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It was unusually smokey in town on Thurs. and Fri. of last week. I found out today that there is a forest fire in the Kamloops area of British Columbia. As unfortunate of an event as that is, it did make for a pretty cool sunset the other night at Patricia Lake. This was a pretty easy composition for me. My main point of interest was the light on the big cloud above the mountains, and the smoke in the air. I composed with the shore line just above the center of the image so that there wasn't too much dead space above the mountains, and used the reflection to show what else was in the sky. I also had on my polarizer, which is usually used to cut reflections, but in this case I used to get the most reflection I could, a 2 stop Neutral Density filter was used as well to balance out the exposure between the lake and the mountains and sky. Happy shooting!
Quite literally! I guess this past week I have been shooting a lot of "motion" shots. I didn't really realize until I picked a few shots for this post and thought..wow, out of the past five days, three of them I've shot photos that depict movement or motion....interesting. So in light of these ideas, I know proclaim this week "Speed Week"...in my world anyhow. I set up the skateboard shot on Monday, first I found some fresh pavement so that the ride would be as smooth as possible, then I set my camera to Aperture Priority, chose an F-stop that allowed me to have a shutter speed that would be less than 1/10 of a second..and then I just fired away until I found the composition and blur that I liked. Finished it off in post with some contrast to the pavement and clouds, then converted to Black and White..and done! Next!!
The train shot was fairly simple as well. Same scenario as above, but I just panned with the train as it sped by. In an ideal world I would have liked to get at least part of the train in focus, but I think my shutter speed was a bit too slow for this attempt, and the whole thing is pretty blurry. I still like the shot though, the colors and composition make me smile. Enjoy!
Photos: Nikon D90, 10.5mm f/2.8, 17-55mm f/2.8
I saw a photo this morning that reminded me of one that I shot last fall, shortly after I got my 70-200 f/2.8 lens, and I decided that I wanted to rework it to try a new technique that I've been playing around with the past few weeks. I think I like it, but I'm not sure if the effect would work on all photos, I know I've found a few that were better off left alone. This one I like though.
Photo: Nikon D90, 70-200 f/2.8 VR
Well, there we go, the first whole week of 2010 is behind us. Hope everyone is off to a good start. My start has already had a little bump in it, but in terms of photography, I'm off to a good start. In my last post I mentioned that I'd be trying to do a "Photo A Day" project....so that started on Jan. 1st, and I've made it through the first week with little trouble. It was cold trying to take a few pics outside, but I toughed it out and get done what I wanted...with a few mistakes, but we'll call them lessons...and now I've only got 51 weeks left!! If I do keep this up I'll definitely take way more photos than I did in the past year, and that wasn't a small amount. At this rate we're looking to break over 30,000 or more shots this year. I know some pros can shoot that in a couple trips, but I don't think my camera was built for that, and I've got a job to, so that keeps me inside sometimes. For my 365 Project I started a Flickr page. You can find that right here, and keep tabs on me for every once in a while to see if I'm slacking off or not. I hope to learn a fair bit through this project, and get to play with some fun gear too! I posted a bit of an "outtake" from my Day 1 shoot. I got to put my new Lastolite Ezybox Hotshoe to good use with this shot. I put my SB-900 in the Ezybox just to the left of the camera and about a foot higher than my head, the SB unit was @ 1/4 power to light me, and I placed another SB unit camera right and just behind me with a blue gel on it for some rim light. I had fun with this and I'm pretty pleased with the result.
Yesterday I drove my wife to work and then headed south of town to catch the end of the sunrise. All I had with me was my camera and wide angle zoom lens, and a tripod as well. I stopped near the Athabasca River and ran out to the edge of the ice, in about a foot of snow, in my skateboard shoes and sweatpants... I know, I wear some real technical clothing when I go shoot. I spent enough time to fire off about 100 bracketed frames in a few different compositions, and this is the one I liked the most. Not bad for being totally unprepared and under dressed for the -24 Celsius weather.
Photos: Nikon D90, 17-55mm f/2.8
Had some free time today (a little too much actually), so I did what I usually do on slow days.... browse the internet for all kinds of photo stuff to inspire me and hopefully get my off my @$$! So I was browsing the Strobist Flickr Group and did a search for Bokeh. If you're not sure what that means...go here. It's a really cool effect, when you actually figure out what it means and how to use it!! It works best with high end, fast glass, like the Nikon 50mm f/1.4, which I just so happen to have. By the way, this is probably one of my fav lenses, it's super, super sharp and produces some awesome color and contrast. So I went ahead and set up a little candle studio in my hallway, and went to work. It took a couple tries to get the flash power right, but after two test shots I had it down. It was then time to set up everything properly, once that was done I just shot a bunch of frames and called it a night. The photo above has been slightly tweaked in post, I added a few Hue/Saturation layers and changed the color of a few of the candles.
Here you see the original shot, still pretty cool (I think), but the color adds a bit more fun and creativity to the picture. Tech stuff...SB-900 @ 1/128 power on tripod camera left about 35 degrees to candle. Put a green gel on it to add a slight green highlight on the candle. Camera was in Manual focus so I had a complete control over focus. I'll most likely play with this more in the future, check back for some updates!
Photo: Nikon D90, 50mm f/1.4
Just as I was getting excited for and soaking up some nice fall weather...SNOW!! Blam, just like that, it's over, winter is here, 8 long months until the sun does anything more than light up the earth! Okay, so maybe that's slightly dramatic, but I'm not a huge fan of cold weather. It has made for a few interesting photos, so I'll take that, but winter is long around these parts of Canada. I think I'll have to embrace it a little more this year and keep my creativity flowing and hopefully grab a few new photos to add to the constantly growing collection. The photo here is from my wildlife adventure I had this past Monday at Maligne Lake, I took this before seeing the moose. I waited around the shoreline for a little while to see if the clouds would clear, but no luck. I first processed the shot in Photomatix Pro, it was my usual three frame bracketed exposure of -2/0/+2 EV. I didn't like the color version, so I went with Black and White so concentrate a little more on the smaller details of the photo.
Photo: Nikon D90, 17-55mm f/2.8
So last week I got out to shoot on Monday morning only to find myself uninspired by landscapes and very draw to wildlife photography. So who would have thougth the same thing could happen again one week later? Not me, but that's exactly what happened. I left the house at 7am yesterday, ready for what looked to be a hopefull sunrise. The coulds were clearing East of town so that's where I planned to head, until my plans were dashed by an accident which closed the road for a few hours. So instead I headed to Maligne Lake again to see if I could catch a nice sunrise with the new snow on the mountains. It has been close to -18 degrees celcius here the past few nights, so there has been a fair but of snow falling up high. As I got closer to the lake the clouds set in and I didn't get a sunrise at all. I took a few shots of the boat house which is now closed, then decided to walk a little up the lake to try and find something cool, which wasn't too hard, within minutes I almost literally ran into three Moose!! I was playing with my camera and walking and looked up too see this moose staring at me from about 100ft away!! AWESOME!!
I shot with these guys for about 45 minutes then went down the road and shot a few frames of the fresh snow on Medicine Lake. Like I said last time, my wildlife photography needs work, but it's definitely something I want to work on for the future. I find I'm like a tourist again, driving around waiting on the side of the road for Elk, Bighorn Sheep and other animals...funny how that happens.
The moose photos were pretty simple, I usually keep my camera in Aperture Priority, and let it choose the shutter. Due to the low light I was shooting almost wide open on the 70-200 here, around f/4.0 I think. The landscape was really easy, three frame HDR to get all the detail in the trees and add a bit more contrast that usual. Shot this one at f/22 to get maximum DOF, shot bracketed frames at -2/0/+2 EV. I did the same shot in a single frame with a Graduated Neutral Density filter and I'm undecided which one I like more. Maybe in the next few days I'll post both so people can see the differences between the two shots and you can decide which you like more. More to come later....
Photos: Nikon D90, Nikon 70-200 f/2.8 (moose), 17-55 f/2.8 (lake)
Things have been busy in my neck of the woods these days, and I mean REAL BUSY!! All of the crazy and stressful planning my wife did for our wedding was all put to the test during the wedding week, and it could not have gone any better. She did an amazing job of keeping both families on track and had lots for everyone to do and see. I give her 100% credit for everything that happened during that week, my job was to be at the ceremony on time and that was it, and to make it more sweet I was actually a few minutes early!! WOW. So after all that fun with the families and lots of activities, everyone was gone as fast as the arrived, and we were left as a newlywed couple ready for our first adventure as husband and wife. And what was our first adventure you may ask? Very simple...GET A VEHICLE!! Man did we need some wheels. So after a few days research we rented a car and drove to Calgary to check out a few vans. We ended up getting the main one we went down to see, a 2002 Chevy Astro. Man am I stoked. We used to own a GMC Safari a few years back and I built a bed/couch in the back so that when we traveled we could sleep in the van at night and didn't have to set up the tent or get a hotel room. It is definitely one of the best ways to road trip and I can't wait to get back on the road to explore some new places to shoot photos and get back out climbing again!
So I leave you with two photos today, one of the Calgary skyline from 15 Ave. We stayed at a friends condo in the downtown area and we had access to the roof, so I shot a few photos before heading to sleep that night. Pretty simple 3 exposure HDR, all exposures were pretty long. Processed it in Photomatix Pro and that's about it. The second photo is not mine! Two great friends of ours shot photos at our wedding, this one is from Jeremy Salisbury who was also a Groomsman as well as the photographer, and when he had to be in a photo his partner Lisa shot photos for us. They both did an amazing job and I couldn't have asked for two better people to do the job, they were awesome!! Thanks guys!!
Photos: Nikon D90, 17-55mm f/2.8 (top), Nikon D700, 17-35mm f/2.8 (bottom)
So in the last few weeks I have been storing photos to blog, in case I had ended up not shooting due to weather or just due to being to busy, but now I've been shooting almost daily, getting lots of photos I like, and I haven't been posting anything because I've also been working a ton too!! So I'm gonna try to post more frequently here in the next week or so, and try to get some new stuff up on the blog, and try to get out and shoot at the same time. We'll see what happens.
There was a bit of a "Car Show" in town today, only about 15 cars in a small parking lot, but there were a few that I really thought were interesting and caught my eye. Of course my first thought was HDR, and that is pretty much all I tired to shoot for all day. I only spent about 45 minutes shooting, but still came out with a few images I'm pretty happy with, so that makes it all worth it. Two of these are HDR that may be processed a bit too much, but I'm happy with what I've got for now, I've only made minor color and contrast adjustments on them for now, but when I'm ready to print, I'll do some more work in photoshop and make sure that they're top notch.
I tried a new technique on the image of the black car, I added a massive amount of contrast to the whole photo, and than ran the "high pass" filter on the image to give it a whole new level of "pop"....it's more like a "bang" in my eyes, but I can live with that for now.
Photos: Nikon D90, 17-55mm f/2.8, 10.5mm f/2.8
Well, the past 24 hours have been quite productive for me in a photographic sense. For the past few weeks I have been reading about off camera flash, and considering buying a flash to add to my camera bag. So I was in luck when I found out a co-worker of mine has an Nikon SB-800 and said I could borrow it to try it out. I am an avid reader of the Strobist web site, and last week there was a really cool video on how to use off camera flash to capture water drops. So for my first attempt at off camera flash, this is what I chose to try out.
Now the possibilities of off camera flash spread WAYYYYY beyond lighting water drops, but this is for sure an awesome application of the technique, and I was pretty happy with some of the results I got in the first tries.
For my first few tries I had the flash at about 1/32 to 1/64 power and pointed it at a colored background. This proved some decent results, but then I thought I'd try to change my camera to Auto FP (High Speed Sync) so I was able to shoot at sutter speed into the 1/1000s of a second. This produced the results that I've posted here and my pics from the day. I plan to borrow a Macro (close-up) lens in the next few days and I'm interested to see the results from that as well.
Needless to say, I'll be buying a flash sooner than I thought I would be!!
Photo: Nikon D90, 50mm, SB-800
So here we are again, a couple days off and more bad weather...don't get me wrong, I really don't complain all the time, and I actually could have put up with some rain this week, I wanted to work a few street scenes in the rain, but of course, I woke up yesturday morning to AT LEAST 6 inches of snow on the ground!! Wow, I know we live in the Rockies and the weather changes every day, but Spring sure has been delayed this year!
On a very good note, the slightly displeasing weather caused me to go through some older images from the past few months, I created a few presets in my software and cleaned up some files on my computer that seemed to have no sense of organization. So it has been a productive few days. It's back to the ol' 9-5 tomorrow..or lets make that 10 to 9...I have started a second job so I'll have some extra cash over the summer. Getting married costs money, and I currently don't have a lot of that, so it's time to work my butt off for a few months, then relax and hopefully have lots of time for photography over the fall and winter!
On the old photo revival note, this image is of a church in Reserve Mines, NS. I shot a wedding during my Christmas Holiday in Nova Scotia, and this was the church where the wedding was held. I think i shot this after the wedding while waiting for the bride and groom. It is a three shot HDR , shot handheld, and processed in Photomatix Pro. I originally did it as a color image, and you can see that on my website here. I do like the original color image, but I have been wanting to play with textures lately, so today my motivation finally came about and I made this. It was pretty easy acutally, I simply converted the color image to a sort of nostalgic old time look, and added the texture layer on top and changed the "blend mode" to overlay, and presto...there you have it! Maybe next week I'll get my rain and put my ideas to work in town with some rainy street scenes. Who knows?!?!?!
Photo: Nikon D90, 17-55mm f/2.8
