Photostory (Class week 12/Final)

After much trial and error I was able to get a set of photos that I like. Shooting from six feet below my normal eye level took a little getting used to. I'm posting the images in order below. I had to compress the video too much in order to upload it and the quality has been greatly diminished.

Enjoy!

Yaya Emerson

Many of you knew my great-grandmother, Barbara Emerson. She passed this evening, surrounded by her family. She brought so many wonderful moments to all of us. I remember how she was able to make anyone smile, even at the worst of times. In that spirit I smile now, knowing that she is up there helping the big guy make the world a better place. 

We will miss you Yaya. I love you.

Of Cats and Beautiful Ladies

1/25 f/5.6 ISO 800 40mm 

After reading so much about calotype photography for a research project, I became interested in making my own. Unfortunately the chemicals are not easy to come by. Fortunately, I stumbled on a guide to making a digital calotype. A new-age twist on an old technique. 

This photo was taken without much planning. I just pointed my camera at her and she smiled. I didn't look through the viewfinder before I snapped the image, and I think that's the biggest problem with this image. I wish I had looked and stepped back a foot or so...

1/30 f/2.8 ISO 400 40mm

This is Mogs. Mogs is quite possibly the craziest cat on the planet. Unfortunately she likes to lie in dark places, requiring high ISO and shooting wide open. I was able to remove most of the noise from the high-ish ISO, but there wasn't much I could do for her ears... It kind of works though, bringing focus more onto her eyes.

Text and Clone (Class week 10 part 2)

This is Baby. While his age puts him far away from baby-hood, a traumatic experience as a kitten left him with severe PTSD and extreme skittishness.  He is terrified of almost everyone and views any movement towards him as a threat. In this image, while it looks like he is sleeping, he is actually pretending to be asleep. It seemed a fitting caption for him.

Top: Original.

I used the clone tool here to remove the top of the telephone pole and the power line running off right. I wasn't able to remove all of the pole so I ended up cropping the bottom of the photo a little. I'm glad I was able to remove what I did. The little bit of cropping worked ok, but any more would have taken too much away from the image.

Potential Photostory... (Class week 10)

These are the images I will most likely be using for my Photostory project. I'm not as happy as I thought I would be with some of them, so I may go out next week and take a similar set of images in a different location.

Fish Eyes and Oil Paintings (Class week 9 part 2)

Top:Original

This landscape shot has the fisheye filter applied to it. I used the filter to make the horizon look curved, exaggerating the curvature of the earth. This filter was fun to play with because it allowed me to alter the perspective of the shot without having to take it at a different focal length.

Top: Original

This picture was taken last winter while a friend was visiting from Singapore. I did a little extra editing with this picture. Before applying the filter I created a separate layer to apple it to. I made sure that the filter layer didn't cover my fried or the horse. I applied the oil painting filter to make the background look like a painting, while leaving the two subjects life-like. (You may have to enlarge the image to see this effect. Clicking on the image will show you full size.)

Forest Gnome (Class week 9 part 1)

This image is taken just south of Battery Park in Burlington. I used the dodge and burn tools in Phototshop to lighten the left side of the gnome and mushroom and darken the right side. I need a little more practice with blending the light, but I'm happy with the way it came out. 

This is the original image. 

I don't think I will be using these tools much. I can see how they can be used in portrait photography, but I don't do a whole lot of it. Still good to know how to use them though :)

Burning Skies and Flowers (Class week 8)

1/4000  f/5.6 ISO 800 35mm-85mm @ 80mm

This photo was taken from the observation tower at Burlington International Airport. This was one of the first pictures ever taken with my camera, before I really knew what I was doing. I completely failed at trying to catch the amazing sunset so I decided to make it look as, for lack of a better term, apocalyptic as possible. Unfortunately I messed up while saving this image and lost the original. I think I succeeded in my goal. I was able to pull out the red/orange of the sun in the rest of the sky while over-exposing the sun to the point that I think it looks like something exploding in the distance.

1/400 f/11 ISO 100 40mm

Original

When I saw these flowers I really wanted to capture how the yellow popped against the green behind them. By selecting the flowers and separating them from the background I was able to adjust the exposure and colors separately. Knowing how to select certain things and adjust them individually is going to make editing a much more pleasant experience. 

Select, Delete, Cmnd+V (Week 7)

This week we were tasked with using some basic, but fun, Photoshop tools to stitch two images together. This first one is an image I took of north beach with the sky replaced. I used a photo I took during Burlington's fireworks this year. 

Sticking with the 4th of July theme, I used another image of fireworks in this photo. The base is an image of my sister last Christmas. She took two large glass balls and, instead of putting them on the tree, wore them as earrings for the rest of the day. I deleted the balls and inserted a cropped down photo of a smaller firework. 

Land(Water?)scapes (Week 6)

This week is all about landscapes. With the weather the way it is this week and a big concert weekend I decided to bring my camera to the beach this afternoon to enjoy, if not the sun, the lack of rain.

0.3 f/16 ISO 800 40mm

This was taken looking looking towards New York from North Beach in Burlington. I took about twenty exposures till I was able to make the sky look like what I was seeing. Unfortunately the peaceful sky is ruined by the dark and gloomy, almost angry, lake. This is one of the situations where HDR processing may have helped, although I think that the dark water is just how it was looking. I think I might take the boat out sometime this summer and try to take another shot closer to the island. I hope to make it bigger while keeping the horizon in the same place.

Playing With Thirds (Week 5, Part 2)

Assignment number two this week is to take an image adhering to the rule of thirds and one that doesn't.

1/50 f/8 ISO 800 40mm

This is my cat, Cujo! I decided to play around with placing the third lines in different places. Cujo's eyes are crossed by the two vertical lines and the bottom horizontal line. I like this better that having his face off set to one side like the rule of thirds is usually used.

1/2000 f/5.6 ISO 200 35-80mm @80mm

This photo is centered, but it doesn't need the rule of thirds to make it look good. Because the tree lady is looking off to the right side of the photo and not directly at the camera it adds a depth to the photo that is usually hard to get on a centered photo.

1/50 f/8 ISO 800 40mm

This photo is the same as the first one but copped to the golden ratio (see my previous post). While it is essentially the same image, the added space around his head makes this one more appealing to me.

Breaking the Rules... Aesthetically! (Week 5, part 1)

This week in class we read a lot about the rule of thirds and were told to go out and post about something also we learned about composition. Having spent a few months before this class trolling the internet looking into how to take better pictures, I am very tired hearing about the 'rules' of composition.

Then I found an exciting post at The Digital Photography School. Break the ‘Rules’ of Photography and Take Stunning Images is a list of articles describing how the 'rules' we are taught should be used more as guidelines than as true rules. Seeing this article has shown me how I shouldn't throw out an image just because it isn't perfect technically.

Another article I found is closely related to 'breaking the rules.' I find the rule of thirds to be boring. I know it works, and have taken images where thirds have worked very well. But it always looked so overdone... Then I found this! Fibonacci's number (known as the golden ratio) is a number I have been fascinated with since I studied the Fibonacci Bunny Problem freshman year of high school. After reading this article, and seeing the examples pointed, I feel like I now have a way to use the 'rule of thirds' without getting that over-done effect that put me off before.

Check out those links and let me know what you think, especially about using the golden ratio. 

Compliments and Analogues (Class week 4 Part 2)

The second assignment for this week is to take two pictures showing Analogous, Complimentary, or Monochrome color schemes. I chose Analogous and Complimentary.

1/6 f/8 ISO 6400 40mm
I was looking for an old phone cord... Banana Phone jokes will have to wait

Unfortunately I was forced inside to take this evening's photos. In person the three yellows and the orange are very different from each other, showing the spectrum from the pure-ish yellow of the banana  to the orange of the blanket behind it.

1/6 f/2.8 ISO 1600 40mm

When I first think of complimentary colors I see a red flower against the green of its leaves. I decided I wanted to do something different. So I found my mom's Gumby figure and put him on a red towel. What makes me like this photo so much is because we will never know what he is looking at to give him that crazy eyed smile.

Three situations (Class week 4 Part 1)

One of our two assignments for class this week is to photograph the same subject in three different lighting situation. I knew the easiest way to do this was to find a subject I could move around. I pulled out two of my figurines and set out on my lighting adventure.

1/640 f/2.8 ISO 100 40mm

This was shot about midday under a very overcast sky. Using nature's best diffuser, clouds, I was able to capture a very evenly lit shot. While there are some shadows they are not overwhelming.

30.0 f/2.8 ISO 1600 40mm

Twelve hours later I went back outside and shot these guys at night with no flash or dedicated light source. Night time photography has been something I have been experimenting with since I get a tripod. Really cool thing s happen when the shutter is open for 30 seconds :)

0.6 f/2.8 ISO 400 40mm

This last image was taken about ten minutes after the previous one. For this shot I used a large mag-light to shine a 3/4 front light on the figures. While not as well lit as the first photo this one is much better than the second. Colors are more visible, even though things are a little over-exposed.

And now for the bonus round!!

This is a heavily processed image. I'm not even sure what the settings are anymore...

Light painting is something I have wanted to try for a while. This being a week of assignments based on light, I figured I would give it a shot. It could use a little more work, but I think the effect is there. I used this figure because Zoroak (a Pokemon) is supposed to be the master of illusions and I thought this effect looked very illusionist-like.

HDR: Fountain Lady

For those that don't know, high dynamic range (HDR) imaging is when multiple differently exposed images (usually an odd number) of the same subject are combined to make one image. A more complete overview can be found here.

HDR of three images, exposed at -2,0,+2

I've always wanted to try HDR imaging, and I'm glad I did. I spent about 5 minutes taking pictures of this fountain trying to find a good combination of shutter speed and aperture that would expose the fountain and the sky. Then I remembered HDR. I set my camera to bracketed exposure on aperture priority mode. Three RAW files, 15 minutes in photoshop later and I have a photo where you can see exactly what I saw that day.

Here are the three images I used to make the photo above.

  

Austin Moth(?)

1/1000 f/2.8 ISO 100 40mm

I'm pretty sure this is a moth but I've never seen them so active during the day. Maybe it's a Texas thing? This was taken at the Zilker Botanical Gardens in Austin. This place was beautiful. Being able to walk around and see so many different flowers, many of which wouldn't be able to grow in Vermont, was amazing. If you ever have the opportunity to visit, I highly suggest it.

On to the technical. The more I look at this the more I realize that I need to stop my aperture down one or two clicks. f/4 would have let in plenty of light, while allowing me to capture the entire flower in focus, something f/2.8 didn't quite manage.

All Things Macro (Class week 3)

This week we had to walk around with our cameras in macro mode. After living in manual mode or aperture priority mode for so long I will admit this was a struggle for me.

I'm not going to try to list the settings for all of these...If you want to know how one was shot, let me know.

Ok. So these may not be true macro photos. The challenge for me this week was getting up close and personal with my subjects. I think that if I cropped some of these down I might be able to get closer to true macro, but my trusty 40mm won't focus close enough for in camera macro.

Anyway, I like how the collage came out. I wish I had taken more photos like the one in the top left. With the narrow depth of field my lens can achieve I think there are some really cool effects I can get with different wall textures.

Austin Texas (1)

These next few days I will be posting pictures taken while I was visiting Texas. My Uncle was married at the beautiful Vista Antonia, and my family was lucky enough to spend a week roaming Austin.

1/100 f/8.0 ISO 100 40mm

This little guy was sitting with his twin guarding the top of a staircase leading to a bell tower at the Vista. I like everything about this photo except how dark the left side is. Next time a soft fill flash may be just the thing to bring out the dark side without over exposing the right side. I was worried at the time about shooting at such a narrow aperture, but I'm glad I did. I like having the trees just slightly out of focus instead of completely blurry like they would have been at f/2.8 (where I usually shoot with this lens).