Tree Line Sunset

It was a beautiful day today, so I thought I might just go out and take some pictures of the sunset. I've found that if there's a chance for a good photo, go out and try to get it. Even if you don't get it, you'll probably get something, which is better than getting nothing at all.

I shot a few different things this evening, but my favorite was shooting the skyline directly into the setting sun. The trees were in total silhouette, and the sun was making an awesome lens flare. I shot just on Av mode and let the camera do the heavy lifting for exposure.

When you're shooting into a bright light source, the autofocus will sometimes go crazy. This is because of lens flares, which cause a loss of contrast. The camera looks for contrast and the sorts to determine focus sharpness, so if you have a big flare it doesn't work very well. I usually block the sun with my hand to get rid of the flare, then focus and lock it.

In Lr, the first thing I did was to crop the image into a panoramic aspect ratio. I like long a skinny ratios for some reason, maybe because they distort how one can view an image. It's very selective and directive in showing the view something.

Secondly, I converted to b/w for the same reasons as cropping. I wanted to select and isolate what I wanted viewers to see in the image, which was not the colors of the sunset.

After that, I just went a little crazy with it. Upped the clarity and contrast all the way, added a ton of grain, and added a white vignette in.  So for any other image I basically ruined it. But I love what it did to this image. It almost looks like a analog image.

See you tomorrow!

More Jedi

Originally was supposed to be sith...but things happened and he turned into a Jedi. Luckily.

Here's a video of the set up. We made a light mod to act as a strip light that is the size of a light saber. This threw light on Victor like a real light saber would, so it made it more believable.

For editing, I went into Ps first. The light saber is made out of four red layers with increasing blur strengths and one white layer. The blur creates the glow you see, and the white is supposed to be the blade of the saber. Not too complicated.

In Lr, I modified the tone curve mainly. I pulled the blues up in the shadows, and then pulled the greens wayyyy up in the highlights. The reds I pulled down just in the highlights. When converted to b/w, the tone curve still colors the image, so you get a nice green effect. Originally, the set up was for a red saber and blue back lights, but I like the toned image a lot more than the original. Sometimes it just works out that way! I always like to see what an image will look like if I just go completely crazy with some settings and what not. You never know when you'll find something cool!

See you tomorrow!

Bear Thing

A few months ago, my parents gave me this canister of compressed air for cleaning things. I just started using it last night to clean this crazy neon sign I got. But the sign isn't important. What is important, is that if you hold the canister upside down, you get a big jet of fog from the gases inside! I thought it would make a great special effect shot tonight.

For editing, I composited the two shots with layer masks and layers set to lighten. Very simple. Just took out the spots I didn't like from the different layers, and then combined the two. In Lr, I converted to b/w, then upped the clarity a loooot. Also the shadows and highlights just a tad. This all gave the photo more drama and pop to everything. There are some cool textures going on, so I wanted the improve that in editing.

I positioned the bear as I did for a couple reasons. First, I wanted to make it like a real scene. With the  bear at that angle, it looks like a 3D image. Sorta. If I shot it straight on, there would be no sense of depth to it.

See you tomorrow!

Another small planetoid body

Since the 4th is coming up, Victor thought it might be cool to go down to the docks and take a test (ish) shot. I thought it would be awesome to have a little planet with fireworks going in the sky, so why not get everything planned out ahead of time.

I wasn't sure what the correct exposure was going to be for the panorama. Since it was a 360 pano, the exposure range was going to be allllll over the place. There were lights from lamps and boats and who knows what. I knew that I wanted the main focus to be the water in front of me, which was pretty dark compared the dock. I exposed for that area and called it good. The highlights in the dock were a little bright, but that was okay.

For the sequences, I shot at f2.8, 6s, and ISO400. It's important to keep the setting consistent throughout the image so that there isn't a dark side and a light side. If you leave it on auto, there will be a distinct transition between dark and light in the panorama as the camera exposes for different tonal ranges.

Once in Lr, I exported the photos to jpeg, then ran them through PTGui. Again, there's tutorials on how to use that application. I pretty much just click a couple buttons and it does the rest. I could go through and set more control points, but I chose not for these first couple photos.

Back in Lr, I raised the shadows a bit and crushed the whites down. This just brought the tonal range out more so you could see more detail. Finally, I raised the clarity.

Then I started messing with the distortion and lens correction. I upped the scale and lens distortion a bit to make the planet bigger in the frame. And then I was done...

I can't decide on the orientation I like more... The bottom one was what I was after, but the top one is a big smiley face...

See you tomorrow!

Very Night, Much noise

I went out to shoot a 360 stereographic image tonight. AKA a little planet one. In the past I've always done it on my iPhone, but tonight I used my actual camera! There's so much more control than with a iPhone, so I could shoot at night and use all my toys. Like flashes! and Victor biking at night!

To start with, I set up a shot of Victor doing a 180 bar (I think). We set up two strobes behind him to freeze him, then did a couple test shots. The camera was on a 30 sec exposure for the background. If I had more time, I would have a more complicated light set up, but for my purpose of just getting a stereographic image made tonight it worked. Tomorrow might be different....

After we got the shot of Victor, I just started rotating my camera and taking a 360 panorama. It's really important that the tripod be level. Common sense but just make sure. I did two levels of images, and I wanted to do one more but my tripod handle wouldn't let me and it started to rain.

Now for the fun part of using PTGui, a program I bought tonight for stitching panoramics. It's a pretty simple application once you know your way around, but tutorials are always helpful. I'll just let that video do the talking for how I processed my image because I just went along with the video...

As for editing, I did the white balance off of the lit part of Victor's helmet.
New code here for settings. Highlights = h whites = w shadows = s blacks = b.

H-9 w+70 s=26 b-9 vibrance at -72. Then I added blue to the shadows and yellow to the highlights to give the image more color. That's about all I did. It's not the best photo ever like I said... But I like the composition. Victor jumping off the planet..

See you tomorrow!

mmmmm Cookiessss

Finally took some pictures of my sisters cookies tonight. They were M&M cookies, other than that I know not of what went into them. Except for that they were amazing.

I went with a similar lighting set up as to what I've done before for food. I put a strobe down low on the left to created a nice big fill light using the box as a reflector. That was at 1/16 (?) power, maybe. I forget but it wasn't that much. The main light was a soft box at 1/128 power to the right of the cookies.

Arranging the cookies was a bit tricky at first, my sister and I couldn't figure  out a good way to lay everything out or what background to use. Eventually I settled on a bamboo mat to put the cookies on, and then I just made random patterns with the cookies until I got one I liked.

Victor came up with a cool idea too to stage the cookies in layers to create a 3D environment. There were cookies closer to the camera and then behind the main cookie to make sort of a cookie land, if you will. That one came out pretty well, but the one I like is of a mini cookie tower.

I really like to shoot portrait orientation for some reason, don't know why. So making a mini tower out of the cookies worked out perfectly for shooting portrait. I put a broken cookie in the middle of it to show the inside of the cookie. Because that's important in food photography...? I also really like symmetry in photography, so the portrait orientation with the tower and broken cookie just looks really nice to me.

For editing, I bumped up the highlights and whites with local adjustment and also with an across the board adjustment. That's it! Super simple.

See you tomorrow!

Window

I had a random idea tonight. I was sitting in the living room, wondering what I was going to do and I started to think about some of the abstract stuff I've done. Then I saw the blinds that were down over the window and got an idea!

I flipped the blinds down (they were rotated up, and I wanted them down so that light would be directed down instead of up), and then grabbed a strobe to run outside. I put the strobe right outside the window with and umbrella, and pointed it into the living room. 

I set the strobe to 1/4 power because I wasn't sure how much I'd need, especially with the umbrella and the blinds. As it turned out, I had to ramp up my aperture to f8 at ISO800 to get the correct exposure. I could have shot at f2 or something, but then my depth of field would be nill. Might try that next time though.... 

Anywho, I set my self timer and took a couple of shots of me sitting on the couch in front of the window. I didn't worry about correct exposure of me because the point was not getting a perfect portrait. 

The point was to get a creepy silhouette of me just out side the window pretending to be a zombie or something! I set my self timer to 17s to give me time to get outside, them just pretended to be a ---insert animal that sticks to windows---. It took a couple tries before I got something I liked. And even then I would like to spend more time with this to get it right. Just have to sleep tonight. 

For compositing, I just painted a big layer mask. Simply converted it to black and white after that and did some local adjustments. I upped the contrast on the shades and then raised the highlights on the lower part of the image. Finally, I lowered the clarity of the whole images to make it softer. 

See you tomorrow!

More bug

Did some more macro pictures today, of dead bugs that we found. Same exactly set up as last night, so there's not much to say about it! If you want, go watch that video for that.

As for editing, I really just amped up the highlights and whites a bit. Not much for this one. I think this is going to be my shortest post yet...

See you tomorrow!

Plankton Friend

We went down to finish cleaning up a boat tonight, and we also found some sweeeeeettt plankton. I have no idea what kind they are, but they were basically little spike balls.

I've made a video of the set up, shooting, and editing. So I'll let those take over from here.

Here's what I did to edit.

It's a Lake

One of the most amazing spots on the island is the forest lands up on the north west corner of the island. There's a couple lake, and countless little steams and such. One of the lakes up there has a look out over a dead tree stand. I was up there today riding, and it looked like an awesome place to do a little planet photo!

As usual, 360 pano made the photo, and then I edited it in Snapseed. The contrast was pretty high between the shadows on the land and the sun lit trees across the water. I raised the shadows, ambient, and structure in Snapseed, which helped to bring out the details where I was. Unfortunately, it also skewed the color and made a ton of noise. Unfortunate. 

In Lr, I lowered the highlights a bit and raised the whites. This gave me bright whites, but not overblown highlights. I also did some spot adjustments on the trees and the land where I was. I darkened both to make the photo a littttle more realistic. 

That's pretty much it. It's not the greatest photo ever, but I do like the geometry of it. The contrast between the land on one side and the water and trees on the other. It's really like a little planet! haha

See you tomorrow!

Happy Birthday!

Today is my friends birthday (you know who you are), so I decided to make a Happy Birthday picture!

Originally I wanted to just light paint, but Victor and I are terrible at that so why not fire?

After setting my driveway on fire with gas and getting no where, we started experimenting with stuff like WD40 and PG2000. Didn't work...

Then we had the good idea of laying out paper towels in the shape of the words, then soaking them with gas. This was the ticket! FIREEEEE.

I shot them at 1/50, f4 and ISO100. This was pretty much just a guessing game, but it worked out well! Somehow got the perfect exposure for fire! Sometimes you just get lucky haha.

The one problem was that each letter was an individual picture...

Which was easily solved with the lighten blend mode in Ps! I did a bit of reworking with the stamp tool to reshape some of the letters, but not much. The trick with that is finding the right part of fire to use that blends with the letter you're working on. Make a new layer and work on that so that you don't make permanent changes to the original.

In Lr, I just corrected the perspective a bit and cropped it. That's all.

Happy Birthday!

Eagle

I had an idea tonight for some product pictures tonight that involved going to the beach. As soon as we got to the beach though, I got side tracked by a pair of eagles and that was that. So tonight's photo is simply of an eagle being an eagle and flying around and basically looking amazing.

I shot using Av mode. The eagle was constantly moving through different light zones, and I wanted to have correct exposure no matter where it was. Av mode calculates the shutter speed for you, and so you can quickly change exposure zones without missing the shot. The draw back is obviously lack of control over the shutter, but there's Tv mode for that.

I had my aperture at f5.6 (as open as it would go at 300mm) and my ISO at 800. This allowed me the range of 1/320-1/120 depending on where I was shooting. My Ev compensation was set to +1, so that the camera would over expose by one stop. This gave the shadows a raise, and ensured that I was getting the details in the eagle.

I found the best strategy for  shooting moving birds is to turn on auto focus and constantly have the bird in the frame. I keep both eyes open, so if the bird gets out of the frame, I can still see what's it's doing and quickly reframe.

Other than that, it's pretty much luck to get the best shots! Animals are unpredictable, and so you just snap away at anything that looks cool. You can tell a bit when they're about to swoop or fly off a perch, so you have to stay on your toes for that sort of thing.

With the image I got, I did all my editing in Lr. First, I pulled the whites and vibrance. Then I raised the black point on the tone curve panel, and added some blue to the shadows. At this point I decided I liked it in b/w, so I converted it to that. I raised the luminosity of yellow a bit for the conversion. To finalize it, I added a strong vignette, because I really like vignettes.

See you tomorrow!

Dancing in the Fog

Except there's no fog in this picture...those pictures are still too come. Just a sampler tonight.

So tonight was another big(ish) shoot with Michelle and Amber. This time we were much more coordinated and planned! Kinda... We first wanted to do sunset pictures, but then we discovered that we had missed sunset and that it was cloudy. So that didn't work.

But not all was lost! We went to the elementary school playground, and made our own sunset!

Theres's a giant white wall over there, and we used this as a background to light the crap heck out of using gelled strobes. I believe for tonight image, we used two 560s with maroon and orange gels on them. These two strobes were pointed at the wall at 1/16 power (maybe lower...) and they just colored
it like a sunset! I was shooting at 1/200 (no ambient light) f1.4 (for max light from the strobes) and ISO125 on my 50mm lens.

Since the back ground was  wall, I pulled the entire frame way out of focus to soften everything. This made the wall buttery smooth, and also made the dancers into lovely, rich, silhouettes with red outlines. Which I loved. And it meant I did not have to worry about focus because it was supposed to be horrible!  Perfect combo.

The image for tonight was actually another test image. I'm not sure what they were doing, but I was fiddling with my camera and looked up to see Michelle and Amber in what I thought was a really amazing pose. I quickly "tested my lighting" and got a photo of it. Luckily, they were both pretty much in the frame and at the right angles. Out of all the photos we did tonight, this one is possibly my favorite. I'm not really sure why, it's just one of the photos that feels right.

Editing was pretty simple, I brought the contrast, highlights, and whites up to make the background pop, and then brought the shadows down to make the silhouettes nice and dark. To make sure they were black, I just painted in them a bit with a darkening brush. I also cropped the image to be only them.

See you tomorrow!

Long Night

After a very long day traveling and helping a family friend move, Victor and I went out to shoot some photos with Amber and Michelle. They are both dancers and we did some photos together last summer that turned out really well!

I had high hopes for the evening and night, with lots of plans and ideas for cool pictures. Of course though, they all went out the door as soon as we actually got to a location and tried to start shooting. Long story short, planning is essential.

The one photo I do like from tonight was not actually one we were trying to take! It's a test photo I think, but I still love it!

The idea behind the photo was to create this motion blur around each person while they were frozen by a strobe. Victor shined a couple flashlights at the dancers while they did their jump (? idk what to call it) to get some motion blur, and then at the hight of the jump I tripped the flash to freeze them.

Camera settings and power level would vary a lot depending on what you're doing, but I was at 2.6s, f5, ISO400. I had a strobe in an umbrella at 1/4 power, and on with a orange gel in the back on 1/16 power.

Once I started editing, I knew I wanted to make the image black and white. The light was awesome, so I really didn't do any tonal range correction. What I did do was add some blues and green to the image with split toning, and then add a lens flare in photo shop. I felt this added in some of the color that was lost with the b/w conversion, but not enough to make the photo not b/w.

There are a few things I don't like about the photo, like the Ugg boots and staring right at the camera, but for a test shot you can't ask for a lot. It's a pretty good representation of the evening.

Tomorrow night I'm definitely planning more and it'll turn out better!

See you tomorrow!

A view from paradise

So I went on a bicycle ride today, and stumbled upon False Bay at a super minus tide. When the tide is low enough, False Bay drains almost all the way to the straits, and you're left with a mile of sand and tide pools. It's one of the coolest things ever, and probably incredibly rare. I had to go take a photo of it, but all I had was my phone.

But on my phone I had the incredible app, 360 Panorama! It basically combines a ton of photos into a 360 degree panoramic, including above and below you. You can then view it as a virtual world kind of, it's a sphere that you can "look" around in by moving your phone around. It's hard to explain so just look the app up, it's incredible.

It can also make the "mini planet" effect, which in the app is called stereographic, which I don't believe is the right term because a Stereograph was a form of photography in the late 1800s and early 1900s that combined two photos to create a 3D illusion. But anyway, the app can make the little planet effect, which is freaking awesome!

Once I exported the picture, I put them into Snapseed and did two edits. One was just a simple enhancement of shadows, saturation, etc. I also made a blurred vignette for that edit. Once exported, I used that as a base edit for applying the Retrolux effect. I loved how what the effect did to the sky, but not what it did to the "planet." I couldn't combine the two images on my phone, so I moved over to my laptop. I made a screen recording of my edit.

You can see me derp and few times, such as when I try to paint black on an already black layer mask. But over all it's a good representation of my work flow for a  lot of images. You also get to see a sneak peak at one of the photos from the Utah trip right when I open Ps. Almostt doneeee.

See you tomorrow!

Pie Flavor!

Only it's not a pie. It's some other baked goodie that my sister made that I forgot the name of but it's awesome and delicious and I'm going to have to go get another piece I'll be right back.

Okay, back. Love run on sentences.

I wanted to do something different with the food tonight. My sister and I have done a lot with white backgrounds and what not, but I keep wanting to do something different. So today, we put a black background in.

For lighting, I put on strobe pointed straight up to turn the mat box the food was in into a giant soft box. Then I put a soft box on the other strobe and turned it into a directional soft light. This gave some depth and texture to the pie thing.

I shot at f16, 38mm, ISO250, and 1/100. I wanted lots of depth of field so that everything was in focus, and to do that I needed to use higher power on the strobes (1/8 and 1/64) as well as bumping the ISO a bit. Since the soft box strobe was so close, I didn't need that much power in it.

When I started shooting, I wasn't really sure what composition I was going for. Nothing was looking quite right. So I googled "pie" and got some ideas from images I saw there. One I liked was a long, skinny composition shot from directly over head.

The initial shot was obviously not the right aspect ratio, so in Lr that was the first thing I did. I had to make sure that the left and right balance was equal with the plate. The spacing had to be exact or the image would look off. I don't like the sideways cherry, but now there's nothing I can do about it without making that cherry look weird. So oh well.

The rest of the editing went really fast. Just upped the shadows a bit and that was it.

See you tomorrow!

Fun with Light Sabers

I had this random idea for a photo tonight; make Victor into a Jedi knight!

So I gathered all my gear and headed over to his place. First things first, we had to find him a light saber. A broom handle worked just fine.

Next was lighting, I knew I wanted to get a nice soft light from above, so I put a strobe gelled with an umbrella above the area we were shooting. Then, I put a strobe gelled green to *hopefully* make the green glow of his light saber. The positioning of the green light was a little hard, but we ended up with it also up in the air, but un modded. This green light turned to be the main key light, while the soft light was a rim and back light.

I shot at 1/160, f5.6 for DoF and ISO400. This was to get enough light mainly. The strobes too care of the stopping power.

We shot a bunch of photos of him leaning on his saber, but at the very end he did this flying kick that loooked way cooler, so we went on shooting that!

The original file obviously doesn't have a glowing saber in it, so I went into Ps and put that in. I painted in the center of the blade with a green brush, the duplicated that layer three times. To the first two layers, I added blurs to. This made the glow effect. One layer had more blur than the other, and this gave it that nice fall of. To the third layer, I gave it a color overlay of white, and then blurred it to. This layer mimicked the super bright center of the saber.

Then on to make the glow from the saber more believable since the green strobe wasn't in the right place.

I made a new layer, set it to overlay, and then painted in green at the very low opacity over where the glow would be on him. I kept the color out the shadows for the most part, or where the shadows would be. Natural light obviously doesn't fill in shadows, so it was more believable to not put any color in there!

Back in Lr, I added some blue to the shadows, and then green to the midtones. This just gave it a cooler tone and look to it that I liked. Purely a personal choice.

See you tomorrow!

Mooooon of Doom

Full moon tonight, and you know what that means. Epic full moon behind cloud. Pictures.

I set up my camera on bracketing from -3ev, 0, and +3ev. This ensured that I got the full range of tones in the moon, clouds and sky. At least for the most part. The moon is so bright when it's full that even at that bracketing range some tones are lost. If I would have caught it a little earlier, then the moon would be dimmer and the tonal range more compressed. Lessons for the future. I shot at ISO800, f5.6 and 1/10.

For editing, I used photomatix to make an HDR, then in Lr I upped the saturation and vibrance all the way, as well as the clarity. Noise reduction helped a lot, as well as a wee bit of sharpening.

That's all! Short post tonight I guess.

See you tomorrow!

Fun with Glow sticks

Tonight, I remembered that I had a ton of glow sticks lying around that needed to be used. So Victor and I went out to the west side to do some pictures!

The idea was to have a biker riding on a rainbow road thing made from the light trails of the glow sticks. Unfortunately, only glow sticks bright enough to show up were the green and blue ones. It looks kinda cool, but not really what we were going for sadly.

After the rainbow road didn't work so well, we just decided to do the good old glow stick in the spokes idea. We taped 15 glow sticks to my spokes, and then just did a couple passes. I had to go pretty slow to make sure enough light was getting to the camera.

The next exposure was to get a light trail for the head lamp I had on. Just a simple pass did the trick.

The most complicated part was to get the still image of me riding. We did this using two flashlights and two strobes. One strobe was down in the front right and lit the front of me, and one was in the back left to backlight and light up the glow sticks. We pretty much just did test shots to dial in the power. The flashlights served to add a bit of motion blur to the wheels and such to give a sense of motion.

I was shooting on bulb at f2.8 and ISO800, and using a remote shutter release.

And really Victor was taking all the pictures, so it was a group effort! Couldn't have done it without him, thanks Victor!

For editing, it was superrrrr simple. I simple chose the layers I wanted, set them to lighten, and then used layer masks to pick out the parts I wanted from each layer. Then in Lr I added blue to the shadows, green to the highlights, raised the black point and the highlights. Also did a big crop and added a Black Diamond log because that's the head lamp I was using. Could make a cool poster or something.

See you tomorrow!

Moth and Some Ice

Broke out the old super macro rig tonight. Victor and I had few hours to kill, so we decided to 1. eat food and 2. take awesome pictures.

The set up looks as follows. Pretty much the same as the other super macros I've done.


We started off with just some ice cubes and the bubbles in them. I focused by raising the camera up and down because the depth of field was sooooo shallow. It was really cool just to watch in the view finder because you could see the different layer in the ice. Almost like scanning through it layer by layer. I pretty much just took pictures of everything because it looked cool and sorted them later.

Editing them was pretty straight forward since I'd done it before. First, I cropped the images, then I did my exposure adjustments. Clairy up, contrast up, highlights and blacks down, and whites up. This combination gave more depth and feeling, and also brought out the details more. I didn't apply noise reduction because they're already pretty noise free and sharp.

Then we saw the moth. And knew it had to be photographed. This giant moth landed close to us (we were in the garage), and was just hanging out there. So I put some honey on a piece of plastic, and coaxed the moth on said piece of plastic. He/she just attacked the honey and didn't pay us much attention as I moved him/her to the camera.

Tips on focusing on a insect with a macro. Shot gun the shutter.  Get really good at timing your shot right when the subject is going to be in focus, you have to be preemptive and pretty lucky. They move so fast that it's just a guessing game after you get the focus in the ball park. By some luck, I got some epic pictures of the moths feet, head, and tongue. Yes, the tongue. It's barbed, by the way. And moths do get full at some point as we discovered when he/she suddenly flew away. It's been a scientific night.

I shot at f4, ISO100 and 1/200. The strobes were at 1/1 and 1/16. I'm not sure why I needed so much power, but apparently I did. I usually only have to use on in a soft box at 1/16.

For editing, I hardly touched these. I really only cropped and maybe did some selective clarity adjustments on the eye one, but that's about it.

These next two I did some more editing on. I raised the contrast a lot, as well as the shadows, whites and clarity. Pretty much everything up, haha.

Finally, the tongue picture. This one I spent more time on, especially getting the cropping right. 

I put the overall exposure up, the upped the shadows a ton, bumped the whites and dropped the blacks a hair. Also put the clarity up a lot. This all brought out more of the tongue and separated it from the honey. I also raised the saturation of the oranges, reds, and yellows. 

Oh, and all of this was tinted very blue.

As always, look at them on Fb!

See you tomorrow!

Adventure Time!

No the show...never seen it...don't even know what it is...don't want to know. Moving on.

No post yesterday because I camping on Shaw! It was a pretty spontaneous trip that managed to turn out pretty awesome actually!

Anne and I met up on Shaw from the ferry, and then biked out to Indian Cove on the south end of the island. Only like a mile but still a pretty ride! It was odd biking with a heavy(ish) pack. I packed in maybe the half an hour before I was supposed to get on the ferry, and I somehow got everything I needed into my daypack. True, my bag, pad, and tripod were strapped to the outside, but minor details!

After a sweet beach walk by moonlight (even got moon shadows and everything), we attempted to make a fire. But being us, the fire refused to start, and it was only after we gave up and let it burn down did it actually catch.

Yeah...no idea how that worked out.

But anyway, we had this sweet fire, and you know what that means. Pictures!

I started out trying to use a pretty high aperture, around f8 or so, coupled with a jacked up ISO. And that's really didn't work out. I'm not really a fan of vast depth of field or noisy images, so that combo of expo settings didn't really float my boat.

I then switched to my favorite settings as of late. Aperture priority mode at f1.4 and ISO100. Wide open with minimal noise makes for images I really like. I pretty much just started snapping away at the fire at whatever caught my eye. I tend to go for intersections of lines that make geometric shapes. Like triangles and stuff like that.

I didn't even look at the photos till tonight.

After going through, I settled on an image of one of the logs with fire wrapping around it and a dark/blurry log off on the right side. The two logs created a v-shape to the image that drew the eye to the in focus area near the intersection of the logs.

Editing tonight was a bit challenging. I saw the image I wanted in my head, but I couldn't get it. After a lot of fiddling and tweaking (which is how I edit, really have no idea what I'm doing half the time), I got what I was looking for. I've said it time and time again, experimentation is why I like photography and it's how I approach it every time. I can almost never execute any plans I have, all of my best work is just from me trying something different and having good luck! but I digress...

For the photo, I raised the shadow areas and intense highlights just a bit. This gave you more detail to look at in the wood, and made the fire more poppy and fireish. I went a bit further and upped the clarity in the area of the wood that was sharp. Also the vibrance just a bit because why not add more color?

So it went from this...

To this! and of course Blogger being Blogger makes the good photo look terrible and the original look like the good photo. face palm. just look on the facebook page, please.

Now, for today's photo! When I was on the beach this morning, I found this epic shell and had to take it back for pictures. 

To photo it, I used my macro adaptor to get close enough. There wasn't a lot of light from my desk lamp, so I used a tripod to keep everything steady and also to keep my focus point in the same spot. I played around with different depths of field, but I eventually settled on using f3.2. Like I said, I just love the shallow depth of field. It was in Av mode, so the camera figured out the rest for me. :)

Editing this one was a pain! A fun pain, but a pain none the less. I just kept trying different things out and taking breaks to let my brain reset on the look I was trying to get. It's incredibly helpful to take breaks while editing, even if it's switching to a different photo for a bit, the brain needs to reset and get a fresh perspective. Every time I would go back to editing, I could instantly see where I'd gone wrong before. 

I ended up with a pretty complicated Lr edit. The Basic setting I've screen captured for you. What I wanted to do was bring out the detail and color in the shell with out making it look to edited and over processed. At least, over processed in my eyes. I wanted it to look like I saw it, which is not necessarily photo realistic. (that term is so ironic now) I also added some blue to the shadows to get a richer tone to the image, the stark black wasn't doing it for me. 

As far as local adjustments, I darkened the spiral line and then lightened the center point. This improved the overall contrast and also focuses the eye to the center more. It emphasized the spiral geometry of the image. I like geometry.

Before:

After:

See you tomorrow!

Even More Yum Yums!

Took some more food pictures for my sister tonight. They were these awesome flourless muffin cupcake things. But they tasted like regular deliciousness. Check out Emma's Baking Addition (blog) for the recipe and what not. She'll have a post up in a couple of days I bet.

I was rushed when shooting this, so I used the same set up as I have for the last food photo. I guess if it works, don't fix it! I'll try something new next time maybe.

Basically, I had two  strobes set up. One in the back left and one in front right. Both were aimed up to make the little mat studio box thing into one giant light box. The strobes also created hot spots, so instead of light everywhere, there was direction to it and created some cool effects. I like the look of the white on the dark food, it creates a nice contrast.

I believe I had the strobe in the back at 1/16 and the strobe in the front the same. I was shooting at f6.3 and ISO400, so I had plenty of light collectingness and didn't need much power. I probably could have even upped the aperture a lot and just used a higher power to get more depth of field. But for the shot I wanted, the shallower depth was what I wanted.

As far as editing, I didn't do much at all. Upped the shadows a touch and dropped the blacks. Love when the photos just don't need much.

The composition of this photo was something I actually didn't think about while shooting. I was rushing and just trusted my experience would make something cool. I really like how it turned out. The off angle nature make the angles stand out and contrast with the roundness of the foods. The focus takes it a step further by highlighting just one of the foods. Even the light is brighter on the food in the foreground. The amount of food items even works. Four in the background (which by itself is a unsightly number) and then one in the foreground makes five. Which is a good number to look at!

See you tomorrow!

Back to Paradise

Yes, I did in fact have to use spell check for the title. Don't judge.

Anywho! I went out to Young Hill tonight, and it was a pretty awesome sunset. Last summer, I went out to Young Hill a couple times every week to try to catch the sunset. Sometime you get these amazing light rays if the conditions are right, and I was determined to see them. Sadly, I realized the you really need to be in an airplane to get the best view, although from the hill it still looks amazing!

Young Hill is definitely one of my favorite spots on the island, there's really only one or two other places that surpass it. San Juan might not be one of those legendary tropical islands, but it still hold all, if not more, of the beauty of them. In fact, my friends and I named one of the trails on the south face of the hill ''Paradise.'' There's hardly a better and more beautiful place to grow up.

Back to photography though! I was on the hill for the sunset, but I started shooting a bit early. There were a few clouds in the sky, and they were really low and blocked the sun almost till the horizon. This gave me a unique opportunity. Usually, you have to shoot into the sun and have a lens flare or wait until the sun is almost under the horizon so you don't get a lens flare. It's kind of a trade off for color and also the spill light on the landscape. I usually shoot at both times and pick later, but tonight I had a different option. Have the spill light and wonder sky colors all at the same time with no lens flare! The clouds were low enough that I had the amazing colors and none of the side effects! Well, that's partly true. There were better colors later, but the composition I was going for was with mountains and they got washed out with haze as the sun set lower and the colors got more intense.

Out of the camera, the picture looked like this. It's a two (vertical) framed panorama.

Pretty good. But not quite what I saw in my head. I'd written on this before, but I take my photos and try to make them look like how I see and feel about the image. Simple capturing the light as it is doesn't usually do the image justice. I have to manipulate that light digitally in order to recreate the image I wanted to capture. Most of the time I can get close to what I want. Sometimes not.

When I was taking this image, I saw it as richer and more dramatic than how it looked to the camera. There is no flare, no depth. The colors are basically yellow and black. I saw the purples, the blues and green and reds. I wanted to bring those back and also show case the epic layered mountains of Vancouver island.

I started by manipulating the tonal curve. The shadows got raised, and the highlights brought down a bit. This left the overall contrast alone, but gave the midtones more pop. I did the opposite with the reds after that, but on a much lesser scale. This mainly gave the highlights more reds and color to them. Finally, I brought up the black point on the blues a bit to add blue across the board. Mainly to the shadows, but a little to the highlights. More purple!! (start wearing purple) Props to who gets that reference.

I finished up with a selective clarity raise to the mountains to bring the details out in them and separate them more.

That's about it! Little noise reduction would have been good buttttt you knowwwww. Lazy :)

See you tomorrow!

Figure of Fire

Tonight will be a short post, need to get some sleep. And sadly no trip pictures yet, still working on those. It might take a bit...

But tonight I went to Mile's grad party, where they happened to have a giant bon fire going! Victor started to hit it with a big log and making epic sparks. I naturally was taking lots of pictures, and one of them looked like there was a figure outlined in the sparks!

When you shoot fire, it's all about figuring out how much blur you want. A shortish shutter speed, less than 1/100 but more than 1/8 will create a nice blur but still have some sharpness. If you really want to freeze fire, you must use above 1/400 or even higher depending on how intense the fire is. I used a shutter speed of 1/250, so it was right in the middle. Still got a little blur, but it was mostly sharp.

I had to use an ISO of 1600 though because it was so dark out. Unfortunate, but what can you do. My aperture could only go to f3.5, and that wasn't really bright enough.

As far as timing, I tend to shoot a little earlier than I would think I should. Usually there is some human lag, and so you'll end up taking the photo exactly when you mean to.

Editing this was a pretty simple matter. Upped the contrast a bit and the clarity, and that's pretty much it! Simple simple. A bit of noise reduction too.

See you tomorrow!

Night Swinging

I'm back from the trip! It's been a long couple weeks, and I have lots and lots of photos to share! But not tonight. I'm still just sorting them, let along editing. I have a couple, but not enough for a post. Maybe soon though!

I do have something for tonight though! Victor, Maclin and I went out to the boat peoples house tonight, and did some light painting with Victor's swing out there. It's basically a rope swing, but you put your arms and chest thru a padded loop and then run. It's quite funny to watch, and I thought it'd be perfect for light painting.

We put a head lamp on Victor, and then he just went on the swing for the length of the exposure. It was quite entertaining to watch him fly around for a while. I chose to use a 10mm lens to capture most of the movement of the swing plus get the tree and grass in the frame. I really like how the 10mm distorts the world so much. Makes it look quite interesting. I liked shooting the swing at maybe 30 degrees. It gave it more depth than shooting it head on or perpendicular, although those angles may have been nice too.

I shot at 40 seconds at f2.8 and ISO400. This allowed me to get a lot of light and get proper exposure, while also getting a lot of light trails. Win win.

For eding, I took a brighter exposure and merged it with a darker one that had better light trails. This way, I got properly exposed grass and also the good light trails. A simple layer mask did the trick. In Lr, I raised the clarity, shadows, and saturation a bit to make the photo pop more. The sky and grass have so much color in them, and I wanted to make that more apparent.

See you tomorrow!