Sunrise

Victor came back today! I was out on a call really early, and he got in on the 5:50 boat, so we decided to go do some sunrise pictures.

We discovered that we have been missing out with only watching sunsets! The east side of the island in the morning is simply amazing. The view over the other islands as well as the Cascade range was sweeeet. I think I may be getting up for sunrises in the future...

So for pictures, I first shot some tree silhouettes, the sun; that sort of thing. Then I zoomed in to 200mm and started looking around at the other islands. To the north, there's Orcas, so I took a panoramic of the view there. I shot at ISO100, f8, and 1/160. I wanted the lens to be sharp, so with the stabilization I was definitely fine at 1/160, and f8 just made everything a little sharper.

In Lr, I first made the panorama using Ps, then I started doing color work and what not on it. I raised the contrast a lot, as well as the shadows and lowered the blacks. I raised the clarity and vibrance a bit to. This brought out the details in the shadows, made everything more alive, and also preserved the dark blacks. Finally, I warmed everything up to match the sunrise I was seeing.

See you tomorrow!

Over the Valley

Finally got the Phantom up to altitude today. A certain altitude that is for me to know and you to not know other than it's really freaking high and you can see the outline of the island...

Maclin and I went out to San Juan Valley just around sunset, and I've got to say it was pretty amazing. There was this big open field that we flew above, and you could see literally for miles all around. Even though you're just looking at a little screen, it's still amazing. Especially when you're zooming around at altitude.

So for the photo, I wanted to get the three shadows, and the square fields. From where we were, it wasn't the best view ever of the fields, but we sure got some cool shadows. If I was to do it again, I would fly out more to directly over some of the fields.

For exposure, I just tilted down and rotated away a bit so that the sun wasn't in the view. The camera exposed for the shadows, and got a pretty good shot.

In editing, I did a auto tone, then raised the clarity and shadows a bit as well as converted to b/w. That's about it. Pretty quick and easy picture, but something a little different. Maybe a little planet photo from above there would look cool....

See you tomorrow!

Carrot Muffin Items

I asked my sister to make some goodies for me to bring to the shop, and as payment I would, of course, take pictures of them for her blog. She ended up making these delicious carrot muffin things, no idea what's in them but they are delicious. You'll have to look up her recipe when she posts it.

Emma's Baking Addiction is the name of her blog. Tons of good recipes and such on it :)

So for photos, I didn't really change things up too much. I had a new plate, but that's not too new. It had a cool spiral design though, and my favorite shot from tonight was placing the muffin directly in the center of the spiral. Pretty common idea that most would think of, but that doesn't mean it's a bad one.  I shot straight down at 57mm, or close to what normal lens looks like.

The strobes were pointed opposite of what I usually do, one on the left was the key, and light up the whole left side of the box to make a giant soft box. The other strobe was pointed backwards to light up the back panel and provided overall global light. I really like this lighting scheme; it lit everything very nicely, and make the muffins look very tasty/moist. Which they are :)

For editing, I lowered the highlights and raised the whites. This compressed the tonal range down a bit so that I got more detail in the highlights, but still kept very white whites. To finish it off, I made a circular adjustment that made a warm, high contrast vignette around the muffin. This was to bring more attention to the spiral, and also highlight the muffin.

See you tomorrow!

Beachness

So we had our internet fixed today! Which means it’s down now. Thank you ISP…

The photo won’t get posted until tomorrow, errr today then. But that’s okay. There’s two photos anyway to make up for it J

Tonight I went out to South Beach with Marissa and took some sweet 360 photos. The plan was to do a layer of the ground when it was dusk, then do the horizon a bit later, then get the stars when they came out. But of courrrrse I forgot to change the ISO settings, so everything is super under exposed and I’m not going to try to recover it. Because I already have a photos or two that is better J

The first one is a panoramic I shot right when we got there. It was on a 10mm lens at f2.8, 30s, and ISO800. You can just start to see the stars coming out, but mostly the horizon is over blown.

For editing, I did local adjustments to raise the clarity in the sky for all the photos, and then to raised the shadows in the ground for all of them too. Then overall, I raised the highlights, shadows a bit, and maybe clarity. Not too much though.

Once I had a panoramic from PTGui, I changed my mind in Lr and converted it to b/w. It looked wonderful that way. I raised the shadows a bit, and then messed with the tone curve. I added blue to the shadows, green to the midtones, and red to the highlights. Why? Because I felt like it. Good enough reason, right?

As far as shutter speed goes for shooting rocks and water, 1s-1/8 will give you just blurred water depending on how fast the water is moving. Longer speeds with make a mist like effect, with the longer the exposure, the more mist the water becomes.

The second photo was a complete whim, but I love it! As we were walking back, I saw the cool rock with the Milky Way coming out of it. So I slapped the camera on the tripod, upped the ISO to 2000, and took one. Just one. Back in Lr, I raise the highlights, saturation, clarity, and vibrance. It just turned out amazing, and it was just a test photo thing that wasn’t even serious! Moral of the story, take every photo you see, because you never know what will turn out.

See you tomorrow!

Definitely Didn't Crash It

So, can you guess what kind of photo I have for tonight?

Yeah, little planet. Of course. It's just way too fun to fly the Phantom around at 500ft. :) The views of the islands are amazing up there. Like having your own airplane kinda...

Anyway, we went to two places on the north end of the island and did the standard thing we usually do for these. Fly up to 450ft, do three rounds of shots, then come back down. Nothing too fancy.

But I ran into some problems in post. First, noise. I had to pull a lot out of the raws, and I didn't do any noise reduction on them. Which made the jpegs very noisy. No good. So to fix that, I went back in and did noise reduction on the photos before I exported them to jpeg and into PTGui. Not that great still, but not bad. I think the lesson is to shoot right as the sun is setting so that you have the most compressed tonal range in nature, and don't have to fix it in post. That, or just set a manual exposure mode. I'll have to play around with the Phantom app and look for that...

So the second photo. Didn't work out so great...

The exposure difference between the light and the dark ground was much too great. The flare effect form the sun washed out the ground a lot, and when compositing in PTGui, everything is pretty flat and boring. I brought it back a bit in Lr with clarity and contrast upping, but it's still not great.

Going a bit further, I added a local adjustment of saturation and warming around the edges of the planet to add a little something to the sunset. This helped a lot I think. Finally, a bit of noise reduction and sharpening go a longgggg way.

Finally, I just threw in one layer of photos for a simple panoramic. Not that awesome because it's missing the bottom part of the lake and what not, but I still like it :)

Lessons learned. Need lens shade. Shoot right before and after sun goes down. Noise reduction is your friend. Get more sleep.

Edit: Got the ground in this one. Added local adjustments to the edges for vignettes and warming up.

See you tomorrow!

Ring Galaxy

So today I realized the my milky way photos could be a whole lot better if I would start thinking more about the exposure. I've been reading some articles about different night time rules, such as the 500 rule. Since it was all fresh in my head, I went out and shot some milky way pictures. There's also been a milky way panoramic I've wanted to do, so I got that out of the way as well :)

So for the rules. The 500 rule is for star trails. You take your focal length of your lens, then divided 500 by that. The dividend is your maximum exposure time with no star trails. So I was shooting with a 10mm (16mm on my 1/6 crop 7D), 500/16=31 ish. So about 30 seconds to be safe. Which is perfect, because that's the longest I can go with out using a manual shutter release. 

As for the rest of the settings. ISO1600 because I did a test and ISO800 was one stop too low. f2.8 because most open lens can get. 

I shot portrait pointed up at about 60 degrees. With the fisheye, I could see the ground and the top of the milky way, so I just took six shots from left to right. 

Here's my editing process.

See you tomorrow!

Point of Cattle

High above the peaceful grasslands of Cattle Point, a small rc copter buzzed noisily around. That's pretty much what happened tonight. We sent up the DJI Phantom at sunset and took a round of panoramas. Same set up as yesterday, three rounds of 360s, and then one pointed straight down.

Here's a few videos of the editing process :)

Utah...at last

Finally, I'm getting around to writing this post on the Utah trip.

I'm doing something a little different for this post...it's almost completely in video format. I'm going to go through each photo from each day and explain as much as I can about the set up's, shooting, editing, and theory behind them. If anyone has any question, leave a comment and I'll do my best to answer!

Update: Photo album here: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.535879869873049.1073741921.223477064446666&type=1

Day 1:

Day 2:

Day 3:

Day 4:

Day 5:

Day 6:

2nd half

Day 7:

2nd half

Day 8:

Day 9:

Update:

I added an adjustment over the stars that made then more blue, upped the exposure, highlights, clarity, and saturation.

Day 10:

Day 11:

Day 12:

Day 13:

Now for the rest of the photos! Enjoy!

See you tomorrow!