More Bird Photography

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.

Creative Portraiture

"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.

New York Style Tilt-Shift

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

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

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

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!

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.

Tilt-Shift Photography, Part I

Tilt-shift photography is usually accomplished using a specialized lens type that I don't have. Fortunately, the effect can be faked. What it does is take a large landscape type image, and use blurs to trick your brain into perceiving it as a scale model. It's a lot harder to explain with words than with pictures, so here you go.



click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr


I faked that image in Photoshop; it really is just a picture of a street in New York from a high vantage point. As you can see, I didn't do a perfect job on it—if you look up faked tilt-shift pictures, you'll find ones that are done much more convincingly. This group on Flickr, for example, has a number of excellent shots.

There are a number of ways to fake tilt-shift photography, none of which I want to explain. There are tutorials out there for Photoshop, but the easiest way is to just use Tilt-Shift Maker. I've never tried it personally, but I've seen an image that came out of it, and it was quite well-done.

Feel free to leave me feedback, especially constructive criticism (that goes for all my posts; it's why I started this blog). And if you have a great tilt-shift picture to show the world, post a link to it in the comments!