconds (both frames)
ISO: 100 (both frames)
Focal Length: 23 mm (both frames)
Tripod

First, set up your camera on a sturdy tripod. For the best results, you need to keep the camera perfectly still between shots, otherwise you'll end up with ghosting. For this reason, I chose to shoot inside, because it was a rather windy day. It was kind of dark in this room, which explains the long shutter speed.

Anyway, for digital "double exposure" photos, you don't need to worry about underexposing by a frame or anything like that. Just take two photos with the subject (in the example above, it's me) moving between them.

Then load into Photoshop. I converted to black and white because the color temperature and stuff looked really awful. The technique would probably work just as well in color. Once you have any corrections done (make sure they're exactly the same for each photo), simply copy and paste one photo over the other in a new layer. The blending mode should stay on "Normal." Then change the opacity of the top layer to 50%. This will make a balance between the exposure of your subject in each frame. If you wanted one to be fainter, adjust the opacity accordingly.

That's it! Flatten the image and crop if desired. I think I will be having a lot of fun with this technique.

Black and White Landscape

2010-04-10T09:32:00.000-06:00

This is one of the best landscapes I think I have ever produced.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/11
Shutter Speed: 1/250
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 18 mm
Tripod

It really needs to be viewed as large as possible. I wish I could offer more than 1024 pixels wide, but yeah, Flickr. The custom black & white controls in Lightroom and shooting in RAW made all the difference here. I'm seriously considering getting this printed in a large-ish size.

Vertical Panorama

2010-04-09T12:23:00.000-06:00

While at Capitol Reef, I decided to try a vertical panorama, something that I had heard of, but never attempted. Long story short, it worked really well. The nature of this image means that when I crunched it down to 1024 pixels tall, it got really skinny, but rest assured that in full quality, it looks nice :)

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/8 (all frames)
Shutter Speed: 1/200 (all frames)
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 55 mm (all frames)
Tripod

The composition isn't spectacular, but this was more an exercise than anything else.

Captitol Reef

2010-04-08T07:37:00.000-06:00

Sorry for not giving you all a heads-up before I left, but for spring break, my family went to Capitol Reef National Park in southern Utah for the last few days. I took about 3.5 GB worth of photos, mostly in RAW, and I've just barely started to scratch the surface with putting the good ones through Lightroom and Photoshop. So don't be surprised if my posts for the next like, two weeks are all Capitol Reef photos!

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/11
Shutter Speed: 1/200
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 18 mm
Monopod

I found myself using the 18 side of my 18-55mm kit lens far more often than I ever have in the past. I also found myself wishing for a lens hood on many occasions. Hopefully lens flares that occurred won't be too difficult to take out when it comes down to it.

Some Commercial Photography

2010-04-02T09:36:00.001-06:00

I have a friend who is starting up a button jewelry business (shameless plug: http://www.cuteasabuddon.blogspot.com/). Yesterday, she asked me to help take some photos of her work for a brochure she's putting together. As most of the shoot was inside, I used my dad's f/1.4 50mm lens for the majority of the photos. One I'm particularly happy about is this one.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/13
ISO: 400
Focal Length: 55 mm
Monopod

Actually, after putting the exposure details down, I realized that this was one I took with my kit lens because I was running out of time before I had to leave, and the kit lens was already back on my body. Which explains the higher ISO.

Commercial photography has proven to me an interesting animal. Even when shooting portrait-style photos that showcase the necklaces or bracelets, I had to pay as much attention to the focus of the product as I did to the focus of the person's eyes.

Anyway, there's that. I may end up shooting more for her, and if I get good results I'll be sure to show them on here.

April 2010 Calendar

2010-04-01T20:52:00.000-06:00

Sorry it took so long to get up! I've had a busy day.

1600x1200

I already know of one person who uses this photo as their background, so I figured I would make it easy on him and throw in a calendar with the deal. Also, this picture suits April more than the weather today. We had a blizzard. Yeah, seriously.

A Tree I've Had My Eye On

2010-03-31T19:14:00.000-06:00

First off, no, there is no photo of the month for April. I kind of forgot about it, and I usually post that when I have nothing else to post or am short on time. That didn't happen during March I guess.

There's a tree that I've been able to see from the school parking lot, and I've noticed it almost every day for a long time; since before I got my DSLR. It stands alone in a field, with not much of a backdrop behind it. On cloudy or foggy days especially it looks really cool.

Today, I finally got around to walking out and shooting it.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/400
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 55 mm
Handheld

I realized when choosing out of my various angles and exposures which photo I would edit that the one that appealed to me most was the one I think captured the point of this tree. Yeah, I had some photos that were much better focused, shot at a more landscape-y focal length, framed more fully, etc. But in the end, I went with the somewhat badly focused, wide framed, more telephoto shot because it showed how alone the tree was, which is really the defining characteristic of this tree. That's a good thing to bear in mind when composing shots in the future, I think.

In post, I actually lowered the contrast (something I rarely do for non-portrait photos), desaturated slightly, and cooled down the color cast in an attempt to make the setting look more desolate, which I think accentuated the mood this photo has.

Orton Crocuses, Take 2

2010-03-30T15:57:00.000-06:00

After yesterday's train wreck of a photo, I did a little research on the theory behind the Orton Effect. That, combined with a little practice and a new method of applying the effect digitally gave me much more satisfactory results.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/4.5
Shutter Speed: 1/50
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 37 mmHandheld

Still not perfect, but I have a much firmer grasp on how it works now. Furthermore, I learned how to do it film-style, which I think can be closely reproduced digitally. More on that tomorrow.

Orton Effect Crocuses

2010-03-29T18:42:00.001-06:00

I was gone most of the day, but the lighting was pretty good for flower photography when I got back. I snapped a few crocuses again (I know, original). In an attempt to make the pictures stand out a little more, I applied the Orton Effect... and was reminded of how either rusty I am, or how I was never very good at it in the first place. I may have just gotten lucky with this photo. Either way, I pretty much ruined this photo.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/4.5
Shutter Speed: 1/50
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 37 mm
Handheld

It looks fake, and too contrasty, and frankly, like a prime example of this. So. I put this up here to show you that sometimes my photography sucks pretty bad. I'll try again though. When applied correctly, the Orton Effect is really pretty beautiful.

More Portraits

2010-03-28T10:23:00.000-06:00

Last night, I went and shot Prom photos for a group of my friends. I used my dad's 50mm and his speedlight with a diffuser for fill flash.

It's amazing how much better portraits turn out when you have a good focal length and some fill flash. I kept thinking back on these. Not that they were bad, I just didn't have the equipment to make them as good. Especially as I was paid for this job, etc. I felt that it was extremely important to deliver great results.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/4
Shutter Speed: 1/125
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 50 mm
Tripod

I'm happy with how they turned out. The backdrop could have been better, but it was the only area around the house I could find that had suitable lighting. But the colors, skin tones, and faces turned out great.

I guess this means if I'm planning on doing any kind of paid portrait work in the future, I need to pick up my own speed light and diffuser.

Natural Side Lighting

2010-03-27T10:04:00.000-06:00

I was reading tips on how to take better still-life photos a while back, and one site said that, especially if you're planning on converting to monochrome, contrasty side lighting is usually desirable. Today, I noticed that a piece of furniture in our house was getting hit with some powerful side lighting from the sun shining through our windows.

So I busted out the camera and tripod and tried it out. I must say I'm pleased with the results.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/11
Shutter Speed: 1/10
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 49 mm
Tripod

The sun provided much stronger light (and therefore even more contrast) than the desk lamp I use for artificially lighting smaller subjects ever could. The texture on the chair really stood out with the side lighting (which, now that I think about it, is something I learned in my digital photography class: side lighting enhances texture).

The only thing I'm not super happy with is the composition. Too much going on in the bottom right, not enough in the top left. But oh, well. You can't win them all.

Anyway, on an unrelated note, at about 5:00 today I'm heading out to shoot Prom photos for a few of my friends and their dates. I read up all about how, and my dad showed me what I need to know about using his speedlight, so I should be set to get some very good results. I'll almost definitely post about that tomorrow.

A Photo Walk

2010-03-26T06:48:00.000-06:00

Yesterday after school, I headed down to a little park near the school. I went on a fairly successful photo walk, which was fun. I had two keepers from the shoot, but I think I like this one better.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/11
Shutter Speed: 1/13
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 100 mm
Tripod

Once again, my dad's macro lens saves the day. I'm continually astounded at how close I can get with it.

Anyway, the exposure on this was a little wonky. The sky was washed out, but it was so gray that it looks, well, gray. The edge of the acorn is closer to blending in with the sky than I want, but I got it as separated as I could by increasing contrast and toying with exposure and stuff. The bottom-right hand corner was too sharp, so it looked terrible when the acorn was at a nice level of contrast, so I just used a layer mask and the blur tool to take the edge off. It's not an important area to the picture anyway.

Insect Macros

2010-03-25T06:19:00.000-06:00

I've enjoyed looking at some of the insect macros I've seen, but never really been super interested in doing my own.

Yesterday, I went outside around 6:00 to do some past-due flower macros, now that our purple and white crocuses have started poking up. I couldn't help but notice that there were bees swarming all over them. Since I was already armed with my dad's macro lens and my monopod, I quickly switched into TV, then set for burst shooting and servo AF based off the middle AF point (the sharpest). About 150 pictures later, I had a couple of keepers. This one is my favorite.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/3.2
Shutter Speed: 1/200
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 100 mm
Monopod

I like it because the bee is in an interesting position, the composition on the flower isn't compromised, and the main interest points are acceptably sharp. I apologize for the boring center composition of the subject, but I was using the sharpest AF point on camera, which is the center, and I couldn't find a crop that I liked very much, so I just left it as-is.

So, long story short, I covet my dad's macro lens like, five million.

More Motionless Photos

2010-03-24T06:19:00.000-06:00

I'm really enjoying still life. Though my kit lens isn't prime, I have a hard time seeing a huge improvement in sharpness and optical quality. Also, I like to use my kit lens because it can focus MUCH closer than my Dad's 50mm and 85mm primes can. Until I find a way around this, I'll probably be using my kit lens for Motionless photos more often.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/9
Shutter Speed: 0.8 seconds
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 55 mm
Tripod

I like the texture of this shot, and I also like the simple background provided by shooting on white paper.

When I get enough photos in my Motionless series, I may do a mosaic. I think it would look good because the photos would be relatively uniform.

Facial Expressions

2010-03-23T06:07:00.000-06:00

I went to a newspaper conference about a month ago, where I attended several workshops. One was on photojournalism, and one of the tips I picked up was the use of facial expressions in photography. Our clinician placed "faces" alongside principles like lines, the rule of thirds, texture, etc. This highlighted to me how important he though they were.

He also gave us a few examples of photos with great facial expressions. They absolutely can make an otherwise boring photo very interesting to look at and engaging. A photo with a good expression will hold your attention much longer, and draw your eye much more effectively.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/500
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 55 mm
Handheld

I've learned that there are few times better for getting a great face in your photo than during a high-action activity like Ultimate Frisbee.

This is from the same shoot as yesterday's photo, so I hadn't quite figured out that I need faster shutter speeds for these. But there will definitely be more games for me to shoot in the near future.

Sports Photography

2010-03-22T14:03:00.001-06:00

Most of the members of the large choir at my school are on tour in California right now, so those of us who are left went outside and played Ultimate Frisbee during that class today. Halfway through, I decided I wanted to try and get some pictures. It was really sunny outside, so I was able to get fast shutter speeds even though my lens is pretty slow (f/3.5-5.6).

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/500
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 55 mm
Handheld

Though I wasn't afraid of getting in close to do these, I think I would have been much better off with a telephoto lens. 55 mm really just doesn't cut it for sports in most cases.

Also, I had issues with focus. I was on servo AF and burst mode, but it still seems like a crap shoot as to whether or not the AF will be fast enough to get the shot. I guess that is just more confirmation for the case that you need to take a large volume of photos when shooting sports.

About 50 pictures in, I decided I wanted faster shutter speeds to completely freeze the action, so I bumped up my ISO to 200. I was a little frustrated that I had to be shooting at 200 ISO on a day with no clouds and a bright sun, but that's just because I have a slow lens. Now I know why they can charge $3000 for about 3 stops worth of aperture.

Anyway, I got a few pictures I was pretty happy with, so I'll probably be sharing them for a few days.

Still Life with a 50 mm Prime

2010-03-21T12:06:00.000-06:00

My dad owns an f/1.4 50mm EF lens, and recently told me that prime lenses get clearer and sharper photos than zooms. I wanted to shoot some still life photos, so I decided this would be a good time to try a prime—I already had lots of control over lighting, subject, etc. so I figured I wouldn't be needing to zoom to make adjustments in framing and stuff.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/5
Shutter Speed: 1/10
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 50 mm
Tripod

Well, he was right. Though I'm very happy with my kit 18-55, and I think it gets really good results, the 50mm is sharper. Noticeably so.

After lots of experimentation with different apertures and compositions, I decided I like this one best. The DoF isn't paper thin, but the entire lock is not in focus. Also, the centered composition made this photo a good candidate for my Motionless series, and after applying the effect in Photoshop, I liked how it fit. The only thing was that since I had white background, I had to dial down the vignette opacity quite a bit to avoid it looking too harsh.

Less is More

2010-03-20T11:13:00.001-06:00

The weekend photograph challenge at DPS right now is titled Less is More. I decided to participate.

Anyway, here's my submission:

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/2.8
Shutter Speed: 1/8
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 100 mm
Tripod

I took this as simply as possible. Just a white background (paper), a very simple subject, a small depth of field, black and white with no tint, no crop, no vignette, and centered composition. And I'm now completely convinced that Less really is More. I prefer taking and looking at simpler photos in general. Perhaps that's why I like macro so much; it tends to exclude noisy or busy details and really focus in on just one thing.

Guitar Construction Update

2010-03-19T17:52:00.000-06:00

Let me start by saying, I'm not particularly pleased with this shot. I don't think it's very good. It's not bad, it's just not great.

Anyway, an exciting day in the construction of my guitar. I've moved on to assembling the box, which means I'll be done soon, and finally able to play it. This is just a photo of the fretboard (which I finally finished inlaying, and sanded flush). It's boring in black and white, but it was even more boring in color.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/9
Shutter Speed: 1/20
ISO: 400
Focal Length: 55 mm
Monopod

The dust-looking stuff is probably mahogany sawdust. The worktable was pretty covered in it.

Anyway, hopefully I'll be more inspired to take an interesting photo tomorrow.

More Bird Photography

2010-03-18T15:32:00.000-06:00

I like bird photography, but without a fast telephoto lens, there's not much opportunity for it. So most of the bird photography I've done is restricted to more urban birds; primarily seagulls and pigeons.

As I've said before, even with just a little bread, seagulls become very easy subjects to photograph at 55 mm.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/1250
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 55 mm
Handheld

I found that if you spend enough time with burst mode and servo AF, you'll get the seagulls in a good pose in at least one photo. I didn't even have to crop this one. I'm very happy with how this one turned out.

Crocus Redux

2010-03-17T13:40:00.000-06:00

I'm not exactly sure what I'm doing wrong here yet. But I'll fix it when I figure it out.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/50
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 100 mm
Tripod

The color looks kind of sickly to me. I think I shot at a rather uncreative angle. On the other hand, the focus is good, and the glass in the macro lens I used is excellent. I need to keep experimenting, but I need to do it on a day when I don't have 100% direct sunlight beating down on me and the flower.

On the bright side, some purple ones started coming up today. I have a feeling they'll be more cooperative subjects.

Spring Macros

2010-03-16T16:54:00.000-06:00

Finally, spring is arriving. We have a few crocuses poking out of the ground now, so I figured I'd start up the old nature macro habit again. As I've said before, the kit lens does a reasonably good job with macros... though not so well that I don't want to get a macro lens. :)

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/400
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 55 mm
Tripod

I'm pretty unsatisfied with this shot, actually. I used the screw on the bottom of my tripod column to mount the pan head. This gets me in a really good position to do macro work, though at the cost of a little ease-of-use. Oh, well. Worth it. That's not really the problem. The problem was the intense, direct sunlight. I really should have brought something out to diffuse that. An 8.5x11 sheet of printer paper would have done the job with a subject this small. Also, it's a bit overexposed. The white-balance is off in this shot, because I had left it on Tungsten and forgotten to change it. I corrected it afterward shooting this one, but that messed up my focus, something I didn't realize until I had packed up. Which brings me to another point: I should have shot in RAW. Oh, and I should have used Mirror Lockup. And been more careful with the manual focus.

Anyway, I'm being pretty hard on myself here, because I know I can just head out later and try again for a much better result. In fact, I think I'll do just that. But not right now. Some other time.

Creative Portraiture

2010-03-15T14:08:00.000-06:00

"Creative" may be a euphemism for how this portrait turned out, but in a way I kind of like it.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/3.5
Shutter Speed: 1/640
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 18 mm
Handheld

That's my friend Miguel, eating a gyro near Canal Street. I think the focal area was too small, so I should have stopped down a bit just so that the crisp area that our eyes are naturally drawn too isn't so tiny. Especially since it was bright sunlight, I had no excuse to open the aperture up that wide... oh, well. It's an interesting effect, and one I'll probably experiment with more in the future.

My Desire for a Macro Lens Personified

2010-03-14T10:28:00.000-06:00

Oh, boy. I borrowed my dad's 100mm macro lens yesterday, and it reminded my why I love macro so much. With a combination of live view, careful and fine-tuned manual focusing, the amazing macro lens, careful lighting, my tripod, and shooting in RAW, I was able to get this shot:

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/5
Shutter Speed: 6 seconds
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 100 mm
Tripod

The lens is beautifully sharp. When zoomed in to 100% magnification on the full-res image, I could not detect any blur at all. RAW, as usual, gave me optimal control over my tones in B&W. I kind of wish I had been more creative with the lighting, but oh, well. At least I got some nice depth.

This makes me even more excited to get my own macro lens. The one I'm looking at is the f/2.8 50 mm made by Canon, and I'll probably pick up an extension tube with it to get closer focusing distances.

New York Style Tilt-Shift

2010-03-13T09:58:00.001-07:00

While I was in New York, I wanted to do some duplicates of the tilt-shift work I had already done. So this time, the photos I took for this purpose were taken specifically for the purpose of tilt-shifting them later in Photoshop. That meant getting subjects that would be interesting in miniature, and avoiding having horizon in my shot. Here's one:

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/4.5
Shutter Speed: 1/40
ISO: 800
Focal Length: 32 mm
Handheld

I'm a little disappointed in the focus—my AF was shooting through a glass window. But the effect turned out okay, and with a saturation bump, the object look more like toys, perpetuating the illusion.

The Statue of Liberty

2010-03-12T14:48:00.000-07:00

No album from a trip to New York City would be complete without stereotypical photos of the Statue of Liberty. While I refrained from posing friends in front of it, I did indulge in a little bit of predictability with this photo.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/8
Shutter Speed: 1/400
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 41 mm
Handheld

Although this shot has probably been done thousands of times, I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. The angle was forced, but it suits a statue like this perfectly. The day was mostly overcast, which made for really good lighting, but I did want to bring out the bit of blue in the sky and the color of the statue, so I boosted the saturation a bit. Other than that, I just did my standard brightness/contrast adjustments and sharpened a smidgen.

Cooperative Subjects

2010-03-11T06:38:00.000-07:00

I have rarely had success photographing birds of any type. The vast majority of them are far to skittish to get a good photo of with a 55 mm focal length. But at the same place as this photo was taken, there was a massive flock of seagulls that were all too eager to pose for me once somebody broke out a few pieces of bread.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/800
ISO: 200
Focal Length: 55 mm
Handheld

Through photos like these (and there are a few more good ones of seagulls from this shoot that I might eventually post), I've learned that I am a huge fan of action shots that freeze motion. This one isn't quite perfect—1/800 of a second left a tiny bit of blur around the tips of the wings. But I look forwards to doing more stop-action shots.

Portraits in Central Park

2010-03-10T06:25:00.000-07:00

With all the time I spent with my choir homies on tour, it became apparent that there are a few of them who are very willing to model for me when I want to practice pictures. Not just right then, either. My friend Jessica graciously told me that I could just call her whenever I needed someone to be in some portraits. I think I will be making use of that.

But now that I have a DSLR, portraits are a lot of fun. I never had very much success with them before, and I think that's mainly due to the small focal lengths involved with my old PowerShot. These portraits are some of the best I've ever taken. It seems that great location + willing model + cooperative lighting + a little time and patience = great portraits.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/30
ISO: 200
Focal Length: 55 mm
Handheld

I'm sure I still have a lot to learn. Even with this shot, I can see a few things I don't like. Her bangs are a little bit low over her right eye. There's a small strand of hair in the lower-left that is moving. And Jessica's eyes aren't in as good of focus as they should be. This is due to the fact that my AF was set to just pick an area of the photo to focus on, and it tends to pick things more in the foreground. Her eyes may be in the foreground compared to the purposely blurred rock in the back, but not compared to her right shoulder.

In the future, for shots like this that are on a more angled plane, I might stop down my aperture a little bit to ensure that I get the whole face in crisp focus. I will also set my autofocus to a specific point and focus on the eyes before shooting.

But, success!

Back from NYC, with Photos!

2010-03-09T11:29:00.000-07:00

I took just under 400 photos in NYC. Most of them are more documentary in nature, but a few had some real photographic value.

Here's one I took in Brooklyn, while we were on our way to sing at a retirement home. There were numerous swans in this little bay area, and an enormous number of seagulls. The seagulls became very friendly with us once some bread appeared, so even though my maximum focal length with the lens I have is 55 mm, I got some very good shots of them using servo AF and burst mode. The best picture from that day though, is of a swan.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/1000
ISO: 200
Focal Length: 55 mm
Handheld

Not a whole lot else to say about this shot. But for the next while, the great majority of the photos I post here will be from New York.

Trip to New York

2010-03-02T16:46:00.000-07:00

I'm headed out of town on a choir tour, starting tomorrow morning at 4:45. I'll be back Tuesday morning at about 1:00, so Tuesday I should have a post again.

While in New York, I get to sing in Carnegie Hall as a featured choir, and hopefully take a LOT of pictures everywhere.

So no posts for about a week, but I should have a ton of great material when I get back.

Improvised Softbox

2010-03-02T12:35:00.001-07:00

A while ago, I read a post on how to improvise a soft box from four pieces of paper and three paper clips or binder clips. Soon after, a friend needed me to take a picture of a strawberry so he could print a poster of it as a gift to his friend (she loves strawberries, and hates when they're out of season). I figured I would test it out.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/8
Shutter Speed: 0.3 seconds
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 55 mm
Tripod

I'm really pretty happy with how it turned out. Very high-key, and the colors are saturated without my needing to tweak much. The only improvement I wish I could make is the focus. The AF did a good job, but I took this before I discovered Mirror Lockup or Live View zoom MF, which does a slightly better job. But I got the DoF just right in my eyes.

Edit: At the suggestion of a commenter, here's the link to the tutorial on how to build it. You can use artificial lighting, but I just set it next to a window on a cloudy day, as I didn't have any portable lighting with me.

March 2010 Calendar

2010-03-01T14:31:00.001-07:00

I tried to do a shaped-bokeh technique so that the light filtering through the tree would look like shamrocks. It didn't really work. Kind of. But I still like this picture okay. It's only in 1600x1200 because I realized that's the same aspect ratio as almost any other monitor, so it should work for almost anyone.

1600x1200

For some reason, the picture doesn't seem to be working. I'll give it some time, but if it doesn't fix by the end of the day, I'll see what I can do.

Anyway, these images are rights-free so feel free to share them with whomever you want.

The Beauty of Telephoto

2010-02-28T09:47:00.001-07:00

I got a new camera bag yesterday (thanks, Mom and Dad!), and in celebration, decided to go down to a little pond not far from my house. I brought my own 18-55 mm kit lens, and my dad's 100-300 mm L telephoto.

There were some people feeding the ducks that live at that pond, and they said it was fine if I came close enough to get pictures. I think I got a lot of good ones. Ducks are pretty friendly, not exactly camera shy; especially when there's someone with bread in the vicinity.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/500
ISO: 400
Focal Length: 112 mm
Monopod

The white duck in the center was particularly fierce when it came to defending what he considered "his" bread. This photo looks like he's telling off that mallard for intruding on his space.

Mirror Lockup

2010-02-27T10:09:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I took my camera down to a ravine near my house. Though I only really got one good shot from the trip, I was pretty happy with it. There are some features on my camera that I didn't think I would ever use, but have proven invaluable. This is the first color photo I've ever shot in RAW.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/200
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 55 mm
Tripod

I think the difference is much more noticeable in monochrome, although, granted, this photo has a pretty limited color palette. This photo is one that is better viewed in full-res, but 1024 pixels wide will certainly be an improvement over 400.

The real cool parts about this photo are Mirror Lockup and Live View. Live View was something I was trying to get away from by upgrading to a DSLR. I thought manual focus could never be as good on a screen with a limited amount of pixels as it is through a real optical viewfinder. Well it turns out in Live View mode, I'm able to zoom into the photo all the way to 100% view, at any area in the frame I want. Because of this, I learned that auto focus does a great job, and manual focus does a better job when the subject isn't moving.

Also, Mirror Lockup has really impressed me. I never thought it would make that much of a difference with camera shake to get the mirror out of the way first. But when you're in really close, or going for maximum sharpness, it makes a world of difference. I was very surprised. Whenever I'm on a tripod and my subject isn't moving (at all... like an inanimate object, not just a person who is holding still), I use both Mirror Lockup and Live View MF now. Together, they work wonders.

Controlling the Light

2010-02-26T14:42:00.000-07:00

While shooting a redux still life a couple of days ago, I found out something that has rocked my photography world. It may sound obvious to you more seasoned photographers out there, but it has completely changed the way I think of this kind of photography:

When you're the guy setting up objects for the shot, you get to be the guy controlling the light, too. All of it.

When I put it to words, it sounds like something that should be followed up with a quick "uh... yeah. Duh." But seriously. I was re-trying the chess piece shot from this post in an attempt to make it better, and it kind of hit me that I wanted to control where the shadows from the chess pieces went. I went and grabbed a portable light that I use in the woodshop and tried a whole bunch of different configurations. It was really fun. Eventually, I decided that this one was the keeper:

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/5
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 33 mm
Tripod

An interesting story about this photo: I tried editing it in the style of my series, Motionless. I absolutely hated what it did to my photo. Something in me strongly objected the to vignette and the tint, to the point that I just couldn't leave it that way. I deleted that version and started over until I got it how I liked it.

So a good day for photography. I learned that controlling the light = win, and that in post-processing, the photo really is the boss.

Beginning of a Series

2010-02-25T06:32:00.000-07:00

I've started a new series on Flickr, called "Motionless." It features still life photos in monochrome. To help the photos feel more like they are part of a set, they all have a subtle lilac tint and a vignette. For this reason, I suspect most (if not all) of them will be center-composed, but I can't be sure yet as I haven't taken more than one so far. Here's the first.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/11
Shutter Speed: 5 seconds
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 29 mm
Tripod

I think I may finally have fixed the problem I was having with terrible compositions. This one may be slightly boring (centered subject), but it's not breaking a bunch of rules at least, and there are no obnoxious lines leading away from the focus.

I'm pretty excited for this set to grow. I'm hoping to really expand my horizons here in still-life photography, monochrome photography, and composition.

And don't worry: no more pottery still-lifes :) And I won't be tracking the set on this blog, so you'll still see a variety of photography types.

Black & White Still Life. Again.

2010-02-24T12:34:00.001-07:00

This is just another B&W still life shot in RAW. I've ranted about the benefits of monochrome shot in RAW enough, I think. You get the idea.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/8
Shutter Speed: 2 seconds
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 43 mm
Tripod

Once again, I hate the composition on this. I guess that's a good thing about shooting B&W photos though: I tend to notice things like that more, and it should force me to become a better photographer, which is the whole point.

I think I'm going to try experimenting with some color tints on my still lifes, just to give them a bit of flavor. We'll see where this goes.

More RAW Monochrome Still Life

2010-02-23T06:20:00.000-07:00

I have fallen in love with another specific form of photography. Monochrome still-lifes. Monochrome in general is so lovely when I have the flexibility of RAW. I've noticed a HUGE difference.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/11
Shutter Speed: 0.6 seconds
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 27 mm
Tripod

I'm not extremely happy with the composition on this. Lines, etc. become even more important than usual when you shoot monochrome, because there isn't color to distract your eyes. So in an attempt to mask some of the lines that are leading the eye in stupid directions, and just generally keep the focus on the center, I added a not-so-subtle vignette. It helped, but I still need to figure out better composition when shooting things like this.

I really like the contrast though, and the shadows behind the vases looks pretty good, as well as the kind of flare of light on the wood.

Man, Nature Macro photography is going to be so jealous.

First RAW Experience

2010-02-22T06:04:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago, I shot this still-life of some chess pieces I made over a year ago. While composing it, I thought it might look good in monochrome, so I went ahead and shot in RAW+JPEG mode. That way, I figured, I could try playing with the RAW file in Lightroom, and if I didn't like it I could always default to converting to monochrome from the JPEG in Photoshop.

Turns out I was right. It does look good in monochrome.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/6.3
Shutter Speed: 6 seconds
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 36 mm
Tripod

The Lightroom tools for monochrome are extremely intuitive, even when working in RAW. In fact, had I not known, I wouldn't have been able to tell that I was working in RAW. When I was happy with my result, I exported to JPEG. Just for comparison purposes, I did my best work on the JPEG with Photoshop to see if I liked that result any better. It wasn't even close. RAW is champion when it comes to monochrome. I couldn't get close to the amount of contrast I wanted without severe posterization.

My last step was just to experiment with a vignette in Photoshop until I liked it. There are a few things I feel I could have done better, and a couple of things I thought I wouldn't like, but turned out really good. The pawn isn't in sharpest focus. It's pretty close, but I should have been paying more attention when I set the shot up. The aperture could have been stopped down just a little more, to achieve the really distinctive hierarchy of levels of focus I was going for. And I didn't think the unfinished tops of the pieces would look good, but I think they add some character to the shot.

I may try a redux of this shot sometime with a more carefully set-up environment, etc. But now I know: for monochrome photos, don't bother with anything but RAW anymore.

Some Clarifying Portraits

2010-02-20T16:00:00.002-07:00

I ran amok yesterday at the debate tournament. It was distributed over the whole school, so the atmosphere of the whole day was pretty relaxed. In all, I took about 250 photos with the Yearbook's XSi. Lots more learning experiences.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/9
Shutter Speed: 1/25
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 53 mm
Monopod

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/9
Shutter Speed: 1/50
ISO: 100
Focal Length: 55
Monopod

Portraits with REAL focal lengths > portraits with the PowerShot. Can't wait to shoot my Prom group's pictures. 55 mm on the Rebel XSi's sensor is about 88-90 mm 35 mm equivalent. Which is right in the middle of happy portrait land. So, even more so now, I'm really excited!

Adventures with a Canon Rebel XSi

2010-02-20T08:10:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned yesterday, I borrowed one of the Yearbook staff's Rebel XSi's. I needed it to shoot photos for my article today, but you didn't actually think that was going to prevent me from using it for my own personal use yesterday, did you?

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/5.6
Shutter Speed: 2 seconds
ISO: 200
Focal Length: 55 mm
Monopod

From this one shot, I've learned a LOT of things about the camera, and how it differs from my PowerShot.

-This was taken with the kit lens. The KIT LENS! That means I can do pretty satisfactory macro work with the lens it comes with. Even better though, is my dad's f/2.8 macro lens that goes 1:1 and is compatible with the EF-S mount on the XSi.
-The aspect ratio of this camera is different from that of my PowerShot. It's a little wider, or possibly just not as tall. But when you have 12.2 megapixels, cropping to fit a monitor won't be a problem at all.
-I feel like the camera is more stable in my hands than I do with the PowerShot. I used a monopod for this photo. Granted, it was in an excellent position of support. But I can't conceive of using a monopod with my PowerShot and getting even usable results at 2 seconds.
-The DoF on the Rebel is a whole different beast. I've come to the conclusion that the really small focal lengths involved with my PowerShot are what really hurt my DoF. I could shoot a landscape at f/2.6 on my PowerShot and have trouble distinguishing it from the same photo at f/8, because the differences in DoF really didn't become apparent until I was very close to my subject. With these longer focal lengths, I have much more fine-tuned control over my DoF.
-This picture didn't involve the flash, but I did play around with it a little. That bugger charges really fast. Like, REALLY fast. Like, I can shoot it in burst mode and still get more frames/second than my PowerShot without a flash.
-Oh man. I'm excited to get my own.

Fun with Light and Framing

2010-02-19T15:12:00.001-07:00

I was upstairs yesterday when I noticed the light was coming through a window pretty horizontally and shining off our chandelier. When I got everything set up to take the photos, I noticed that various parts of the walls, ceiling, etc. were creating symmetrical natural framing at the angle I was shooting at to get the sun's reflection.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/5.5
Shutter Speed: 1/60
ISO: 80
Monopod

So I'm pretty happy with this photo. I cooled down the temperature a bit in Photoshop, because I like the facets of the glass when they're a cyan-ish blue. I also had to clone out some gross cobwebs. I guess you don't notice them until you're photographing them.

In other news, I borrowed a Canon Rebel XSi from the yearbook class at my school to take photos for my article in the upcoming issue of our school paper. I mostly borrowed it to try it out. Holy cow. I can't wait for mine to get here.

A Confusing Portrait

2010-02-18T15:38:00.002-07:00

So despite the fact that I believe I had excellent lighting, (overcast, and not 12-noon sun positioning) I'm not completely satisfied with how these portraits turned out.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/2.6
Shutter Speed: 1/500
ISO: 80Tripod

Despite the fact that I purposely put the background elements way far back from the subjects, and shot at a very wide aperture, my background absolutely refused to blur. This could just be because of my super short focal length (because the camera I used for this isn't DSLR, my focal length was actually 5.8mm, though I think the small sensor size makes it appear longer). Other than that, I have no freaking explanation.

Pretty frustrating, but within about a week, I'll have my Rebel XSi and P&S focal lengths will be a non-issue.

If any of you more experienced photographers have any kind of advice on how to make these better, please share. I still consider myself a total portrait noob.

A Perfunctory Day

2010-02-17T22:23:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone. Sorry about the late post. I try not to treat my blog in a perfunctory way, but I refuse to miss a day of posting just because I didn't get a good photo for the post.

I actually did take some portraits today, but I'm going to get permission from the subjects before posting them.

Anyway, here's today's humble submission, for your consideration.

click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr
Aperture: f/2.6
Shutter Speed: 1/30
ISO: 80
Gorilla Pod

Yes, it's a frosted mini-wheat. I'm happy with the white-balance setting on my camera. I used "manual" and set it using a piece of paper. The shadows I'm not so happy with. But the focus is good, and the image is crisp!