Bouldering

After I finally got my car fixed today (hopefully....), I went with out to this bouldering rock with some friends. They wanted to climb some, but I just wanted to take pictures, of course. There was, and is, a room waiting to be packed, so there wasn't much time to spend there and I only got a few pictures in.

I brought all my whole back pack to the boulder, but I only used my camera and a polarizer filter. Sometimes all you need is the sun to take good pictures. I could have used a flash for a little fill light, but I was happy with how the natural light looked. Plus, there were a ton of people there so I didn't want to intrude that much.

The goal of the photo was to silhouette someone against the sky and take out all of the ground. To do that, I shot from a low angle and at about 50mm on my zoom lens. I used a polarizer to darken the sky, luckily I was shooting at almost 90 degrees to the sun, and that's when you can darken the sky the most.

The biggest challenge was just to try to predict and time the climbers so they'd be in the frame and in the right place when I took the picture. I don't think they took the same line twice, so it was hard to get the angel and framing right. Out of luck really did I get the picture I was looking for. I had the rock filling most the image, with the climber hanging off the side.

When you're shooting moving subjects, it's important to think way ahead if you can. It's almost impossible to just shoot from the hip and hope you get something good. It can help if you frame your shot first, then wait for you subject to move into the frame. This way, you aren't focused on following the subject everywhere and then trying to compose the shot. It takes more time to follow the subject, and you'll be more shaky and less prepared usually. The times you would follow your subject would be if you want to get motion blur in the background, or you just have absolutely no idea where the subject is going to be at any given time. If you do follow your subject, try to frame ahead of them, this way, you are trying to think ahead, and from natural lag you'll be right on time. Usually.

Anywho, I'm sure I'll talk about this more this summer as I shoot more biking and whatnot.

In Lr, I converted the image to b/w first. I don't really like the image in color. I lowered the luminosity of the blues to further darken the sky, then raised the oranges and reds to brighten his skin up a bit since it was in shadow.

I raised the exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, and blacks to brighten up the image even more. I also raised the clarity a bit to help bring a bit of drama to the image.

Well that's about it, gotta get back to packing. See you tomorrow.

Kale Treat

I found an awesome new treat today. It's called Kale Krunch and it tastes like cheddar. Except it's made from kale and other healthy ingredients. I was super hungry tonight, so I decided to do a macro shot of said Kale Krunch since that would be representative of the night.

I set up the shot the same exact way I did my last macro shot. You can find the details of that here.

I don't think tonights photo turned out nearly as cool as the ice macro though. Little bummed about that but oh well, it's still a cool picture of what a piece of Kale Krunch looks like! Maybe I should get a real macro lens some day....

Once I'd taken the photo, I brought it into Lr. I raised the exposure a bit as well as the highlights just to brighten it up. I warmed it up and took out all the blues, also raised the vibrance a bit. Some split tone was added with orange in the shadow and green in the highlights. Finally, I went and removed the purple chromatic aberrations, because they can really screw up a photo.

It's crazy how little tiny things like that can make or break a photo. It doesn't take much for the photo to just feel...off. It's important to pay attention to the little details as much as the main part of the photo.

I might try another macro tomorrow, and see if I can get some pictures as cool as the ice ones. Those were just awesome.

See you tomorrow.

Not another M hike

The sky was epic again today, so I went for another hike up the M trail.

I went during the middle of the day though, so there was much more contrast in the sky and ground. I like taking cloud pictures during this time of day because they can turn out to be so dramatic. I was not disappointed today.

For the photo I'll post here, I shot big panoramic image of the mountains in the distance. The clouds above them were just so dramatic and I had to capture them. I shot at f8, 1/400, ISO 100, 135mm, and with a polarizer filter. The polarizer darkened the sky and made the clouds more dramatic. I didn't use a trip for this however, but it still stitched together very nicely.

I Lr, I converted the image to b/w the upped the contrast all the way and then lowered the blacks and raised the whites. This made the image super contrasty and dramatic. Obviously I'm going for dramatic here...also I raised the clarity. Clarity helps with sky a lot because the sky is mostly mid tones and clarity increases mid tone contrast.

To finalize it, I added some noise reduction and a bit of sharpening. Not too much because the image was already pretty sharp.

Well, that's it. I'll post the rest of the photos from today on my Fb so go check it out! Link is over on the right side of the screen...

See you tomorrow!

Problem Picture

The only thing that went smoothly with today image was actually taking it. Everything else was a nightmare...

But let's start off on the good note of shooting. It's been classic spring weather here in Bozeman, rain shower almost every day and very dramatic skies. Today was looking a bit more clear than usual, so I decided to go up to the M trail and take some sunset pictures.

I saw this cool ridge thing when I was driving to the trail head, and it turned out to be right next to the trail up! I climbed up that and perched myself on the around the middle of it. I was on a 3 foot wide piece of rock with 30ft drops on either side. Fun, fun, fun!

When I got there, instead of an epic sunset, I got the most dramatic sky ever. It was incredible and casting amazing lighting on the mountains and valley before me. The tripod came out quickly, and I started taking a series of panoramics right away. I shot at 1/80, f5/6, and ISO100. I mostly was exposing for the sky.

The image tonight is composed of 43 images shot in three rows. The bottom two rows composited really nicely in Ps, but I had to merge the top row separately and then manually fit it in with everything else later. Just a simple layer mask did the trick.

Once I had my nice 124 megapixel panorama (which crashed my laptop 3 times and took me 2 hours to make) I started to actually edit it. The process began by making three copies or looks of it in Lr. I raised the shadows to various degrees as well as the clarity. I then made three more looks of the image with Photomatix. The goal of all this is to have a bunch of different versions I can then composite later in Ps.

Which is exactly what I did next. Using layer masks, I composited the three Lr layers, then did the same with my Photomatix images. I now had two different looks to put together. I threw them in Ps and spent a lot of time with the layer masks to get each part of the images I liked. The sky was more dramatic in the Photomatix images, so I kept more of that image in that area. The ground looked unnatural with the Photomatix images though, but I did like the colors and contrast in it, so I just used that part of the image in a very low opacity.

To complete my edit in Ps, I applied a slight high pass sharpening layer and curves layer that increase the mid tone contrast. I also made a stamp visible layer, blurred it, set it to overlay to make a glow effect, then painted in with a very low opacity the areas I wanted to have more pop and intense color.

This all took me an hour because of a really slow computer. It's really hard to edit when the images don't even open half the time and you have to restart.

Moving to Lr, I played around with colors, tonal range, and split toning. But I wasn't really getting the look I wanted at all. On a whim, I converted the image to b/w and suddenly it was exactly what I wanted. I did like the image in color, but it just wasn't working out so well. In b/w though, the distraction of color disappeared, and you could suddenly see the drama of the landscape. I'm posting both the color and b/w versions because I like them both, but the b/w version is my favorite.

That's all, gotta sleep now. This has been a solid effort since about 6, and it turned out pretty well I think. Definitely one for print.

Btw, I do have prints available if anyone wants to order them...all profits go to camera gear and more trips to amazing outdoor locations!

See you tomorrow!

Old Analog

It's my last week here in Bozeman, and tonight I was feeling like I had nothing new to shoot. I've done a bunch of different kinds of photography in my room, and I am getting kinda bored of setting up the same stuff over and over. Might just be a mood tonight, but I wanted to do something different than I've done so far.

My solution was to photograph one of my photographs!

Last fall, I went on this really cool bike ride way up in the Crazy Mountains. We rode up a valley and the trail was the rockiest trail I've almost ever been on. It was crazy. Pardon my pun. There's a helmet cam video of the day here.

I brought my 35mm camera along for the ride, hoping to get a few cool riding shots. The I ended up taking only 3 pictures the whole ride, and only one that I really like. It was the first shot of the day, everyone had stopped to rest about half way up the trail and was looking at the huge scree covered mountain off the right. I pulled out my camera and backed off the trail a bit and snapped a picture.

It was a bright, sunny, completely clear day, so there was massive amounts of contrast and the sky was all one color. Technically, the photo isn't that great. When I printed it, I went with a 11x14 sheet of paper, so there was lots of detail. But still I couldn't get the contrast curve quite right. Maybe if I'd split filtered a bit it would have helped. But oh well, I'm still happy with how the print turned out. It really captures the day in stark contrast.

So to photo my photo, I set up two strobes on either side of the print, which I put on the ground. The strobes were set to 1/16 power, and I was shooting at f10. This ensured a sharp, clear, bright image.

It was pretty simple to photo, so I'll leave it at that.

In Lr, I raised the shadows a bit and most importantly applied lens correction. Most of the stuff I do I don't really worry about lens distortions. I like how cameras distort the world, so most of the time I leave it. However, for this application tonight, I needed the photo to be square and realistic.

I then moved the photo over to Ps and did the following.

1. Curves adjustment.

2. High Pass Sharpening

3. Added some clouds

I did this with my custom cloud brush, then applied a layer mask from a selection I made of the ridge line.

4. Make bigger clouds to add depth

I'm not sure if they look completely realistic? Maybe? I just thought they added some depth to the image.

So there you have it, an analog photo photographed digitally and then edited.

See you tomorrow!

Night in the Rain

Tonight was another epic photo adventure with Alex and Nick! Only this time it was raining cats and dogs instead of snow.

The night began as these things usually do. We left at 9 and got half way across town before we realized that we'd forgotten bear spray, Alex's phone, and most importantly...bananas!

An hour later we were back on the road armed with a can of expired bear spray and 5 bananas!

That's when the rain hit. It was just pouring rain all the way out into the mountains. We hoped it would turn into snow the farther north we got, but it kept as nice wet raindrops. Originally, our plan was to go do light painting on a stream out past Bridger, but of course that didn't happen. We decided that it was much to wet to even think about taking out camera's out. We ended up sitting in a construction zone on a back road wondering what to do.

Long story short, we tried a few ideas before we found a awesome loader in said construction zone and decided to light paint that. By that time the rain had let up quite a bit, and so we felt it was safe to bring out the gear.

Light painting got off to a rough start. We all had different camera setting and visions of what we wanted, so we pretty much just took turns with my flashlight. It probably would have been cool to coordinate a bit more, but then there wouldn't have been three different looks. There's always next time.

For my picture, I really had no idea what I wanted! I knew I wanted it to be bright and contrasty, but that's about it. I just hit the loader with light a few times and got some base exposures to composite in Ps later just with layer masks and blending modes. I also lit up a gravel pile behind the loader.

As far as shooting goes, light painting is really just about experimenting and getting a bunch of different looks to then composite later. You can do it in one exposure of course, but it's hard to get the look you can get from compositing. That's a pretty personal opinion though because I really like the look of composited stuff. It will be cool to see what Alex and Nick do, I don't know if they'll composite their photos.

As I said, I just used layer masks and blending modes to composite mine. It's a really simple process so not really worth explaining. Especially, I just painted over the areas of each layer I wanted, and that makes them show up in the composite. I normally paint over the spots of light that I like, and if two spots fall in the same place, those layers go to the lighten blending mode, which takes highlights from each layer and blends them.

Here's the final composite. In Lr I upped the blue saturation and added blue to the shadows. I love the blue light in the cab contrasted with the yellow of the loader. It's pretty awesome.

Also, pics from earlier today with Drew and bikes! It was good to shoot them again.

See you tomorrow!

Photoing a Photo

Last week I entered my dorm's art show. I printed a big panorama and framed it (thanks Mark for helping me with that). I thought it was pretty cool and I ended up getting third place, so not too bad. I just got the thing back a little while ago so I thought it might be cool to do a photo of it. It was definitely a challenge to light with the glass from the frame.

Next time I'll just remove the glass and make it easier on myself...

Lighting the was all about specular highlights and reflections. The glass will reflect back whatever it sees, so you have to make sure you can not see the strobes in the glass. The strobes have to be at low angles on either side to be sure you doing get the ugly highlights from them. I set the strobes to 1/32, which is pretty high power for the f5 f-stop I was using. This ensured that everything was very well it and bright. I cross lit with two strobes on either side of the frame.

To get the straight on angle. I placed the frame on the ground on top of a white mat board, and then stood on a chair to get really high up. I shot at 40mm on my zoom lens, which is really close to having no distortion.

To further get the angle right, I used live view and moved the camera right out over the frame. I couldn't get it perfect, but it's really close.

In Lr, I cropped the image down to the long, panoramic aspect ratio. The lens correction panel helped to get the image free of most any distortions.

There are a ton of little scratches in the glass, and so the image in the frame doesn't really look that look at all :/ I'll just have to remember to get rid of the glass next time.

As far as exposure adjustments go, I bumped the exposure up a bit but that's pretty much it. I did increase the saturation on the mat around the image to bring it closer to it's true, off white color. I also increased the exposure of the white mat around the frame because it was kinda an ugly grey before.

And that's pretty much it! It turned out to be simpler than I expected. I just really have to think about how I set everything up.

See you tomorrow!

Snow on a Road

Tonight I went out with Alex and Nick to do some awesome star trails! Except it was cloudy! and then it started snowing! So there were no star trails....but we got some cool pictures none the less.

We were kinda bummed at first that it was cloudy, but we pulled out my strobes and soon that was frown was turned upside down.

yeah....that was cheesy.

We set the strobes up in the back pointing in. It's kinda a back/cross light, that gives a nice rim light and highlights all the snow falling. I love doing this lighting when it's snowing or raining because of the cool effect it gives. You just really need to use a high power because most of your light is going through the translucent snow. I used 1/8 power on the strobes at f3.5 ISO320 and that got the job done. This is massive overexposure, but with backlighting it's actually about perfect.

Sometimes I'll add in a fill light from the front if you don't was pure cutouts, but I loved the look we were getting with the set up so I didn't this time.

In Lr, I pumped the clarity to bring out the little bits of snow that were lost with less mid tone contrast. I also raised the highlights to have the same effect. I wanted a super harsh, vivid look. I did't really like the look of the colors though, so I converted the image to b/w. Strobes tend to put out light very close to daylight temperature, and this doesn't always work out so well. I converted to b/w and then added red to the shadows and blue to the highlights. These colors work well together, and I think they really improve the look of the image. It gives it almost a surreal effect. Colors have a huge impact on a photo, and the decision you make with them goes a long way. Just the difference between a dark blue sky or a light blue sky can completely change the feel of an image.

This image is my favorite from the night. I love the symmetry of it, and the out of focus snow in the foreground. The head lamp seems to be flouting in space, almost as if he is a ghost figure. He just blends in with the background so well it's as if there's only floating cloths.

Well it's sleep time, so see you tomorrow!

Happy Earth Day!

Today is Earth Day if you didn't know. I hope everyone went out and at least hugged a tree, rode a bike, or something of those sorts. It was certainly a beautiful day in Bozeman (at least in the morning) and I managed to ride around town and get a quick run in before classes.

In honor of Earth Day, I really wanted to do something about nature. As it's now raining pretty hard out, what better thing to photography than the rain? Everything depends on water to survive, and I wanted to capture that beauty of water.

At first, I though about doing a water drop picture. I've never done one of those before, at least not outside in the dark, and the rain, and late at night, and by myself....so that didn't really work out so well. I ended up standing in the rain scratching my head of what to photograph as nothing I was trying was working.

I've often been in that place this year. Trying to come up with a new idea or at least a new variation of a new idea each day with out fail is pretty challenging. And then when you have an idea that you really want to do but can't figure out how to pull it off is really annoying and frustrating. I tried maybe 10 different ideas with varying degrees of success tonight, and even when I called it quits I wasn't sure if what I'd gotten would work.  The point is, even though something doesn't seem like it's even going to work and you've tried everything you can think of, keep trying. Most of the time something will just click and you can get the shot or figure out the problem. The rest of the time some freak accident will happen and magically the problem will solve itself.

Not the most inspiring words but I'm tired and literally misspelling every other word I'm tying and just want to get this done.

So, what did I do tonight?

Set a strobe to F@ck your eyes nuke the world power and pointed it straight up. With all the moisture in the air and falling rain, the light froze the rain drops amidst a glow a light. It looked pretty cool so I  took a few shots and then called it quits. I was shooting at ISO100, f2.8, and 1/200 to try to block out the ambient light on campus. The strobe was set to 1/2 power, so about 32 times brighter than what I normally shoot at.

This image was made in Lr. Out of the camera it looked like this.

It's pretty meh. White balance horrible. lots of noise. weird green flare. blurry. no contrast in the mids or shadows at all. Lameeeeeee.

also upside of how I want it.

So first thing I did was pump the clarity ALL the way up. Never have to much. This increases the midtone contrast a tone and brings out the drops of rain. Next I cropped this to an 8x10 size and cut off that weird flare. Then raised the contrast even more, and turned it black and white. Finally, I added blue to the shadows and green to the highlights. So there are really only two colors in the final image, and none were there in real life. Looks sweet though IMO.

Hate that JPEG compression though...so horrible. On Fb it's probably a lot better. I'll make sure it is so head over there to view it. Link to the page is on the right side of the screen....

So I suppose that's it! Sleep time! Yay!

See you tomorrow!

No Edit

Tonight is something very different than usual. A completely unedited, untouched, photo. The only thing I did in Lr was export it. I must be going crazy, I know. Me, not editing a photo? What....

For one I really like the photo as it is. I've been in a weird mood today, and I think the raw nature of the photo sort of captures that. I still have my head phones in from my run an hour ago, and didn't care to change my shirt either.

This last week of school is going to be a rough one I sure, and so I nuked the whole image red to express that. But then I also wanted to show I wasn't completely engulfed in the tide, and so I let a little beam of white light fall on my face and I looked right at the camera.

At least that's the theory. I could have also just been scheming up a cool light design, but I like the deeper, self reflective explanation.

So I guess all I can talk about is how I lit this because I didn't do anything else.

Background was a white mat board. I had a flash on 1/16 power  camera left with a deep red gel on it. On camera right was a snooted flash at 1/32 power. The gelled flash needed more power to cut through the gel. I was shooting at f7.1, ISO100, 1/200 and on my 50mm lens. I think this give the picture a very non distorted look so that you can focus on the subject and light rather than the technicalities of the optics.

Well, that's about it..I guess see you tomorrow?

Yellowstone!

I went to Yellowstone this weekend. We left mid-day Saturday and spent most of that day setting up camp, eating food, and soaking in Boiling. Sunday was mostly spent breaking camp, eating, some hiking, and some soaking. Overall a pretty great time. But I'm super tired and only staying up to edit and post the blog so this might be a short one.

First the photo from Saturday:

My first star trails photo! This is about 270 images taken over two hours using an introvelometer. I had the exposure at 36 sec, f2.8, and ISO800. The camera would take the photo, then wait 5 seconds for it to process, then take another and so on. I did a bit of light painting at first withe my red headlamp and Maglite, but all the yellow trees are lit from the road and cars running just over the rise. They actually turned out pretty cool.

The application I used to composite this is called StarStax. It's a program specifically designed for this, so all you do it throw your images in and hit a button! You can mess around with some setting, but for the most part it's automated. I just exported the final image and in Lr tweaked the shadows, exposure and highlights up a bit. I also ran a graduated filter to increase the saturation of the stars. They are actually all those colors, which is awesome.

Bison! Today we did a hike but ended up losing the trail in snow and hiking out on a random prairie above Mammoth. We also ran into some bison. I pulled out my telephoto and got up behind this electrical box that was probably too close to this bison. He was pretty into eating grass, and ended up walking about 20 ft from me. When he looked up and saw us, we decided it was time to leave, but it was really cool seeing the bison up close. 

To take this I was shooting at ISO100, f9, and 1/200. I have a bunch of tighter croppings of this guy, but I really like this frame. Something about the bison's expression and posture...really like it. 

In Lr I did the following...highlights and shadows down a tad, whites up a bit and vibrance up a lot. That's it. I kept this one pretty natural. 

Here's some more photos from the trip. See you tomorrow!

Ghost Pants

I had originally tried to so this Photoshop thingy tonight, but that didn't work out...soooo I decided to do something else. Definitely not anything that required a lot of Ps because I'm pretty fed up with it at the moment.

I eventually decided to do a picture of my pants. Yes, my pants. I knew I didn't want anything inside, so I had to go out outdoors somewhere. So to Peats Hill, of course.

There's a row of bushes that worked perfectly for this. I wanted a natural background, but nothing too cluttered. The bushes were just spaced so that they didn't make a busy background, but they still had the outdoor feel. I set up two strobes to cross light everything, and shot with my 50mm.

The thing I changed from what I usually do was raise my aperture a bit. All the way to f4.5. I set the strobes to 1/64 power, which was not enough I later discovered, but it looked good while I was there. I really should be paying more attention to the histogram to show me the light levels. One day...

Anywho, I took two pictures for this. One for the background and one for the pants. I composited them in Ps with a simple layer mask. A few curves adjustments later just to help with the brightness problem, and I was good.

Over to Lr. I raised the exposure a stop and a half (way too much), and then lowered everything but the blacks. This gave it the midtone exposure it needed without ruining the tonal range it had.

I lowered the vibrance and saturation a ton, and then added blue to the shadow and yellow to the highlights. This gave it a cool looking washed out effect with some complimentary colors.

I didn't run any sharpening or noise reduction.

I think it did turn out pretty well. It's a little off somehow, but I can't quite put my finger on it. Oh well.

See you tomorrow.
*unless I'm in Yellow Stone and not able to access the internets.

Stars in the Sky

Went on a spontaneous water gathering trip up Sourdough tonight. Some of my friends were heading up so I just tagged along with them and got some pretty awesome tasting water from the river...and a cool picture.

This was the very first picture I took up there. Just slapped the fish eye on, put it to my regular night exposure settings (30s, 2.8, ISO800) and it turned out almost perfect. It was a tad dark, so I had to fix that in post but it was pretty cool composition! I took it just from the road so there's that perfectly clear path down the middle with amazing trees on either side. This was a half conscious decision, and half just me picking the easiest spot.

There's not much to say about this photo, it wasn't a snapshot, it just happened to work out perfectly on the first try!

In Lr, I made it into a fake HDR from the Raw file. To do this, you just raise the contrast, lower the highlights and whites (but not too much for this since the whites are the stars), raise the shadows and blacks, and then pump the clarity a bit. Pretty simple. Just compresses the tonal range of the raw file so you can see it all.

I applied a lot of noise reduction to this image, and a lot of sharpening as well. It needed it. I furthered this in Ps with a high pass sharpening layer.

Finally, I used a adjustment brush to bring out the stars more with adjusting the clarity, contrast, highlights and shadows a bit.

That's is! This was a pretty minimal edit. Which turned out pretty great :)

See you tomorrow!