This last weekend I went to take some pictures of Hanna and her friends for her Birthday. We had some cool locations, a few outfit changes, and got some fun pictures. I will have more later, including some about how the images were lit. We did some inside on black seamless too. For now, these two will have to do.
I arrived at Wood Lake Nature Center before the sun started to set, but not by much. I did find some interesting shots as I walked around. There were a few ducks and geese, but not as many as I expected.
The reflections on the water of the dried grasses and the low light make for a pretty cool shot. Otherwise it is just a shot of a duck. Here it is just a shot of a duck on a cool reflection.
A long time ago I took a picture of a bolt on this same bridge. Probably not the same one, but I like the set up for this. It is shot with an aperture of 2.8 which sends the grass and trees in the background into a nice impressionistic color blur.
This time, shooting with a medium aperture of 5.6, the evening light on the reeds makes for some nice images. I didn’t stop the lens right down to 2.8, so that the background would show some definition.
Right when I was taking this a family walked by. They were having the darndest time trying to figure what I was taking a picture of. They kept looking into the distance, and back at me. Then one of the kids asked to look. I let them try to hold my camera with battery grip and the 70-200. I don’t think they ever saw anything through the viewfinder, but they happy to have tried.
Nothing much interesting happened with the sky that night. No clouds, no color, nothing special. I decided to use the sun reflected in the water instead. I also warmed the white balance up a bit to get the gold color like the other images.
Last weekend I went to the Wood Lake Nature Center in Richfield. I took quite a few shots, but I have been sick the last few days, and just didn’t get around to getting a post up. Here is the first of the images from that little outing. These are all of this little bird. It is mostly black with just a little red color on it’s wing. Smaller than a crow. This is the Red Winged Black Bird.
I went as the sun was going down, and I only saw a few people. I soon had the place all to myself.
There are paths that navigate the entire lake, and a floating foot bridge that crosses the middle of the lake. This is a great place to take pictures. I even saw a muskrat around the the bridge, but couldn’t get a picture.
This bird species, some ducks, and a few noisy geese were the primary animals I saw.
For those that know me, don’t worry, I did get some pictures of ducks. I will post them later.
This isn’t the first Cardinal I saw, or heard this season, but it is the first that I tried to capture via lens. I admit that I really don’t have the lens for capturing an animal this small, and I had to crop this a fair bit, but it still looks pretty good.
One good reason to shoot early in the spring is the lack of leaves on the trees. These guys like to hide in the trees, not out at the edge. Even in this picture, I still have a shadow on the singing bird, even with the lack of leaves.
I had some strawberries in the fridge, and I thought I would take a shot at taking photographs of them. The leaves are a little past perfect form, but they worked. For all of these shots, I shot near a window with lots of indirect light. I used no flash. A bit different for me, but thought it would be a good exercise. I also had two kids hanging around wanting to spray things with the spray bottle of water I had out.
The shot above has the berries on a low table out a few feet from the window, so that I could fit between. There is a white poster board with a sheet of Plexiglas on top. The reflection is not very evident with the white background, and that is what I was looking for, so I switched to black.
Now we have black poster board, with the Plexiglas on top. I lowered my angle a bit on this shot too. I like the reflection here. You can also tell just how important (and difficult) it is to get the Plexiglas clean. I could get that in Photoshop, but for this exercise, I didn’t feel like it. I then wondered what it would be like to bounce some light in from behind with the white poster board.
This is still the same black poster board with Plexiglas on top, but the color that we got from them is quite a bit different when we added the white reflective surface from behind. I am not sure which on I like better.
One thing I would do different next time, is go for more depth of field. I would need to get more than the f/4 that I used. To do that, I would need a tripod. I was being lazy. These shots are using ISO 400 and 500, with shutter speeds of 1/45th to 1/15th of a second. That is really to slow to hand hold, especially if you wanted to get more depth of field.
This was just a quick project I did in between family activities. Next time, a tripod, and maybe see about lighting it with flash.
I was at Minnehaha Falls Park this last Saturday to take some engagement photos, but that fell through. I saw some guys go by on skateboards, one carrying a video camera, another a tripod, and I was intrigued. I headed over. I talked with Nick, the video guy, and he said I could take some stills, so I set up.
I was able to take some shots with no flash, but catching the guys going in and out of shadow from the pavilion wasn’t working. I set up a SB900 on camera as commander, and a SB900 as off camera remote. I really needed more light. Maybe using two, maybe adding some actual flash from the on camera light, but I had it directed at the off camera one. I didn’t use a softbox, just the bare light, sometimes gridded with a Honl grid. Neither worked great, because the beam of light was fairly narrow. The guys didn’t always jump from the same spot, and I wasn’t on a tripod. Sometimes I got a good flash, most of the time, I didn’t.
That image worked pretty well with the flash, but I still needed to lighten him a bit with the adjustment brush in lightroom. I needed bigger light, or more speedlights. This shot is with the skater coming from dark into sunlight. To make him pop I needed something more.
Also, I was using my 17-55 f2/8 lens, most of the time at f/4.0. Since I was relying on the camera’s dynamic autofocus, and the skater coming somewhat toward me, I wanted a bit of leeway in the focus plane. Unfortunately, at f/4 at wider apertures, I am getting tons in focus in the background. I took one image into photoshop to blur the background. Not sure if I like it, maybe I over did it, but he does pop.
I was also playing around with a gritty black and white look. I converted to B/W in Lightroom, and then added lots of clarity and grain, which is new in the Lightroom Beta’s. I think it kinda looks like old shool skate rags, but that could also be wistful thinking.
I took a ton of shots, and came away with about 30 that I posted. I was going to host them here, but really, I need a new section on this site to do that, so for now, I decided to post the images on Flickr in this Skate set. I’ll probably get them hosted here soon. I also put a few on Facebook here. It should be a public album.
To the skaters, thanks for indulging me. I would be happy to get together and try again if you would like to. If you want to leave your name, I would be happy to give credit to the skaters in the images. Sorry, I really should have written those down. If anyone wants an image in B/W or color, let me know.
I also took a few bits of video on my D90, and want to get that into something. Check back in a bit.
Are you a photographer with a flash site? Do you know that the iPad, just like the iPhone, will not display flash content? What’s a photographer to do? Scott Kelby looked at this earlier today.
When Kelby first put up his flash portfolio, I decided to create a javascript only portfolio site to do the same thing. See my portfolio here, and my post here.
I think my code is successful, to a certain extent. It works great on the desktop, but doesn’t work as well on the iPhone, and I don’t yet know on the iPad. Need to try that out. Anyone that wants to comment about that, please do.
I think that my issue on the iPhone is the size of the images. I think they need to be smaller to save on bandwidth, and prevent the phone’s browser from having to scale the images so much. That may be the issue on Kelby’s site too, because his new non flash site didn’t work well on the iPhone either. His new portfolio is also a jQuery javascript site done by RC. It was too slow to be useable on my phone. I wonder if image size is the issue there to. Now his site was optimized for the iPad, not the iPhone, but I want mine to work on both. I will need to do some more testing with smaller images to see.
While in Winnipeg, I went to take some pictures of the Cathedral in St.Boniface with my sister Kathy as my model. Only thing was, there were no lights on the Cathedral. Easter? There was a service going on. Weird. Never figured it out. Luckily, as a resourceful photographer, I just turned around, and there was a nifty sunset going on. The picture above was the last of the images I took that night. I kind of wish I had taken some of Kathy with this much bluer (about tungsten) white balance, and gelled the flash, but I didn’t. So the auto white balance with the flash on is much warmer.
This, like all the images was shot in aperture priority, with the exposure compensation turned down two stops I think. I was using a 24×24″ lastolite softbox, in this case to camera left. A SB900 is inside with the diffusion dome on. The sky looks too orange really. Like I must have faked it. Also, I wanted Kathy to face the other way.
The bright orange is fading, and I am on auto white balance which may have shifted things. Also, the softbox is moved to the right, and I now needed to zoom to about 130 to get any light on Kathy. It still wasn’t quite enough, and I had to pop it up a bit in Lightroom. Decided that while the light was pretty good, the background could be better.
I moved up across a street and closer to the water, and even closer to her. I really like the light I got on Kathy this time, but the balance of the frame is not really there. Both Kathy an the bridge are on the same side, and there isn’t enough on the other side. She needs to move over.
I like the balance in this image much better. Kathy is positioned right in front of the cranes, so you can’t see them. Moved the flash to the other side. Still zoomed, maybe a bit much, but getting fairly good balance of light and shadow on Kathy. Look at her hair. I didn’t give her enough instruction about staying still in the long exposures were were getting. The flash freezes her face will, but the hair shows movement. Kind of interesting, but wishing I had taken a few more. The things you can’t see on the little LCD.
Anyway, I should have played with the light balance more, or at least brought Kathy back into the frame after I got the first shot shown in this post. The white balance is much cooler,and the image is not as underexposed. Oh well. Live and learn. Lesson: auto white balance isn’t always your friend.
I usually use White House Custom Color for my printing needs. I even use them for prints I make of my kids. I just love the way the pictures look from them. I have had standouts, large panoramas, 8×10’s, 5×7’s, canvas prints, and large prints of my landscapes that hang in my house. I have had a lot of things printed by them, but I had a new requirement recently.
I had committed to doing a silent auction that was a fundraiser for my kids school. I figured that only having some business cards there wasn’t going to be enough, I need to have some pictures. I wanted something bound, but didn’t want to go all out for a book. What I got from WHCC isn’t exactly a proof book. They sell those too, and they are a way to print multiple images per page. I figured bound 5×7’s would be nice.
I fired up their ROES software, and selected from the Catalog drop down, Thrifty Proofing 5×7. You can then just add images to your queue as you would for any order. The order you add them will be the order they show up in your book. Here’s a tip: If you want more two books, change the quantity of the individual images from 1 to 2, and in the special instructions box later on, indicate you want two books.
You can choose to have the images get a white or black border to them, but I just went with the full 5×7 images. Then when you select “Review Order” you will get to select how to make your book. You could choose to use Thrifty Proofing without getting a binding if you wanted. I chose to place the binding on the long edge, but you can do short edge as well. The coil binding is a $5 fee. I also picked the clear cover, but you can pick frosted.
One other thing that I did was to create a “cover image” with my name on it that I moved to the top of the order so it would be the first image. This seems like a wise thing to do, because there are no other markings on this book at all.
The other nice touch is that there is a heavy piece of black cardboard that comes after the last image. It really makes it feel much more like a book, and helps to protect your images.
Shipping is really fast, and you can always get a person there on the phone in short order if you have an issue. (Such as not knowing how to get multiple books) They always help me out.
I like this proof book. I would give it a try. I will probably get some others done at some point.
My kids like to go on a “night time walk.” That just means that we walk around the block at night. One thing we do that probably makes it the reason they like to go on the walks, is let them take flashlights. Right now, their favorites are headlamps that they got as presents from their aunt.
When we headed out on this walk, it was almost dark. Very little light, and fading fast. I still took my camera. I had a 50mm set to manual at f/1.8 and 1/45 second. I tried slower, but the kids move too much. The pics were too blury. I tried a couple of posed shots, but they didn’t go over well. I got “the look.”
It’s better to just let them play and see what you get anyway. I wasn’t looking for technically fabulous shots, but just some interesting moments of my kids on a walk. They don’t really walk by the way.
They pick up stones, walk on low railings/fences, jump, run, and splash in the puddles. Walking is just too boring. The great thing about this night was that it was warm, with piles of snow on the sides, and melted snow in puddles in the middle. All sorts of great things to do.
So, if you wondered at the beginning why we only go one block (maybe two on a very special night), now you know. One block can take quite awhile to get all the way around.
So get yourself some flashlights, and head out into the night. You don’t need to try for perfect exposures. Try using the light from the flashlights, the streetlamps, the house lights, etc. None of these pictures were taken with flash. The on camera flash can look a little harsh. Turn it down if you want to try to use it. There is actually quite a lot of light out there without it.