Monday, December 28, 2009

Icy Fog

This is not the interesting post promised on December 13. The results of the Vancouver 12x12 Photo Marathon won't be announced until January 16 2010, at the opening of the event's exhibition entitled "Raw Talent". I've learned that the first photo of my entry into the competition (for the theme "My entry number", which was 32) was an all black frame. I'm not sure how improper loading of the film would create this result (I would think an all white frame would turn up in that case), but I screwed up somehow. As a result, I am not in the running for the top honour of overall winner, but my 11 remaining photos are still in the running individually. I'm optimistic.

On my birthday, I got out for a brief stroll in the foggy frost (or frosty fog?) that was still lingering about mid day. Here's a photo from that excursion.



I wanted to capture the dull blanket of the fog. The relative clarity (a term used loosely in this case) of the foreground tree with those in the background captures that effect. Here, positioning is important. Ideally, I would liked to have been closer to the foreground tree and made it a bit clearer, but that would not have allowed a similar composition given the surroundings (the foreground tree's lowest branches are quite high, and there is a tall chainlink fence just below frame of the background trees).

Believe it or not, this is a colour photo. The fog is thick, and the trees are backlit, so the scene looks pretty much as it was when I stood there. I did fuss with the tone curve a bit to get a satisfactory amount of detail in the foreground tree's branches.

A few more photos from this outing can be found on my Flickr photostream, tagged with 'fog'.

Sunday, December 13, 2009

Interesting Post Coming Soon...

It's been a while, but that doesn't mean I haven't been taking photos. Last week, I bought a Nikon FE body for the Vancouver 12x12 Photo Marathon, which was yesterday. My next post will contain a discussion and some of the photos I took during the event.

Saturday, November 14, 2009

Morning Landscape Potpourri + a Sculpture

I've been doing a lot of reading and very little shooting lately. I got up early this morning to try another sunrise. I picked Stanley Park as the location, hoping to get the sunrise over Coal Harbour and Downtown Vancouver. After parking the car and starting along the seawall, I noticed a barge housing a large set of illuminated Olympic Rings (to my delight). This would be my subject.

It wasn't long after picking a location and setting up that 1, 2, and then 3 other photographers showed up. They were sporting some really fancy equipment, and looked like they knew their stuff. Although it's a little discouraging to think that I wasn't being original, I also took this as a sign that I was clever (or lucky) in choosing a good spot at a good time.

I experimented with a bunch of different compositions at pretty much every focal length to see what worked. The photo below, taken at about 6:50AM with a 28mm lens, is my favourite.



I noticed how quickly the light and mood changed. Reviewing my photos, I found as the sky got brighter, it also got grayer, the colourful reflections in the water diminished, and I generally found the cityscape to look less exciting under daylight than when illuminated with its own artificial light.

The following shot was taken looking the other direction (towards North Vancouver), with my 20 year old Nikkor 50mm lens.



After getting home and looking at the photos in more detail, I was amazed just how good this lens is. I had taken similar shots with my 18-55mm and 55-200mm zooms, and none of them comes close to looking as nice as this one does. The details are great, and I think the starbursts on the specular highlights look really cool. I should use this lens more often.

On the way out of the park, I saw some moored container ships. I wanted to fit as many of them in the frame as possible, without making them too small. The following photo, taken with a 66mm lens, is my favourite composition. I adjusted the tone curve to achieve maximum contrast in what was an original with a very small tonal range. I also heavily desaturated the photo (there's still a bit of colour left) to give it a mechanical, industrial feel.



Finally, I stopped in the west end at a public display of sculptor Yue Min Jun's Laughing Figures. I wanted to emphasize the rough, rusty texture of the metal. I used my 50mm and shot at f/1.8 and ISO 400 so that I could use a fast shutter speed. I ended up with many different shots that I quite like. Most of them feature a pure white background from blowing out the overcast sky, but for some reason I really like the out of focus apartment building as a background in the following photo.

Saturday, October 3, 2009

Jericho Sunrise

Went to Jericho Beach this morning to photograph the sunrise. It happened pretty fast, and I clicked away at various focal lengths, compositions and settings.

Noticed that my gear is dirty (could be the sensor), and that I sometimes get abnormal looking smears around the blown-out sun. Here's my favourite shot.



Apart from the usual tonal curve adjustments in Photoshop, I cheated a little and made use of the "Smart Sharpen" filter. Although I am generally in favour of trying to get a sharp photo at the time of capture, I should admit that I'm impressed with the result.

I was sharing the pier with a few guys tossing crab pots into the water. I wanted to get an action shot (a pot-toss shot!), and was loafing around nonchalantely waiting for the right moment. During that time I took this photo of smooth gradient of the water's surface. Never did get the pot-toss shot though.



Update (04/10/09): While checking out The Drift, I saw a photo in Vancouver Special by Shea W. Pollard. It's called The Deep End.

I like hers more than mine. The water has a lot more texture, and the photo is just really well executed. The sticker was $700 for what looked like a very nice 36"x36" print. I wouldn't dare say that it's not worth that much, but I can't help but wonder... if I made a nice big print of mine, what it would be worth?

Monday, September 28, 2009

High Key Portraits

I've been doing a bit of reading on studio lighting. In particular, a few things that got me excited were Snapify's series of One Light Portraits, as well as the numerous great articles on http://www.diyphotography.net/ (especially from Nick Wheeler). So, I decided to get my feet wet by attempting a high key portrait.

Unfortunately I don't have a studio, or even a space that could pass for one (e.g. garage, basement). I do have a very small dining room, though. My setup is shown below.



What I've got is a piece of matte finish bristol board, affixed to a Swiffer via sticky tack (bear with me now). It's roughly positioned above and at about 45 degrees to the subject. This serves as a reflector for my key light. I've got my speedlight sitting on the table, aimed at the bristol board. I've also got a white post-it-note stuck to the speedlight to give a little bit of fill. The camera is at the other end of the table, at the same height as the subject. I used a telephoto lens (70-90mm) to get a nice close up and to exclude much of the background. Unfortunately, I think the small space places a limit on the size of object which can be photographed. Here's what the results look like.





Aside from cropping, neither of these photos have been edited.

I ended up playing around quite a bit. Placing the flash at various distances from the reflector, and adjusting the flash zoom to change the contrast of the key light. Using other types of reflectors for the key light (a pizza pan, handheld mirror). After viewing the results up close, I can see that I didn't get the fill light quite right (notice the nose and eyelash shadows on the left side of the face.) As the setup picture shows, the flash is placed more or less directly in front of the subject. Combine this with way too small of a reflector (the post-it-note), and we get a wholly unsuitable fill. I should have moved the table (and flash) off to the left a bit, and used a larger reflector. I could even have widened the flash zoom, aimed the flash more towards the subject, and put a diffuser in front of it (perhaps a white quick-dry athletic shirt, or a couple of dryer sheets).

I'll definitely be doing some more experimentation with this in the future.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Santa Monica at Pre-Dawn

It's been far too long since my last post. Now that the summer is over and I have a bit more time on my hands, hopefully I'll be able to practice more regularly. Unfortunately, nothing special today. Here's a simple but pleasing shot of the pre-dawn sky above Santa Monica, CA, taken from Santa Monica Bay. The little white dot is the planet... Venus I believe.



This was taken at ISO 1600, f/3.5, 1/40s at 18mm. I believe the time was about 5:45.

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Kootenay Rafting

I went on a 4 day river rafting trip last week, and one of my objectives was to get some decent photos. I ended up keeping 103 in total. Here's a few that I particularly like.

Given that the trip passed through some pretty nice looking mountains, it would be a shame not to include a landscape shot. Here goes.

I chose this photo because of the trees in the foreground. I think they really stand out. I'm very happy with their sharpness, as well as the variation of tones and hues. I'm not sure how I managed to pull this off. The right lighting (bright sunlight above and to the right) as well as accurate focus were contributing factors. In processing, I mainly upped the saturation and contrast. Too much? You be the judge. I like it for now. Maybe next week I'll take another look and think it's too gaudy.

The next shot is my friend gearing up in his tent in the morning. Technically, I don't have much to say about this photo. I just like how it captures what I would call a camping mood. With the warm sunlight filtering through the tent fly, which frames the scene to give the impression that we're peering into the tent. He's happy, bright eyed and his hair is a mess. Ready for another day outdoors.


Had to give the stacked lens macro thing another try. Here's a flower about to bloom. I really like how the shallow depth of field causes the background to be a single wash of colour (I've also got a shot of a purple flower with green background). I don't really mind how much barrel distortion is going on. This was taken with my 18-55mm zoom set at 55mm, with my 50mm prime reversed on top of it.


Here's the trail of a jet that passed overhead. I think it turned out pretty crisp.

I believe I once heard someone say not to put things in the corners of your photos. The heck with them, I think it works out well here. I really like how the sunlight projects through the image, as if it's a spotlight aimed at the little cloud. Again, some may argue that the colours are overly saturated, and that the sky doesn't look this way when you look at it with your eyes. To them I say: your eye and my camera differ in how they see the sky, and this image is my camera telling your eye what the sky looks like in its opinion.

Lastly, here's a long exposure (6") near dusk of our raft pulled up on a bank of river rock.

The raft itself is a little unsharp. Either because of slight movement of my camera, or because the raft was moving a bit with the water, or both. Given that the rocks on the bank are fairly sharp, I'm guessing it was mostly the latter. I like the colours in this photo. Lots of grays, with a few small splashes of yellow and green. I think it gives the photo a tranquil (as opposed to depressing) feel. I left the saturation as is, and lowered the contrast to go along with this theme.

Friday, June 26, 2009

Macros

I had a friend tell me that I can reverse my 50mm prime lens for macro usage. While searching the web for an adapter that allows this, I found this post by David Chin on stacking lenses for macro use. He didn't use any special adapters, he just held his 50mm (in reverse) up against another lens. So I thought I'd give it a try.

I used my Nikkor 55-200mm zoom, attached to my camera body, with the 50mm reversed and hand held on top of it. I also used an off camera flash to get enough light to permit me to use a fairly short exposure time.

Here's a picture of a Panamanian coin, poorly focused.

To get a sense of scale, the eagle's wingspan is 14mm. I had the zoom set to 66mm here.

This is a moon snail shell. With the zoom at 66mm again.

The hole in the centre of the shell is about 0.5mm wide.

And here's part of a fax I received. The zoom is set at 200mm.

The 'e' is about 1.5mm wide.

Except for the fax, I cropped a bit out of each of these photos. As David Chin's article noted, vignetting is a problem. I noticed this especially with the shorter focal lengths. It wasn't so bad at 200mm. I used f/16 for the coin and shell, and f/25 for the text, in order to maximize depth of field. Unfortunately I can't control the aperture on the 50mm lens. It's set at f/1.8 and is stopped down by the camera right before the shutter opens.

Monday, June 22, 2009

50mm Prime

The 50mm f/1.8 lens I ordered on ebay is in. It's an older one (from the 80's), and although it has a bit of dust, I'm really happy with how it works. It's heavy (made entirely of metal), and the focus and aperature rings turn nicely.

I was in Seattle doing some sailing for the weekend. Here are a few pictures I took with the lens. Not much to say about them. Didn't really make many adjustments. Judging the exposure (given that my camera body has no clue what aperature the lens is set to) isn't as difficult as I thought it would be. I usually get it on the second or third guess. Focusing in some circumstances can be tricky, but this is something I imagine will come with practice.

Here's a picture of a lamp shade, one of the first pictures I took with my new lens.



And here's a picture of my mom having a snack on deck between races.



More to come.

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Sophie

I don't want to be one of those people who take hundreds of photographs of their pets, but our cat Sophie was napping on a pile of laundry today and the afternoon light was falling nicely on her side. Similarly to an older post of Chester, I used a long focal length (145mm) to get nice and close. I'm not too happy with the composition, with her body taking up most of the background. I had a hard time deciding whether to crop this out to have a final photo consisting of mostly face (the original composition includes all of her head and a bit of her ears). In the end I cropped it this way so that she has some space to look into.



A big challenge for me with this shot was getting her to be still enough. With such a slow lens (f/5), I couldn't really expose for any less than 1/13s. It took lots of repetition before she happened to be still enough during one of them.

Sunday, May 3, 2009

Garibaldi, Nairn Falls, and English Bay at Dusk

Wow, 2 months since my last post. Embarrassing. No excuses, just got a bit lazy. My interest has increased a bit over the past few weeks as I picked up Tom Ang's Fundamentals of Photography again. Also, last week I attended a meeting of PhotoClub Vancouver. Unfortunately, I did't get my act together enough to prepare a photo for their monthly theme (April Showers), but I did meet some people and learn some things.

Moving on, I have 3 unrelated photos to share in this post.

The first is a photo I took while snowshoeing in Garibaldi Park on New Year's day this year. I can't remember the name of the trail, but there's a few spots where a view opens up onto Squamish, and the light spilling through the clouds was just amazing.



I don't really have much to say about the capture. For post-processing, I did a ton of spot removal (didn't realize just how filthy my lens was), upped the contrast a lot to cut through the haze, applied a bit of luminance noise reduction to eliminate some of the grainyness in the clouds, increased the color vibrance/saturation a bit, and applied a slight vignette to make the tree-frame less distracting.

The second photo was taken at Nairn Falls (just North of Whistler) about 3 weeks ago.



I was experimenting with different shutter speeds to see which one would make the water look the most violent. I ended up going with 1/160. Any lower, and the water loses its shape and tends to look more flat. It was a sunny day, giving the rock some nice texture. Here, I was also extra mindful of focus accuracy and camera stability, which Tom Ang's book emphasizes as being essential to high quality image capture. At this level of magnification though, I'm not sure how much difference my efforts made. I did very little post-processing.

The third and final photo is for PhotoClub Vancouver's May theme: 1 second. I was driving to a friend's house just after dusk and noticed the lovely cloud patterns above me. My intention was to shoot the clouds and skyline, but once I arrived at a park overlooking English Bay, I noticed the sky's reflection in the windows of the waterfront mansions.



Again, I made a conscious effort to focus accurately and not jar the tripod. I think it was a mistake to focus on the clouds though, as the overall image would appear sharper if I had instead focused on the mansions. For post processing, a bit of luminance noise reduction, contrast, and fill light. I also increased the saturation and lowered the luminance of the reds, oranges and yellows to bring out the sunset.

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Rob at the Velodrome

I went over to the Burnaby Velodrome to practice some more remote flash stuff on moving subjects. Learning from my past trip to the Richmond Oval, I placed the flash ahead of the riders, right at about eye level. I also made sure to give it lots of juice.

This is my favourite shot from the day.



I had the same issues with composure and lack of autofocus points, but seem to be getting more skilled at tracking the subject in my viewfinder.

What I've done with this photo, that I haven't done in the past, is spent a lot of time making adjustments using Adobe Camera Raw. It's frustrating because I'm just wandering aimlessly through the controls, using a very subjective method of figuring out what changes are good and what are bad. I can improve in 2 ways: 1) thinking ahead of what look I want to achieve, and 2) applying a principled workflow. I think this will be something I will constantly need to improve on. For this particular photo, I aimed to desaturate and darken the track surface in order to emphasize the subject, while trying to retain natural skin tones. I made some luminance adjustments; bringing up contrast and recovering highlights, corrected lens vignetting, reduced noise (ISO 800), and did some minor sharpening.

Friday, February 20, 2009

Speed Skating (again)

Made another trip to the Richmond Oval. I had learned how to set my flash by following some formulas in the manual. I found this to be no better than trial and error, since any distance measures are guesses, and the amount of light required also depends on the subject. The number I had calculated turned out to be much too dim for what I was shooting, and the sad part is that I didn't clue in to this very well and ended up with some pretty lame shots. On the bright side, at least I know what the numbers on the my flash's display mean.

During the shooting, and after looking at the pictures on my computer, I picked up a few pointers.

Firstly, I now understand why a larger number of autofocus points is desirable. For example, I wanted to have my shots composed so that the entire skater is in frame, on the right side (with lots of room on the left to "look into"). I also want the focus to be on the face. With my measly 3 autofocus points, the best I could do was keep their bum in focus, and hopefully not cut off too much of their feet.

Secondly, dark lycra is hard to shoot against a dark background. Drawing attention to the subject in this situation is tough. Not surprisingly, all of my favourite shots ended up being of people who were not wearing dark lycra.

Thridly, I figured out that by not closing my other eye, I can simultaneously track the skater in frame while looking ahead to time the shutter release so that they are passing through the flash's range. It works somewhat reliably.

Lastly, position the flash so that the face is well lit. I had ended up placing the camera and flash as shown (experimenting with various elevations for both).



My reasoning was 2 fold: 1) I want the skater to be coming towards or past the camera, and 2) I want the flash to be far off camera because it produces interesting shadows. Unfortunately, what could have been some great shots turned out to be disappointing because of shadowy faces.

All said and done, my favourite shot is not of someone skating hard, it's of Matt being a goof. And I like it because the subject is well lit and sharply focused, standing out against the dim and out of focus background. I also think the low flash (in this case, on the floor) produced some interesting shadows, except for that annoying nose shadow. Notice the lack of dark lycra.



Update (03-03-2009): After learning some more features of Adobe Camera Raw during the processing of Rob at the Velodrome, I went back and did some retouching of this photo. The white balance for the subject was about 250K on the low side. I warmed up his skin, upped the saturation of the green, lowered the saturation of the ice, added some noise reduction and slight vignetting. What a difference!

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Speed Skating

I visited the Richmond Olympic Oval yesterday during open speedskating hours. They were nice enough to allow me access to the infield, where I practiced using my wireless flash trigger.

This was my first time really using it in practice, and I took a trial and error method. Being used to TTL flash metering, I was pretty clueless as to how to adjust the power and range of the flash (TODO: learn). One challenge was ensuring that the subject was in the flash's path when the shutter was released. I found the best way to do this was to take a photo of the ice, look at the area lit by the flash, and line that up with something on the far wall.

It was actually tougher than I had anticipated, especially since I was tracking a fast moving target while looking through a telephoto lens. I did manage to get one decent shot of Jen. I had to use ISO 400 in order to use an acceptable shutter speed for my lens (f/5). Remembering a tip from the National Geographic Photography Field Guide, I cropped the photo to leave space into which the subject can look.



I plan to become more proficient with the wireless flash by practicing at the Burnaby Velodrome... after I learn how to do manual flash metering.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Lightman Takes a Leak

I received a copy of Digital Photographer magazine for Christmas, which contains an article on painting with light. I had heard of painting with light where an object is "painted" with a non-strobe light during a long exposure (see here). The article in this magazine however, discusses directly exposing the light source to the camera, so that the photographer can draw with it. After reading the article, I crudely wrote "Hi!" in my mom's living room, not revisiting the technique until today.

Witness lightman taking a leak in my bathroom.


Although admittedly only slightly less crude than my initial "Hi!", and by no means a work of art, this photo helped me understand some of the basics of light graffiti. It's really a matter of planning. I found it best to draw each line using only one stroke, and plan the order of the lines to minimize misalignment. For Lightman, I found the following order to work the best: head, arms (down), wee wee, torso (up), legs (down), pee, pee splashes. Initially I had done the arms near the end and had trouble aligning them with the head and torso (which were done first). Expect a future post on light graffiti when I can spend a bit more effort on creating an image which is pleasing as a whole.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

New York

Whew, it's been a while. Shortly after my last post, I traveled to New York. Then to Seattle for Christmas, then to Victoria. Now that I'm settling back into my routine it's time to think about some photos.

I decided to pick a few of my favourite photos from the New York trip. While traveling to NY I had blazed through a lot of the National Geographic Photography Field Guide, and probably didn't remember much of it. So the following photos don't necessarily practice anything in particular that I have learned, but in the end turned out nicely (in my opinion).

The first is an entrance to the subway on Trinity Pl. and Rector St. I'm not really excited about the composure, but I'm very happy with how wet and dirty the surfaces look. That is what I was aiming for. I think the reason is that this particular entrance was exposed to very little outside light, and so the scene was mostly lit from the fluorescent lamp. I tried this shot with a few other subway entrances which were exposed to outside light (it was slightly overcast), with a far less interesting result.



The second is of the lobby of the Guggenheim Museum. The structure of the building is interesting, and I think I did a good job of capturing the scale by also including the people near the entrance. This is entirely by accident, as I had to set the camera on the floor and couldn't get my eye up to the viewfinder to see exactly what was in frame. A few other features that I like are the blurring of the people in motion, and the glare from the single spotlight aimed at the camera. Again, entirely by accident. What I don't like about this photo is the slice of ceiling at the top. The ceiling is an interesting structure, and this little piece of it kind of tells you it is there, but doesn't tell you much what it looks like, which I find a bit unsatisfying.



The last photo is not one of my top 3 favourites to look at, but I'm putting it here because it is an example where I set out to get a particular shot, and was successful. I am fascinated with the New York subway system. The thumping, screeching and grinding of the trains, the damp dark stations, and the characters you find there. Although I would have liked to capture more of the surrounding scene in this shot (perhaps with a secondary, static subject like a person), I think I did a good job with the train. It took a while to find the right shutter speed (1/3 seemed to be just right), to wait for the right train (there are 3 tracks, the first being too close and the last 2 being too far), and to get the timing right (using a 10 second shutter release delay, because I didn't have a cable release or remote with me).



The full photo set can be found on Picasa