Category Archives: Photography

Related to Photography and taking or dealing with pictures.

Don’t take photos here

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This has me a little freaked out. A local Minnesotan was out taking pictures at Lamberts Landing in St. Paul and was taken aside, cuffed, given a citation, and told he couldn’t come near the area for a year! This is MNkiteman’s picture on flickr. That’s nuts. Oh yea, they deleted some of his pictures too. This discussion on flickr started out with a different story about paranoid security officers, but MNkiteman chimed in with more of his story as well. I am sure that this is all about increased security concerns over the republican national convention in early September, even more than what seems to be typical post 9/11 paranoia. It’s getting tiring, and a little scary.

I run by this location when I run at lunch. There is sometimes a tug parked there, and it looks like it could make for some interesting pictures. I keep thinking I need to check back with my camera. Maybe not.

D90 Rumors

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It now seem quite likely that we will see a D90 in September. There is an author that writes field guides that has a post on Amazon about the D90. He claims to know a price, and has a whole page devoted to specs for the new camera. These specs are what I have seen other places, so I don’t know who posted first. They are appealing though. 12 Mpixel, Live View, Video???, Larger LCD (over D80), 4.5 fps, GPS and HDMI ports. Sounds cool. I am starting to print some things larger, so I would like some more pixel room for cropping. Live View would be cool, and 4.5 fps would be a big improvement over what I have with the D40. I guess we wait and see what the real deal is…

MN State Fair and Tripods

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I figured that the State fair would turn away people with tripods, but I wanted to find out for sure. I buzzed around the site and found Press Room link that had a link to Photography and Videography Guidelines (pdf). It makes no mention of tripods. So I called the marketing department number at the bottom of the page. What I got was the most honest and realistic, and potentially frustrating policy yet. “It depends.” What I was told was that you have to be able to carry everything. So no light stands and such. Tripods are OK if they are used in areas that have lower traffic (find one of those at the fair!) and you may be asked to move along if set up in a spot that is busy. This sounds like a fair compromise if it works. But it does leave the discretion to the roving staff at the fair. I think I will try to go one week night this year by myself to take pictures. I will let you know how it goes.

Printing from WHCC

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I have used WHCC to print things for awhile. I have a friend that used them to print standout’s and other large prints, but I had only used them for 8×10’s primarily. So, I decided to go a little crazy. I had several pictures of flowers printed to fit in 10×10, 4.5×4.5, and 5×7 frames. (Weird Ikea sizing) We picked the ones we liked together and put up a collection in the livingroom. They came back great.

Next I had a picture of a window printed in a 16×20 poster on standout. It came back awesome. (outer border not on print)

Window Poster

Then I also had a picture of the girls printed as a 11×14 gallery wrap. Yeesh, those are expensive. It is canvas stretched over a frame, with the image wrapping around the frame. Wow, does that look cool.

Hand in Hand

All in all, I am impressed with White House Custom Color. The prints, standout and gallery wrap all came back very well done. They are packed impeccably, and upload to receiving is ridiculously fast. They usually fulfill the order the day you submit. One of my orders was even shipped that same day. Nice.

Noise Ninja for Aperture

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The gold standard for noise reduction in images is Noise Ninja. Aperture’s noise reduction tools are not the greatest, so it is pretty exciting to learn that Picture Code has released an Aperture Plug-in. Just one more thing to add to my list to buy. They have profiles for individual camera’s that enables the plug-in to get great results without a lot of user input after selecting a profile. Check out the before/after page, the images taken with a D70 (I have a D40) are very good. It would enable me to feel better about shooting at 1600 ISO inside.

The Moment it Clicks

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I have been reading The Moment it Clicks by Joe McNally. This is one great book. This book is a little different than others. Every two page spread is a story about a picture, and the picture. There are some great pictures, and an amazing amount of stories. Some have critized the book for not giving the exact focal length, F-stop, shutter speed, and all the other setting you would need to recreate the image, but that is not the point. Each story/picture has a point. It may simply be “don’t leave a window dark”, or “shoot now, don’t try to shoot tomorrow” wrapped into an amazing story. There are a few, I shot with this or that F-stop, but it is the context of the story that you need to get.

This guy is into light. Lots of strobes and small flashes going off. I have heard bloggers joke about wanting Joe’s lighting bag, and now I know why. Almost every picture involved placing flashes in several places around the image. I don’t see running out to buy 4-6 SB-800‘s anytime soon.

Photo walk

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Photo walks are kinda fun. I have only been on one, with the Twin Cities group from flickr, on a night walk. It was nice to hang out with other photographers and see what they were taking pictures of.

I see that Scott Kelby is organizing a Worldwide Photo Walk. That would be fun. Currently there is no one from the Twin Cities that is leading one. Too bad. Maybe someone will sign up to lead one before Aug 23, the date of the walk.

Moo (new) Business Cards are coming

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I ordered a set of business cards from Moo. I had been trying to figure out where to print my cards with a photograph on them (not just 4 color), and wasn’t really finding anything. Thought I would give them a try. You can link right from your flickr pictures and re-crop them in the web app, but I decided to make new images resized for the cards without my name on the front – I put all the text on the back. I ordered one set of 50, and submitted 8 different pictures. Here are a few of the ones I used. (I am showing the flickr images)

I just added this sunset pictures on flickr.

Montana Sunset

I could only use the front grouping of the trucks. Not really sure how it will look.

Backward Mack

I had to modify the crop on the apples to get it to fit on a card.

Green Apples