Peat's Pano

I got back into Bozeman today, and was greeted by a couple inches of fresh snow! That, and it was about 4 degrees out..burrrrr. I guess that's what happens when there's not a cloud in the sky. 

By the time I got back home and unpacked, it was nearly sunset. I looked outside and saw the orange light coming, so I rushed out to Peat's Hill for some pictures. With the fresh snow on the ground, I figured there would be some epic lighting on the town. 

Sadly though, the light faded too fast :( By the time I got up there, the town was in the shadow and only the mountains were still glowing. However, it does still have sort of a cool look to it. The town is in a cool blue bowl, surrounded by fiery mountains. 

Taking this was pretty stranded panoramic technique. First, compose your shot. I wanted about 60/40 ground to sky ratio, because that is really close to the rule of thirds. Put the horizon on one of the third lines instead of the middle. It makes a more dynamic photo, where either the sky or the ground are put forth as more important. It helps the viewer know what to look at. 

Next, I got my exposure. Looking at my histogram, I made sure to get as bright as image as I could without clipping any highlights. In digital, you can make things brighter, but you can't bring back detail from overblown highlights very well.

Finally, I shot from left to right with about 50% overlap of frames. This helps Ps blend things together nicely. 

Before I made the pano in Ps though, I did some editing in Lr. First, I brightened the ground by about a third of a stop, I just felt it was a little bit too dark. I also increase the contrast and vibrance there just a tad. More drama to it. It's the subject after all. 

Next, I brightened the highlights, shadows, and whites of the whole image. I guess my exposure was a little dark.... when you try to work to fast to catch light that sometimes happens. But it's better than missing the light! That's what's so great about digital, it's very easy to brighten up a slightly underexposed image. 

Next came the pano, which blended beautifully because I shot on a tripod. With a quick crop later, that was all done. 

For a final little tweak, I upped the highlights and clarity just a tad. Just right. 

See you tomorrow!

Passive agressive quad

It's not very loud, but it tries to kill you constantly. Deb's quad is highly entertaining.

Victor and I went over to the farm today, where Deb's freshly acquired racing quad is stored. It's a Honda 450, so it's quite large. Apparently, Deb used to race quads back in the day. Figures though, since she also raced NASCAR...

Shooting a quad is much different than a lot of what I've been doing recently. It's very fast moving, so focus and scale were going to be the major problems I faced. To give you an idea, it tops out 1st at 20 or 30, and Victor was getting into 3rd... but the most fun we were having was drifting it around in 1st.

As with the title, the quad got all passive aggressive on Victor when he was drifting it. There he was, just quietly going sideways, when quad decided to try to fly. First the front wheels came off the ground, then the back left wheel...all while still drifting. Yea one wheel drift.

I was shooting at 1/60 and f/11. It was full sunlight, so I needed to stop down quite a bit to get that fast of a shutter speed. Normally, you need at least 1/400 to stop motion for fast moving things like quads. But you can also stop motion by moving the camera relative to the subject, to slow it down. This makes the background move faster than the subject, and so it becomes what it blurred. The subject is sharp because it's not moving fast relative to the camera, but the background goes all wonky. This can have awesome effects in photos. It's really hard to get the speed matched right, so most of the time everything is blurry, but when you get it right, it's awesome.

For editing this, I knew I wanted it in b/w since the colors weren't that great today. It's winter on the island, so grey everywhereeeee....

Mostly, I just upped the contrast after that. Made the whites whiter, blacks blacker, that sort of thing. Give a little more definition to the softness of the photo. I also adjusted the tone curve a bit to give more detail through out the image. 

After that, all was done! 

See you tomorrow!

Burning Clouds

My family and I went out to some of the island beaches today. I'm thinking about shooting the different beaches here for my photo final, since there's a lot of really beautiful ones here.

The final beach we ended up at was Dead Man's on the west side of the island. Don't know why it has that name..we arrived right at sunset, and I was scrambling to get a photo taken with the field camera. That thing takes a good five minutes from set up to when you can take a picture, and the sun waits for no one. I managed to catch the fading sunlight, and with a little time to spare! So why not shoot with another camera?

I pulled out my 7D and fired away. The water on the rocks was pretty interesting, but the clouds....oh the clouds. One of the best sunsets I've seen this winter, the clouds were lit up like fire in the sky. It was just glowing up there, and the dark blue clouds behind the glowing ones made for some real drama.

Many cloud shots are fairly flat. Not tonally flat, but specially flat. There's contrast in the clouds, but there's only one layer of clouds. No foreground, middle ground, or background. Yes, sometimes that's different, but not usually. The distance is just to great between you and the clouds that they all look the same. Only color can really separate them, tones sometimes can too, but it's not as apparent as color can be.

I shot at f/8, ISO100, and 1/100s. My lenses are not very sharp wide open, so I've been shooting at f/8 and f/11 more often. f/11 and f/16 are probably the sharpest, but f/8 gives 1-2 stops more light and I need that when shooting handheld and with a telephoto.

Framing for this, I just put it anywhere but in the exact center. Not much else you can do with that.

Editing was as follows.

What does it all mean??

Well, I brightened up the clouds, but kept the darks still dark. You can see from the sliders that most of the highlights got brightened, as well as the overall exposure. However, this brightened the darks too, and so I upped the contrast a bit to get those darks back, and to also make the whites a little brighter.

See you tomorrow!

Fun with LEDs

Got home today! It's nice to be back. After my family had Thanksgiving dinner, Victor and I went down to Maclin's house to take some pictures and play some games. For about an hour, we just did the latter, but we finally tore our selves away to figure out a picture.

Maclin has these epic LED strips he got, they're just a ton of LEDs daisy chained together in a waterproof strip that you can actually program to light different ways. They're all different colors and can change! Tres cool.

For about two hours, Maclin tried the lights to do a specific pattern. Apparently something kept going wrong. Victor and I were really helpful, we made targets out of yellow padded mailer and shot at them with some bows and arrows. :)

Finally, we gave up on the pattern, and just started playing with the lights. They got attached to a really long stick, so you could swing them around and make cool patterns. For this blog photo, Victor just went crazy with the lights, and it ended up working really well. It made really neat effect, having the light trail go in front of the others to create some space. The refresh rate on the LEDs made things interesting too, very interesting.

I shot at f/11, ISO100, and bulb. The lights were bright, so I could afford to stop down a bit and get more in focus.

Other than blub mode, there was nothing really special done for shooting. Just a dark garage and go to town with some LED strips.

Editing was really simple as well, the only thing I did was to darken the black patch to the left side of the image. There was a little detail of the room in that area, which had to go. Noting major though at all.

I'll get the rest of the photos from tonight edited soon, and posted! Stay tuned.

See you tomorrow!

Winter Wonderland

With all the fresh snow, it was a perfect day to go test the Moonlander! I think there's about 4 or 5 inches on the ground, so I hoped there would be some good fun to be had on the trails.

However, the snow had other plans for me. Slippery when wet is one thing, but turning to concrete is another. It's been really warm for snow, and the fluffy white stuff wasn't so fluffy. More like peanut butter. Sticky, sloppy, heavy, meh. Very hard to ride in.

The first couple stops for pictures didn't turn out so well. Very frustrating trying to get a good self portrait when it takes about 3 minutes to do each try, not to mention setting things up. Let's just I was less than thrilled with the results.

But I wasn't going to give up, persevere and you will prevail. I found this weird will gully that looked promising for a picture. The snow was untrodden, and it had a neat little flow to it.

Find the right exposure for snow is really annoying. Snow is very white, but with detail, so somewhere around zone 8 maybe. I wanted a smaller depth of field, so I shot at f/3.5. To get the shutter speed, I couldn't really rely on the meter. Since everything is white, the meter was going to underexpose things by about 3 stops. It wants middle grey, snow is zone 8 and middle grey is zone 5, so three stops difference. So I shot at 1/800 to get close to the correct exposure, but still underexposed a little bit. This was to preserve lots of detail in the highlights, which is important for digital. You can always bump up things, but you can't recover blown out areas.

Now for the actual taking of the picture. I used the same method as I did for the last couple pics, intervelometer every second. Basically, I set up my camera to take a picture every second for 17 frames, with a 1 minute timer. This gave me time to scamper (slip and slide on a steep slope carrying a bike weighing about 40lbs with all the snow stuck to it) up to the top of the gully and ride down. I also set my phone with an alarm to go off after 1 minute, so I knew when the pictures were going to start.

I have to say, the gully was a ton of fun to ride. I didn't do any scouting or anything before I dropped in, and I couldn't see since it was covered with snow. It felt like it was just a big ol pile of baby heads (grape fruit sized rocks) that were coated with grease. It was a "hold on for dear life and bounce off the sides of the gully" sort of gig. Brakes were highly ineffective since there was so traction. I think the only thing that kept me up was the massive set of wheels under me. I had to ride it four times even though I got a good shot on the first try. Even took a little video! It's really not that extreme of a line, but a little sketchy in the wet snow!

To start off in editing, I fixed my contrast a bit. Upped everything, then compressed the highlights and shadows. This was the whites would be bright, and the blacks would be black, but the shadows and highlights would still have lots of detail in them.

In other words, I took the image which had contrast from zone 3 to 7, and pushed it to zone 1 and 9. Then I took zones 2,3, 7, and 8, and made them 3,4,6,7. There is still information in all the zones, just most of it is more readable now. The vast majority of information is in zones 6-8 though, since that's the snow. And there was a lot of snow. I also upped the exposure in the snow about half a stop to get it bright enough, so I suppose I could have shot at 1/640 and just do that adjustment in camera.

Finally, I added more contrast into the sky for more drama. Drama is good for skies, most of time. For this, definitely good.

See you tomorrow!

Fresh White

So it rained today. and then it poured. and then it sleeted. and then it snowed. and then it snowed some more, and some more, and some more. It's beginning to look look like a winter wonderland.

I was out and about all day, but when I got home the first thing I had to do was so shoot the fresh snow somewhere. But where? It's late at night, the roads are traitorous, yes I meant to say traitorous, and not to mention there is half a chocolate bar waiting for me.

But I ventured out none the less, in hopes that something would catch me eye. It was actually surprisingly warm, so it wasn't half bad walking around in the snow. Just around the neighborhood, I started to look at all the trees and branches that were piled with snow. Everything was just white on top. The high trees actually looked like they had leaves on them there was so much snow. So maybe there's a picture there?

While I was experimenting under an evergreen, I happened to look up through a patch of branches that framed another tree perfectly. Instantly knew that was going to be my photo. The underside of the evergreen was nice and dark, which contrasted with the white conifer across the street.

My first exposure was 30s at f/11 and ISO100. Lots of depth in the focal field, so both the branches and the tree were in focus more or less. The long exposure allowed me to do some light painting on the branches first. I stood on the street and used my Maglite on the outsides of the branches, so that they would be rimmed with a bright glow, but not enough to take over the photo.

The rest of the exposures were light paintings of the tree. I couldn't get the whole thing in one go since my Maglite wasn't bright enough for f/11. But oh the joys of compositing.

Speaking of which, that's all I did for editing. Auto-align the layers in Ps, then just paint in the bright spots from each layer. That, and blend them together with the lighten blend mode. Ta da. All done.

See you tomorrow!

Sunny Day

Haze is a pesky thing. Always getting in the way of photos and ruining contrast. It's always such a bother when I'm shooting the mountains. Scenes that have a lot of contrast (looks like it with the eye) are really actually flat and bleh. They require some post work to bring the contrast back to where I think it should be.

Usually, on clear and sunny days, contrast is just over the top and pictures turn out too extreme. But today, wonderful haze had other plans. I was just trying to get some interesting pictures of the mountains, and haze had to go muck it up for me. The white capped peaks were still kind of interesting in the low contrastness, but I wasn't feeling it. With so many pictures of the mountains already, something had to change, and that wasn't going to happen today.

Just before I left, I happened to glance up at the scattered clouds. They were nice and puffy, so I though, why not see what a picture would look like?

Just looking at the histogram, it was a terrible image. The range of tones was from about zone 4 to 6, so it was basically a grey photo.... But viewed in b/w, it was strongly appealing. The cloud seemed to blend with the sky, with just subtle tonal shifts defining its shape.

I was shooting at sunny 16, which I think I've explained before. It's shooting at f/16, and your shutter speed is equal to your ISO speed. It usually provides the proper exposure for sunny situations.

Editing this was, minimal but extensive at the same time. I didn't do much to "correct" it as I usually do. Normally, I would have brought out more contrast, upped the clarity, gotten drama out of it...that sort of thing. However, for tonight, I did the opposite. I brightened things up quite a bit with the highlights and shadows, so that information was only in zones 6-10. Very, very bright image. Maybe a bit too bright. So I toned it down a bit, lowered the shadows, and added some midtone contrast. This gave me some more information into zone 5, with most of the info in 7 and 8. It's still a bright image, but the detail is in zones that you can still see detail in. Previous to the darkening, it would have been nearly impossible to see detail in the upper zones.

It's kinda funny, the darker side of the cloud is actually a highlight range on any other photo. It looks dark because we want to see it dark, but it's actually quite bright! Funny how the eye plays tricks.

This picture made possible by haze, lowering the contrast of image since literally the beginning of the world.

See you tomorrow!

Actually Did It

I tried my idea from the other night with the tea kettle. Many times I've had an idea while writing, and said I'd try it one of these days, but tonight I actually did! What an achievement.

If you don't remember, my idea was to light paint the kettle instead of lighting it with strobe. Surprisingly, it worked out almost exactly as I thought it would. Got some awesome light trails and cool reflections on the kettle! And, just as I thought, the steam is gone :( Motion blur was just too much for it. It could have been brought back with some strobes, but that wouldn't go with the light painting idea, now would it?

So how did I do the light painting? I set the camera to f/8, ISO100 and 10s shutter. In my room, with a black background and the lights off, the ambient light wouldn't effect the exposure at all. Only the light from my iPhone makes any effect.

It sounds a bit immature, but I pretty much just waved my phone around during the exposure. There's a little thought that has to go in, like having the light pointed the right way, and making sure you light the whole thigh right, but really its just a random motion. I ended up doing two exposures, one where I mostly lit the front of the kettle, and one where I did a lot of side lighting on the handle and edges.

For editing, I just blended the two photos together in Lr with the lighten blending mode, and converted to b/w. That's really all though... It was a really simple photo, but very awesome! It's so dramatic for a picture of a kettle.

See you tomorrow!

Guess What?

I took pictures of the mountains again! Crazy that I'd take pictures of mountains...right? Such boring things with no cool light at all, especially when they're covered with snow and lit by the golden setting sun.

Where to begin...

It was late after noon, and I needed to start really thinking about a photo. I should really start doing pictures in the morning too, but I'm just never awake or I'm in class! Sunrises are pretty dang cool though. Anyway, late afternoon...

From where I was, I could only see the sunset in the west. It was pretty decent, with some little clouds lit with gold here and there. Nothing really to write home about. Farther north, the clouds got a little better, with more color and contrast in them. As I kept looking and scanning the horizon though, they just kept getting better and better.

I quickly grabbed my camera and ran down the road a little bit to see farther north west. Boy, what a pretty sight. The rather boring sunset in the west grew into a fairly descent light show in the north, and then into a golden landscape in the east. The snow capped mountains (snowed earlier in the day) had a bank of clouds just above them, and everything, I mean everything, was glowing gold. The shadows had a darker purple look to them, which mixed perfectly with the gold.

I started shooting at f/8, 1/50 and ISO100. I wanted to shoot at f/8 to get a sharp image (my 70-300 isn't that sharp wide open), and to get a good exposure at ISO100 I needed 1/50. Unfortunately, that's not a fast enough shutter to get a sharp image handheld at 170mm focal length. You need about a 1/200, which is about 2.3 stops faster/darker. :(

Luckily, that lens has stabilization that lets you shoot about 3 stops slower than normally required! So I'd be shooting at 1/50 and get the sharpness of 1/320! (ish) That's really pushing it, and I should have been on a tripod for a really sharp image. But no time! The light was going away so quickly! It's still a decently sharp photo.

So, quick geeky photography thing. Basically, any given film/sensor can capture a range of tones of a scene. It'll be different for every film/sensor (I'm just going to say sensor since that's what we're talking about), in other words different levels of light will become pure white and pure black in a scene. With a very sensitive sensor setting, light of brightness A will be pure white, and light of brightness B will be shadows. With a not as sensitive sensor, A will be a midtown, and B won't be recorded at all since it's not bright enough for the sensor to record.

Note: I'm simplifying "sensor." It's really the sensor and processor/other hardware in a camera.

So, different sensors record light as brighter or darker, but they can also record a range differently. A third sensor might record A as a bright white and also B as a shadow. That sensor would have a high dynamic range or be able to record a white range of brightnesses.

This can have different effects on shooting a scene. If you have a sensor with a low dynamic range, the resulting photo will be more contrasty. If you have a sensor with a high dynamic range, then the photo will be less contrasty, with more information in the midtones.

Think of it like having a cold and tasting food. When you have a cold, you can't taste as well, and food is bland. There's no extremes. But when you're healthy, the very same food has all sort of flavor! If the same input, but the sensory can detect a greater range of inputs and the results is a lot better.

The same is with photography. The greater range of tones a sensor/film can capture, the more information you have to work with. However, sometimes the range you can capture is greater than what's in the scene. This is called having latitude in your scene.

Going back to the zone system, there's essentially 8 zones with information, and 2 (black and white) of just luminosity. Each zone is 1 stop of light difference. If you have a scene that only has 6 zones occupied, then you can chose where to put it. Metered to have an overall range of middle gray, or 18% reflectance, zone 3-8 will be occupied. If you were to overexpose by 1 stop, you could have more whites (zone 4-9 now occupied) but less blacks. Sometimes this is great, but other times it looks like a washed out photo. On the other end, you could underexpose by one stop and get more blacks (zone 1-7 occupied) but now there are no whites.

With post processing, all three of these cases can be corrected.

I shot with "correct" exposure, or metered for about middle grey. The photo has roughly zone 3-7ish with information in them. So the image is pretty flat. The first thing I did was to raise the contrast up to occupied the next two zones, 2 and 8. Now there's some deep shadows and some brighter whites. Looking good. But still not enough. I then bumped the highlights up one more stop into zone 9, or almost white. Yay, lots of contrast. I'm happy with that. But that's really only at the extremes of the tonal range. The midtowns are still pretty flat. I then upped the clarity to push the middle zones (4 and 6) farther out to 3 and 7. This gave more pop in the little details, while no actually sharpening the photo.

Next, I went into Ps and did a few little things. I removed a power line by use of the stamp tool (easy job, just time consuming). It takes a lot of time to remove lines when it's on a very information dense background. I also made a curves layer that increased the whites and lowered the midtones a bit. So say zone 7 and 8 go to 8 and 9, and zones 4 and 5 go to 3.5 and 4.5. That' enough to make a very dramatic difference. I only applied this layer to the clouds, clouds need more epic!

Since I was working with all the color channels, it increased the saturation or colors in the sky. By product of modifying contrast in a color image.

And then I was finally done.

See you tomorrow!

Spot of Tea, If You Will

Probably one of the greatest things I have in my house right now is an electric tea kettle. I suppose an actual kettle would be just about as good...but I mean seriously, for the ease of use it's hard to beat. Just fill with water, press the switch and in about 2 minutes you have boiling water! The only down side is that you go through hot chocolate and tea really quickly...

Since it's been so cold out lately, and decided to honor the trusty kettle with a little portrait. Plus, I though it'd be pretty cool to have the steam coming out of it and everything... Next time I may try to do some light painting around it with a long exposure, I think that could be really cool actually. But you wouldn't get the same frozen steam effect, so I didn't try it tonight.

The big thing with this, and really any metal object, is dealing with the specular highlights. It's essentially a mirror, so any light source is reflected. I don't have a studio, only my room at home, so it was inevitable that there would be some funky stuff going on in the reflection.

Here's my set up...

There's one strobe behind the kettle to create a rim light and illuminate the steam coming out. Pretty simple. I believe this was at 1/64 power, so not very much. The other strobe was at about 1/8 power and pointed away from the kettle...and into the giant white sheet I had. I basically wrapper this around everything to create somewhat of a mini white studio.

Didn't reallllllly work...

But it helped. My first attempt were with just a umbrella, and you can plainly see it in the kettle. With the sheet up, you get a nice white reflection, and a reflection of me!

Yeah, I kept both reflections in the final composite. Hehe

I shot at f/8 and ISO100, mostly to get some good depth of field on the kettle.  The stutter speed is irrelevant for strobes, remember. I haven't been including it in a lot of post because of this.

I composited two images, one taken with the umbrella, and one taken with the sheet. I alined them in Ps, then used the lighten blending mode to blend them together. It worked really well, with minimal exposure change. After I'd composited, I did a stamp visible layer thing (just making a copy of everything and putting it into one layer) and then blurred that layer. I only applied this blur to the edges of the photo, and with a lighten blending mode. This created sort of a etherial glow going on.

Back in Lr, I upped the contrast on the steam a little bit, and on the handle. Just need them to pop a bit more.

See you tomorrow!

Screen it again

Found yet another screen in the house...this one's for a window. Apparently we don't have enough screens...

I thought about doing an other product shot with this one, but decided to do a portrait instead.. My idea was to have the focus on the screen, and then the blurry image of me behind it. Might be cool, might not be. We'll see.

I set up one light, way up high and to the right. It sort of mimicked sunlight a little bit. Not quite as hard, but definitely contrasty. It was at 1/32 power, which is pretty high since I was shooting at f/2.2. But contrast is what I wanted. Exposing for the highlights makes the blacks really fade away, which can be nice. Not proper photography, but who cares?

I set the focus to manual, and then just experimented with different lengths. Not really any rhyme or reason, just what I thought might look good. Eventually, I settled on a very out of focus one, but that had a really cool grid pattern going on from the screen. Somehow, I had held the screen right in between myself and the camera at a distance that created the little cubes, but didn't show the actual screen. Pretty lucky.

Editing, I upped the contrast a lot, but then brought the blacks up a bit with the tone curve. I'm liking that weird muddy blacks style for a lot of photos. Maybe it's just a fad in photography that will pass. Even though I like it, I still feel like it's a bit of a cheat for a lame photo. I'm beginning to feel like the best photos are the ones that are interesting with out editing. If the edits become what's interesting about the photo, then that can be cool too, but if the edits are simply trying to fix a broken photo and trying to stay hidden at the same time...that's not very cool.

See you tomorrow!

Tasty Sun`

What's orange, tasty, and the size of a golf ball? Halo sun satsumas would be the correct answer. Juicy little spheres of goodness.

In honor  of them, I of course did a simple little portrait of one tonight. Nothing crazy, just simple goodness.

My first thought was to under light the fruit using a gridded strobe. I did this for a light bulb a while ago, and then used a screen for the shoe picture a while ago.

I set up this light before anything else. Starting  at lowest power and f/9, it actually lit the fruit perfectly from below. That was easy...

Then I added a top light by way of a soft box just about 5 inches up. Here's a little picture of it..

You may see that I added a piece of paper under the fruit. This was because I didn't like the way the grid was sort of taking over the image... just wasn't working. But with the paper, it turned into a little seamless white background. I held up the corner to make that seamless effect.

That's about it for shooting...oh I used a 4x macro converter to get a bit closer. I really need to get a macro lens.....

Editing...I just added some brightness to the background by way of a very feathered mask around the fruit. That's it though...

Like I said, very simple photo.

See you tomorrow!

Luminous Time

I have to say, glow in the dark things are way too cool. I've been tray developing my film for the last couple goes, which involves staying in the dark room with no lights for about 20 minutes or so. By about the half way point, my eye's adjust to the dim light of....the glow of my watch and the timer in the room. Normally much too faint for you to see, you can actually use it to make out the edges of the trays. Pretty cool. Plus, the green light reflecting off all the watch parts just looks really freaking cool in the dark.

My first attempts at capturing the glow were not that successful. I used a really powerful light to charge up the glow, and then proceeded to light paint with that light. The image that resulted just looked like I'd taken a normal photo of the watch. Borings.

Next I tried with my phones LED, but the same result happened. The white light was just taking over the scene. :(

Then, I had an idea. What if, I painted with green light? I did a quick Google search, and found the green color of glow in the dark stuff. I set my phone to max brightness, and did my light painting with that! Brilliant results!

But now I had too much green. haha just can't win

At that point, I started mixing white light with the green light. My procedure was thus:

1. Charge glow with sun flashlight
2. Flash scene with white LED on photo
3. paint sides of watch with green for remainder of exposure (f/9 and 5s at ISO100)

It just really just a matter of getting the mixture just right, which took about 10 attempts.

I arranged the scene to look a little like a display. I wrapped the watch around a black leather filter case, which I had taken a +4 macro filter out of to put on my lens. The filter gave a softness to the photo, as well as a more shallow depth of field to play with.

Then I got everything into Lr. Got it all edited, and discovered that the second hand as over the Seiko logo...

:(

Back to shooting... 1, 2, 3. 1, 2, 3....

Got another good shot WITHOUT any of the hands attacking..

Essentially,  I just synced the settings from the previous photo. Which were was follows. 

I brightened the face of the watch to bring more detail into the numbering and logo. It was jut a little to dark in the original, but I couldn't light it more without toning down the effect of the glow in the dark parts. I wanted that contrast between the face and then hands/dots. But now the face was too dark, so I brightened that whole area. But now the glow in the dark parts were too bright...bugger!

With a little selective mousing, I toned down the hands just a bit to where I liked it. They're still bright, but not completely blown out. 

For the second photo, I went a little further. I felt there was a little too much green around the photo, so I made a round mask and added purple toning to it. This did not make the image look purple, just toned down the green. I did the same to the watch face (only slightly), and also raised the clarity. Just a hair though. Not much. 

I'm really happy with the results, it's pretty much as I imagined it. However, I wish I could figure out a better way than massive amounts of post to get the image to look the way I want. Maybe I experiment around some more in the future!

See you tomorrow!

Une Apple

I was very much out of ideas tonight for a photo. I was going to take a picture of my bread....but I kinda ate it soooooo that didn't work...

I played around with portraits for a little while. Nope. Maybe some product shots? Nope.

Oh what's that?

A piece of mat board with a hole cut in it? That would make a cool little light, lets put an apple below it.

I put a single strobe up in the air, and the apple on my stool with the mat board in between the two. When the strobe popped, only the light that passed through the little circle reached the apple. It only illuminated the top of the apple, and a little bit of the stool.  The circle had a little highlights on it, but nothing else got light.

I shot at f/8, so the background was pretty much black.

It's so simple, I love it.

In Lr, I painted in a darkening adjustment on everything but the apple and hole, so everything but then is absolute black. I did a slight bump in contrast and a little bit of clarity and highlights too. Not much though. I converted to b/w and that was it. Simple, but elegant.

Now, I am going to go eat that apple, because it is delicious.

Alternate edit. The more modern style.

See you tomorrow!

Hi Hat

I (hopefully) finished shooting my final project today. There's one photo that I might have to redo...but I really hope not. I'd rather move on to other, more fun things.

On of my models today was Anne, and she brought this awesome hat. Apparently it's wool, and has some other really cool things about it that I can't remember right now. It's a pretty dang awesome hat though, and when we were done shooting, she asked if she could take a shadow puppet picture of it. Of course I said yes, and so we projected a white screen with the projector for her to make a shadow with. That was the only light source, the projector. I shot at f/8 and 1s at ISO100. Of course I was on a tripod.

Capturing the shadow was a little difficult. I had to be as close to Anne as possible without getting her in the frame and casting my shadow over hers. I ended up shooting right next to her, maybe a foot behind. I caught a little bit of her arm any my tripod, but it was easily edited out later.

Now I had a nice little silhouette. Kinda. It wasn't very contrasty, the whites were grey, and the blacks were gray. That needed to change. In Lr, I upped the contrast all the way, the whites all the way, and the blacks all the way down. There was no detail to capture, so I just wanted to get as much contrast as possible. I wanted only pure white and pure black.

In Ps, I took the picture of the mine in Butte, and over laid it on Anne. I turned it 90 degrees though, so that it was very abstract and confusing. To further the effect, I upped the contrast a little bit on just the mine layer, and also inverted it. Looks the same, but the exact opposite.

I considered putting in a mountain or something like that, but nothing I had really worked. Anne's silhouette is so slim, so a landscape doesn't fit. I could maybe put together one of those layers of the earth photos, but that would take more time than I have tonight.

Back in Lr, I did a few things. I further upped the contrast, but then toned down the whites just a bit. I added a vignette, and applied some split toning as well. Blue for the highlights, and red for the shadows. This is the opposite of what I usually do, but it really works for the picture.

I'm not sure what the picture is supposed to be, it is just a ridiculous for the sake of being ridiculous. I need to make them every now and again, just so much fun to play around with every slider you can get the mouse on.

See you tomorrow!

Image of a Camera

To make an image, all it takes is a lens. I feel it's a common misconception that camera lenses have to be on a body to make an image, but that's not true. A lens will always be projecting an image, a camera is just a way to capture the purest form of that image. 

One way you can see how this works is to take a camera lens off a camera, and put it it's focal distance away from a piece of paper under a lamp. The focal distance is the distance the lens focuses (dur..). When you have a bright light source above the lens (i.e. a lamp) an image of it will be projected through the lens onto the paper. It will be dim, since there is a lot of light pollution, but it is there, just a sharp as it would be in the camera. All the camera does is provide a light proof case for the sensor or film. 

Tonight, I had access to a large format camera lens. These lenses project  very very big image circle in order to cover the whole 4x5" negative. The image circle is the image projected by the lens. And not, they're not rectangles like pictures, they're circles. With small format cameras, the image circle does not need to be that big since the sensor or film is small. The larger the sensor though, the larger the image circle needs to be. 

So with a 4x5 lens, I projected an image that took up half a sheet of paper. Pretty dang cool and fun to do, since it looks just like a photograph. Except for that you can manipulate it in real time, and it's not on a little view finder. 

For my photo tonight, I projected an image of a light bulb. Somehow, I got the glowing filament in the middle of the bulb too. The dynamic range on this was just amazing. There's still details in the shadows on the bulb, but you can see the individual spirals on the filament. 

To get a more clear picture, I cut out a circle the diameter of the lens from a piece of mat board. This mat board served to block a lot of the light that was coming from the lamp and would interfere with the image. A more clear picture resulted. 

Taking a picture of this was a bit difficult. First, I had hand occupied with the lens to make the image, and then the other hand to manipulate the camera to image the image. Shooting at f/2.8 gives  shallow depth of field, so focusing was really difficult. It was hard to keep the lens in exactly the right place, so I had to focus and then quickly take the picture. Really, it just took a few tries. I shot at 1/13th and ISO100, which wasn't that bad. Little blurring of the image, but not terrible. 

Editing was quick and simple. Didn't want to modify it too much. I just converted to b/w, then upped the contrast a bit. Done! 

See you tomorrow!

Landing on the Moon

As the trail are getting a bit snowing here, and that's no good for riding on. Except when you have a fat bike! Not being able to ride much last winter sucked, so this summer I purchased a Surly Moonlander. It has possibly the fattest tires on the market right now at 4.8". That's as wide as some motorcycle tires. It basically floats on snow, and has traction like you're on hero dirt. I've only slid out a handful of times, and only when it's pretty much sheer ice.

It was snowing tonight, and I figured that'd make a really nice environment for a little product shot of the bicycle.

Gear up for shooting in the snow is a little different than shooting in warmer and dryer weather. First, you have to keep yourself warm. You could be tough, and shoot with out warm cloths and gloves so that you're mobile and nimble with the camera, but guess who ends up calling it a wrap too soon and before the right picture is taken? The trick is to be warm enough that you don't mind it, but not too bundled up that you can't even trip the shutter. Gloves are critical. The warmer the glove, the more bulky it is, and the harder it is to adjust things on your camera. So you have to find a balance between warm hands, and being able to shoot.

For you equipment, anything that's going to be snowed on needs to be water proofed. For my strobes, I stuck them in ziplock bags. That way, they don't get wet, but can still fire just fine. With my camera, I kept it out of the snow unless I was focusing or shooting. The rest of the time I kept it shielded with my body.

On to the set up. Balancing a bike is somewhat tricky. I used an empty jar of apple sauce as a platform to rest the non-drive side crank on. There are little stands you can get to hold up the tire from the back so you don't see them, and little things like that. But I don't got those. The jar was easy enough to remove in post with a simple clone/heal tool.

For lighting, I stuck both strobes in the back, about 5 feet behind the bike and 5 feet out. That being said, I think I might have had the strobe on camera right a few feet farther forward, so that there would be a little light spill on the front of the bike. I wasn't so much as going for full illumination as I was going for illuminating the natural environment of the bike. Lighting from the back really brought out the snow, and gave some awesome highlights to the bike.

I shot at f/2, 1/200, and ISO100. The strobes were at 1/8 power, so really bright for shooting at f/2, but then again they were back lighting the bike. By overexposing the lights, I got more detail in the front of the bike.

I also ran into some problems focusing. Auto focus doesn't work in the dark, so I had to use live view to focus. This meant holding the camera in the same place while I focusing, and then keeping it there while I turned off live view and composed with the view finder. I don't know why I didn't just use live view all the time, or better yet a tripod....lessons learned.

Post happened in a few steps. First, I did basic adjustments in Lr. I only did local adjustments, since the exposure and contrast were already awesome. I blurred the foreground and edges of the frame a bit though, but to draw your attention to the center. There's a lot going on with the snow falling, so the eye could get a little confused. I also upped the clarity on the edges just a hair. Blurring decreases contrast, so I need to get a little back.

In Ps,  I added some light leaks of the orange and green variety. I have some I found on line, and all you do is place them in Ps and set the layer to screen blend mode.  I haven't done this in a while, so why not? I felt they were a little over powering though, so I used a Gaussian blur to spread them out and tone them down. Next I muddied the blacks, which is that really odd trend that's happening in photography right now. I like it for some shots, but not for everything. It sort of gives the feel of matt paper or something. I think it worked for this one though, just because there's so much black it was a little overpowering.

Finally, I added some fake water drops on my lens by painting in large circles and setting them to a very low opacity. I think they're convincing, but you tell me. Maybe they need the cut edges like bokeh have from the aperture blades.

Anywho, that's all for editing. Enjoy!

See you tomorrow!

New Foot Covers

Cold feet are always a problem in the winter. Extremities just basically stop working at it get's below 0, and that's a bit of a problem. Plus, I bought a fat bike this year so that I could ride in the winter, so I needed some warm shoes.

After a bit of research, I settled on the 5.10 Impact Highs. They are the iconic mountain bike shoe. Known for being one of the most durable and weather proof shoes on the market, I thought they would be perfect.

They arrived today, and  after one ride I confirmed I got the right shoe. Only after an hour of riding did my feet start to feel remotely cold, and that wasn't even with wool socks or toe warmers! Never before have I had a shoe this warm....it's quite odd.

Anyway, as you'd expect, I took a product picture of them tonight. However, I wanted to do something different than what I've done in the past. White backgrounds are nice, but it's time for change. I spotted a spare screen door in our living room (yeah, I'm puzzled too), and an idea was born.

I created this set up. It's under lighting the shoes with a spotlight effect, and also from above from two different light sources. There is a gridded strobe that makes a spot of light on the shoes, but makes hard shadows. The soft box fills in those shadows, but does't illuminate the background or mess up the spot light effect.

The grid and the under light strobe were both at 1/8 power and I was shooting at f/8. I wanted a sharp photo with a reasonable depth of field, so I used f/8. The soft box as at minimum power, it's job was just to fill in some shadows, but not really light anything.

I love how the it turned out. The grid and the soft box really combine well into beautiful light, and the under light creates a glow around the shoes. Now I just want to add a logo in somewhere, but I didn't leave enough room in the frame!

For editing, I started by brightening things up. I shot 1 stop under exposed :( boo. Should have been at ISO200, or just looked at the histogram more. I checked it, but then probably changed some settings and forgot to check again. :/  Oh well.

For other edits, there's weren't any. Pretty much right out of the camera. Ta da.

See you tomorrow!

When the Sun Goes Down

All is not lost when golden hour fades. A lot of photographers will pack up and go home because they think the light is all gone. That's not quite the best decisions a lot of the time.

Take tonight for example, the clear skies made the east light up in amazing purple tones after the sun set and was gone. Just before dusk, on my way to class, I happened to park right where I could see Mt. Baldy. Boy, as it pretty. The sky was deep purple behind the snow white peak, and the trees were frosted on the slopes. Quickly, I pulled out my camera and tripod to fire away a few shots.

Since it was dusk, there wasn't exactly much light to be had. I wanted to shoot at f11 to get a sharp photo, which meant I needed to use 1/3s as a shutter speed. Or so my camera said. This exposure would give an overall neutral photo, which is what meters try to do. However, there is little contrast in the scene, so to really make it look good, you have to actually overexpose the foreground by about a stop, and underexpose the sky. This gives you white snow, but then rich colors in the sky.

For the composition, I wanted to show case the sky more than the snowy peak. To do that, I placed the peak to occupy the lower third of the image. This allowed the sky to take the majority of the image, and before more dominate. However, sky will always have a hard time overcoming land, so even though the sky takes up much more space, the photo is still balanced.

Editing was a little tricky for this one. Out of the camera, it's a very flat photo. There's barely any highlights or shadows, let alone whites and blacks. The contrast slider helped a bit, but it as a little too ham fisted for my taste.

What I did instead was a local adjustment over just the mountains to brighten them up. I raised the contrast a hair, the highlights all the way, and the clarity up quite a bit. This made them pop more, and really give the photo back what it was lacking.

For the sky, I adjusted the color channels instead of the overall luminosity. First off, I made the purples and magentas more red. This translated to a darker, richer purple in the sky, which I felt more accurately represented what I saw. Then I increased the saturation of those colors, as well as the luminance of purples. More color, and a little bit brighter as well.

Now it's off to sleep with me, as the sun set a full 8 hours ago and that's when people should go to sleep. I just decided that.

See you tomorrow!

Warm Snow

Warm in color, not in temperature. Warm snow would melt, and then it wouldn't be snow. The title would have to be "Warm Water," and that's not as interesting.

As you know, there's a fair bit of snow in Bozeman now, and quite a fair it on the mountains. Today was super busy, and I wasn't even thinking about taking a photo until I got home and looked out my window. There was beautiful, golden orange light streaming through the trees, mixing with the cooler blue shadows. After 5 minutes of my car warming up, I was on my way out Kagy to catch the mountains glowing in the waning sun.

On my way out, I knew I was racing the light. Through breaks in houses and trees, I could see the peaks in the distance, almost neon on the horizon. But I could also see the freezing shadows creeping up the slopes little by little.

Coming into the pull out a little hot for the icy roads (yes mom, I was careful. It was intentional to use the deep snow to slow me down), there was probably about 10 minutes before the light was gone. But my hands would freeze well before then, so that wasn't a big issue :)

My camera told me that I needed to shoot at f16 and 1/20. I was at 70mm on my lens, so I definitely needed a tripod. I used a 2 second delay on the shutter, so that any vibration would go away by the time the picture was taken. From there, it was a simple matter of taking frames of the mountains.

I cut most of the foreground out of the frame, since it was almost all houses and boring things like that. Nothing I really wanted. But I wanted the clouds above the mountains, since they were also glowing in the light.

First in Lr, I really had to improve contrast. First, I brightened the image and upped the contrast slider. This helped overall, but the whites were still lacking and now the shadows were gone. So up those two sliders went, as well as the clarity. Looking pretty good at this point.

Next was the pano in Ps, as well as a little curves adjustment. I brightened the midtowns where there was a lot of information, as well as the highlights. Still need more whites!

In Lr again, even more whites were needed....serious pushing this photo. I bet there's some degradation of quality. :(

For final touches, I adjusted the hue of red and orange to be more purple and red, and increased the saturation of those colors as well. This helped to bring more color into the mountains, which was more like what I saw in real life.

A few more from the shoot:

See you tomorrow!

White cold stuff that melts

Otherwise known as, snow. It's finally snowing in Bozeman, actually dumped about 3 or 4 inches since last night. Suddenly...it's winter. Saturday was in the 50s, even 60s. Then BAM, winter. Rocky Mountains, why you be so bi-polar?  But I have a fat bike for snow, so it's okay, things are going to be okay.

I thought it might be appropriate to do a snow picture tonight, maybe even try and re-create that amazing macro picture of melted snow I managed to get last year. Noooo idea how I actually got that, must have been luck because tonight it just wasn't happening.

At least in the same way as last year. Shooting straight down wasn't getting good results at all, so I needed something different. Plus, the snow kept melting into mush and I couldn't get a good pic of a snow flake! Lame.

I felt that the only thing to do was to go into the great outdoors. Which meant going outside. In the cold....

Skipping forward a bit, I'm crouched in the dark, cold, but snowy backyard trying to protect my camera from falling snow.

My set up for light was a follows. I had a little stool that served as my set, and my Maglite illuminated the snow so that I could focus. A single strobe with a soft box set very close to the stool was my light source, set to a very high power, 1/1 I think. I was shooting at f/16, so that needed a decent amount of light, but with all the glass and mega focal length of my lens, there needed to be a lot of light. The closer you focus, the more light you need. It's a bit complicated to explain, but trust me, it's a law of physics.

My strategy was to wait until snow flakes pilled up on the stool, then just scope around with my mega lens for an interesting composition. I had to move the camera forward and back to focus, it was somewhat easier than moving a duck taped lens.

Eventually, I found this really interesting little formation. The snow flakes aren't really that big yet, but they clump together in really interesting ways, and these little flakes had made a wave! It's a very little wave, yes, but if you look at it right it definitely looks like a wave about to break.

With my exceptionally ghetto rigged lens, it's not the sharpest image in the world, but it definitely gets the job done I'd say. There's actually some pretty cool little halos going on. Aberrations are pretty awesome sometimes. The vignette around the edge, and the focus fall off are simply amazing. I actually cropped them out in the final image, but just take a look!

For the final image, I wanted things to be a little bit tighter. Actually, scratch that...I like the wider frame!

I'm an indecisive person.

I suppose I should talk about editing a bit. First, I converted to b/w, because this is day 3 in the b/w challenge. Plus, I thought it looked pretty good in b/w. I shot it with that in mind, and it worked out. Learning to take photos that will look interesting in b/w v. color can be a challenge. Colors that pop against each other may look great in color, but in b/w they may all be flat, boring grey. Luminosity is all that matters.

I then upped the exposure just a tad, and the contrast a tad more. I've been liking the contrast slider lately... Then I decided that I wanted for detail in the highlights, so toned those down, but then raised the whites a bit to get the bright whites back. Finally, I upped the clarity a bit to get more mid tone contrast, because that's really what can make a photo pop.

See you tomorrow!

Making Bread

No, this photo has nothing to do with bread. But I made bread tonight, successfully, and so I'm really happy. It was the first very successful loaf I've made, and I just had a very satisfying sandwich. Now on to desert of apple sauce and frozen fruit.

I guess I should talk about the portrait. I'm doing this b/w challenge thing, 5 days 5 photos, and today is day 2. I decided that I wanted to do a dramatic portrait, which meant doing some dramatic lighting.

First, I started with a small soft box on one side. It was really close to me, and almost on axis with me. That means it was side lighting me and barely front lighting at all. This provides the most contrast between the highlights and shadows on the face, and gives the most dramatic lighting.

Then I decided that I wanted to have a light on the other side too, but have it be sharper and even more dramatic. So I put a bare strobe in a grid there, and put it a little behind me. Super, super contrasty lighting. With the grid, you get all the hard light a bare strobe does, but the light fall off is just beautiful. Just absolutely beautiful.

With these lights set up, I was set.

But something was missing. Just me was well, boring. I'm not the most interesting subject in the world, so I needed something else...hmmmm....why don't I go dump some water on my head! Yeah!

So that's what I did. I shot at f11 to capture as much detail as I could, so every little drop would be razor sharp. With the contrast and clarity most of the way up in editing, it helps even more. This is probably one of the sharpest portraits I've taken.

Other than contrast and clarity, I did one other little edit. On my shoulder and neck, I darkened things up and raised the contrast/clarity even more. I felt like that area was a little distracting, and needed to go away. I also blurred it a little bit, so it's still there and adding to the photo, but it's darker, more blurry, and doesn't draw attention to it's self. Sometimes, to make things become less obvious, you have to make them more contrasty and dramatic. Usually it's the other way around, but with portraits like this, the other way worked!

See you tomorrow!

How to Make Mountains

I shot just after the sun went down today, which gave beautiful colors, but horribly flat light. It was especially hazy and cloudy over the went horizon, and so the mountains off in the distance were flat as a burnt pancake run over by a steamroller driven by a elephant that has eaten nothing but Big Macs and hasn't worked out in years.

Here's what it looked like:

It's pretty, but not that interesting in my opinion. The purple touch is really nice, but there's no black, and there's no white! So sad, that needed to change.

First, in Lr I put the contrast, shadows, and clarity sliders all the way up...yes, I did that. :O Then I put the highlights all the way down, the whites up a lot, and the blacks down quite a bit. Basically, I pulled as much contrast out of this as I possibly could. Quite scary really, what I did. Degrading the image quality probably quite a lot with all the edits and adjustments. But some times that's okay.

With the contrast fixed, there was still something not quite right. I think that I needed some selective focus, so into Ps I went. There's some tilt-shift filters in Ps (that don't actually do what tilt's or shift actually do), but they do a nice little job at blurring things. I feathered the blur transitions quite a bit, so that the transition from in focus to out of focus was very gradual, and not that distracting to the viewer.

But that's a bit cliche now, with all the iPhone photography, so I added and iris blur too. Why they called it that I don't really know, but it's just a circular blur.

Note: people at Adobe really do know what they're doing as far as what actual tilt's and shifts and all those camera movements do, it's just not possible to do it digitally...yet. Blurring parts of the image just look similar enough to most people, and its a useful tool.

Anyway, I combined the two blur's with some layer masks. I put the mountain in the background in focus, as well last the hill in the middle, and the rest of the frame just sort of fell out of focus with out you really noticing. The focus is not supposed to be the main focus of the photo, it's just an element that helps you as the view look at what I want you to look at. It's a tool for manipulating you, making you look at what I want you to look at. making you think what I want you to think. Give me money..

So here's the layer mask I used on the tilt shift blur. The iris blur was very slight, and just around the out side edges of the frame.

See you tomorrow!

Day and Night

Full moons are awesome. Just saying. At least for night landscape photography. It literally looks like it's day out when you're done....except for the star trails.

So, tonight I went out Springhill Rd on the west side of the Bridgers, about 3/4 of the way up the range. Or something like that, I went pretty far. The original plan was to just take star pictures, but then I thought about the moon, and how bright it was. First, I thought it was a problem, because talking pictures of stars would turn out to be really washed out and bleh with the bright moon. But then I realized that since the moon was so bright, wSo
Tonight though, was very successful even though it's not the most interesting composition. I pulled up rather randomly on the side of the road, and just took pictures from there. From the spots there were, it probably wasn't a bad choice, but maybe could have been better. The mountains form a really like double peak thing, with a valley in the center that leads into a star trail and then the moon. I cropped some of the bottom off a bit, just to get rid of the excessive amount of grass in the foreground. Plus, the longer aspect ration really works with the composition. Could even be a desktop picture, maybe. It is 16x9...

For exposure calculating, I started with a 30s test at f3.5 and ISO400. That turned out to be pretty much right on, so yay! Given those values, I knew I could drop the ISO and stop down to get a better, sharper image and still have enough light to not need a ridiculously long exposure time. But the exposure would be long enough that I'd get some star trails in there! Win, win!

To get to ISO100 from ISO400, that's two stops. From f/3.5 to f/11 that's about 3 stops. So five stops overall. Starting from 30s, I need to make five stops brighter, so that's 1min, 2min, 4min, 8min, 16min. I really should be at 22min for the extra 1/3 stop that's between f/3.5 and f/4, but that's not really worth it I think. It can be done in Lr really quick with not much degradation to the image. I would lose some good star trails though....but it was cold and I was pressed for time. Another day!

For editing, I started by making that 1/3 EV adjustment, then upped the clarity and shadows just a bit. Then I brought down the blacks a bit, just to get the richness back for them.

I've been playing around with camera calibration a bit lately, which is pretty useful actually. I went through the presets, and I really liked how the landscape one worked with the image. I did tweak the reds a bit to make them more orange, but mostly the color is from that preset.

Until I went into the color adjustments and made the oranges more yellow, and made them brighter. The image was just a little flat, and there is so much yellow orange that just brightening it would really help the image.


So, moral of the day. If it's full(ish) moon, go out and shoot landscapes! They will be awesome.

See you tomorrow!

Mooning at the Eye

Went over to my friends friends house tonight for dinner. Turns out that my friends friend was actually my friend from last year, so that was fun. Plus, it turns out he's an amazing cook and made this awesome thai soup and rice. 

Anyway, as I was sitting in his living room, I noticed the awesome moon that was outside, just peaking through the clouds. When I got home, I headed straight for my camera and went outside to try to capture the amazingness. 

Which turned out to be harder than I originally imagined. The full moon is very bright, but not bright enough to illuminate the clouds around. Well, that's not true, there was light...but, not enough to fall within the dynamic range of my camera. In other words, the moon could be exposed right, and the clouds would be black. Or, the clouds would be okay, but then moon would be like the sun. Plus, the clouds were moving so fast long exposures just wouldn't have worked well. 

So, I thought maybe I could do a HDR composite of the moon. That'd work, right? I fired off a few bracket sequences based off of +-2EV, ISO100, f/5.6, and 1/10s. I was also at 135mm focal length, so fairly telephoto. The shutter was fast enough to stop the cloud movement, which is what was important to me most. That and getting the moon correctly exposed. 

As soon as I got inside, I had an idea. A brilliant idea. Kinda. I thought, what if I could stick a photo of the moon in the pupil of an eye that was inverted?? Wouldn't that be cool? Take a picture of an eye, invert it, then convert to b/w, get the picture of the moon, invert it and stick it in the now white pupil. Yeah, I have random ideas like that. 

But it worked! 

I quickly set up a little eye portrait studio. My strobe with a soft box was just off to the right of the camera, and it provided all of the light for the photo. The soft box is HUGE compared to the eye, so it made really, really, nice soft light. And also kinda a cool reflection....a ring light would have been really cool too....tomorrow!

I had the 50mm on with a 10x converter on the front (it's just a magnifying glass), which would make my eye big enough in the frame. I shot in autofocus, with a little flash light to illuminate my eye for the camera. It's hard to get things in focus, so what I did was fully depress the shutter so that when it focused it'd take the picture immediately. That eliminated me moving and screwing up focus between when focus locked and I took the picture. 

I shot at f/7.1, ISO100, and 1/200s. The strobe was at 1/16 power. 

Editing was surprisingly incredibly simple...all I did was put the two layers in Ps, invert them and the align them. The moon pic was set to lighten, so that only the moon would affect the image and stay in the pupil. I ended up not ever converting to b/w because I loved the blue so much! Super, super simple edit. 

See you tomorrow!

Drops in a Bucket

Actually, they were drops into a little wine glass thing, but same difference.

I saw a cool photo of a single drop of water dropping, well, into water, and thought it'd be cool to try that tonight. I've done this sort of thing a lot, but always with colored gels and all that stuff. Never just a pure, simple, water.

For the set up, I just had the glass filled all the way up with water. As in, all the way it could be filled until it was pouring over a bit. Then, I put a single strobe behind it and off the left. Backlighting water is key, that way you don't pollute your backdrop with light, and the water has that wonderful glint. If you light from the front, the light going straight through and you end up lighting the background, not the water.

I shot at f10 with a macro filter on so that I could get close to the water, but still have a somewhat reasonable depth of field. As it turned out, shooting at f10 made me use such a high power on the strobe that the action was not all the way frozen! The higher the power on the strobe, the longer it takes for the strobe to deliver that power, and so the freezing action of the strobe goes down. Usually, you can get away with it, but I guess water just moves too quick for it! Luckily, the water I wanted to freeze and to be in focus is exactly that. Part luck, part skill to do that.

I focused using Live View, and roughly eye balled it in. I was just dropping drops of water off my fingers, so it was going to be a guessing game anyway. After about 10 shots of failure, I got two back to back that were great! Actual little drops! Perfect.

In Lr, I converted them to B/W and upped the clarity a whole bunch to really bring out the contrast and what not in them. I wanted the drops to be sharp, to jump off the screen. With how sharp they actually are, I think they definitely accomplish this. The lowest drop is just pin sharp, love it. I also cropped things down to a 1:1 ratio. I just felt like this cropping would help the photo, minimizing distractions and what not.

That's all, I'm falling asleep so enjoy!

See you tomorrow!