Inky Sunsets

So last night my last CF decided to die, which is why I couldn't do a post until now. It took all night to transfer the pictures to my computer, and I just didn't want to risk using the card again.

But on to happier times! Last night, I was treated to a sunset kayak tour with Discovery Sea Kayaks! I basically just hung out on the water for the evening taking pictures for them. The sunset was half way decent, and some good shots definitely came out of the tour.

I've never shot from a kayak before, and it obviously posed quite a few challenges. The first was keeping my camera dry. Easy, dry bag lashed to the hull in front of me. But then that only kept it dry when it was in the bag...I just accepted that it was going to get some salt spray on it when I was actually shooting with it. Which I guess is about as bad as using in the dust and with sweat dripping on it...etc. The camera is just a freaking work horse. Same with the 18-135 lens. It had all the range I needed for the evening, and I really didn't have to worry about killing it too badly. It's been through more than even the body has.

As for shooting, I mostly tried to wait until the sun set really got going before I started shooting. Like it said, the sunset wasn't thattttt good, but it did cast some really nice highlights on the water, and super saturated everything. A routine I got into was to shoot silhouettes of other people in the group with the sunset behind them. I was shooting in Tv mode with an auto ISO, so the camera took care of most of the exposure part. I just had to tell it what to meter off of. Depending on where you focus and where you point in the final framing, the camera will expose for the shadows or the sunset. I generally tried to get half way, so in post I could recover both. Getting the framing right just takes practice, and a bit of luck.

From the ones I got and liked, one edited photo really caught my eye. It was taken just as the sun went down, so the overall contrast was pretty low. I was able to get almost the full tonal range of the sunset and the boat in front of me (which was positioned perfectly thanks to my awesome kayak partner!).

1/320 to stop all the motion. kayaks move a lot in the water. f3.5 for light. 18mm. ISO400 for proper exposure.

Develop settings...
Highlight up 19
shadows +92
whites +17
vibrance +51

Local adjustment over the kayak that upped highlights and shadows +50 each. This brightened them up a bit while keeping some of the contrast.  Which is basically the whole goal on how I process. I try to keep the overall contrast consistent while bringing out the details.

Now for todays photo...totally different.

Tonight, Victor and I tried some ink in water photos. Quite the learning experience...use a polarizer next time.  We ended up using a giant black backdrop behind us to keep reflections down in the glass, but I was still illuminated by the flashes. Polarizer needed to get rid of that or at least tone it down.

The set up was fairly simple, fish tank with water in a mat box with two strobes. One in the back to light everything up, and one of the side to provide some cross light. Both set to 1/8 power.

I shot at 1/200 for motion stopping, f16 for DoF, and ISO400 to keep everything nice and bright.

I also shot tethered to Lr so that I could go directly from the camera to my hard drive, so no CF card needed. I highly recommend doing that, well worth it in controlled situations.

What really makes the photo tonight, IMO, was shooting from a very low angle so that the bottom of the water turned into a mirror. I've actually flipped this photo upside down, so the water on the bottom is actually the bottom of the layer of surface tension. If I am using the right words...it's late.

Anyway, for shooting ink, Victor counted down and then just squeezed ink out of syringe into the water. Which looked awesome. We experimented with swirling the water, doing drops...all kind of stuff. There's a whole album of the pictures on fb, check it out and I'd be happy to answer how a specific one was made.

For the one I'll show here, we swirled the water just before the fact so the ink took a very odd trajectory when it was squirted.

In editing, whites +100, shadows +21, clarity +37. Much details, very very high contrast. I reverted to my stock editing process that I do for this kind of planar image. I try to make it as isolated and simple as possible. I really try to do this with all my photos, clutter just annoys me. Doesn't usually work out as I want it to, but I try.

Even though I didn't get the quality of shots I wanted tonight because I forgot to use a polarizer, I'm still happy with what I did get. It's definitely something to do again soon.

See you tomorrow!

Just a short jaunt on the beach

And by short, I mean a 3 mile run in sand with 20mph winds. Much fun :) A little annoying with sand in the shoes, but I can't complain with a run by the moonlight.

To explain, it was super windy today, and so the surf on the west side of the island was really big. There are some rocks way down the beach, and when the big waves hit them it shoots water everywhere.

But of course, by the time I ran all the way down there, the light was too low to take any good pictures of the spray. I need to use at least 1/500 and at 1/50 my ISO had to be at 3200...so not really a good combo. There's no way I could get to 1/500.

Change of plan. Shoot the water on the epic little rocks on the beach. Well, they were actually large rocks, and looked really cool with the water over them. I shot at ISO100, f5.6, 13s, and 100mm. I hiked up on a hill right next to the beach and shot down on the rocks. It took a little while to get the right composition since the rocks were spaced kinda odd. But I got some that I liked, the best one being of the rocks just above the water line and then a nice gradient down to the water. I love how the water swirls around and between the rocks.

For editing, I stretched the RAW as far as it would go. Shadows all the way up, highlights all the way down. Clarity all the way up. Contrast up. Whites up a lot. Vignette a little. Here's the before and after.

I love the first one, but the second is awesome too. But now seeing them together, I think I'll combine them and maybe do a photomatix version.

Turns out no photomatix, just taking the setting from the b/w, toning them down a bit and then making a color version. But I still like the b/w better.

See you tomorrow!

Landing on the Moon

So I got a new bicycle today. :D Considering I live in Montana in the winter, I decided it would be worth it to invest in a fat bike for riding in the snow. Even it was for one season, being able to ride all winter is well worth the money to me. The bike I eventually decided on was the Surly Moonlander. I reallyyyy liked the PugOps (just because of the name) but the Moonlander has a lot better spec and has much wider tires. And the for the deal I get it at, I can't complain about the price difference.

Building it up today was so weird. I don't think I've ever had a bike come in a super sized box because the wheels are bigger than the frame. Chuck and I had a good 5 minute session of disbelief when we first saw the things. 4.8 inch tires are ridonkulous(ly awesome).

After I got it all put together, I of course had to do picture of it. And of course it was 10pm. Hmmm, why not go to the beach and ride it under the moonlight! It's a Moonlander after all.

I met up with Victor and the usual crew at the beach, and we set up with the shot. It was a challenge to get the right composition. At first, I was looking down a straight section of beach, and it just wasn't working. Turning around to the curved part helped, and Victor's suggestion of moving toward the water helped a lot.

The bike rides amazingly btw. Deep sand, drift wood, seaweed...you name it the bike just ate it up and forged ahead. It was truly incredible to ride that easily over those kind of obstacles with almost no problems. I think I'll be having some fun in the future with this thing....

For the photo, Cody triggered the shutter, then I rode down the beach till he yelled stop, and then we repeated that a few times. This painted the ground with my head lamp. I underexposed by 2 stops so that the light from my headlamp would be the only bright light on the ground.

After we got those, I took a properly exposed shot of the landscape. This was at ISO250, 18mm, f3.5, and 30s.

To wrap up shooting, we popped a strobe on me from about 20 ft away and up high at 1/8 power. We had the manual remote hooked up, so it was a 30s exposure with me frozen in it.

For editing, I picked out my favorite shots and headed over to Ps. The lighten blend mode took care of most of the blending, and layer masks took over the rest. I just took the light trails from those photos, and just the frozen image of me from that layer. From the proper exposure layer, I drew in some of the sky and all the water to get some pop out of those areas.

In Lr, I first converted to b/w, then raised the shadows and blacks all the way. Well, the blacks only a bit, but the whites a lot. I also upped the highlights a lot. I then did some local adjustments to the sky, water, and frozen me. To the sky and me, I upped the clarity. For the water, I just upped the highlights.

I went through a couple different versions of the same image, so here's the two last ones. I thought I was done, but then I found something and changed it.  Can you tell what?

See you tomorrow!

I Dunno

So plans changed last minute tonight, so I ended up taking some very fast pictures of some very wilting flowers. Said flowers were just sitting there, so I put on the 50 with the 10x macro adaptor and started shooting away.

The camera has a hard time focusing with that combination of optics on though, and at f1.4, the pictures were all very very soft. I didn't want to shoot for very long, so I just started trying to incorporate that look into what I was shooting.

To get things even more blurred and crazy soft, I shot from a low angle to increase the distance between my subject and other parts of the shot. This blurred everything a lot more as it effectively decreases your depth of field.

For editing, I did something I never, ever, do. Decrease the clarity all the way. Crazy, I know. But I actually love how it turned out. That, in combination with upping the vibrance and luminosity of the reds and oranges, just made everything hyper realistic but also very surreal. It's just a very odd representation of a flower, that I really like.

See you tomorrow!

Moar Pi

Finishing up Emma's pie blog today. We couldn't do a single piece yesterday because the pie was still hot, but tonight we could.

The set up was exactly the same as last night, only I upped the power of both the strobes by about a stop each. So there was twice the power from each strobe, and 4 times overall. Theoretically, I could be very very wrong about that too. In practice though, it only gets maybe 2 stops brighter, but that still helps a whole lot with making the white cloth very white.

Another trick to get wrinkles or texture out of something is to use a big light source that is in line with the lens. This fills in the shadows and makes everything look very flat. But be carful not to overdo it on the subject, which is easy to do. Fortunately, the very soft lighting still worked really well with the pie tonight, and so I left it as it was. The backlight was semi directional, the front a little less, so there was till nice texture in the pie and berries. The specular highlights was awesome as well from the inside of the soft box.

Here's the edit. You can see how I initially go with one photo, then change my mind really fast and go with another one at the very end. I just liked the composition way more with the other one.

See you tomorrow!

What flavor? PIE FLAVOR

My sister made an epic pie today. Epic. I like pie. But before I got any, I had to take photos.

For said photos, the usual photo set up was used. With a few modifications. The lighting set up was opposite, so the fill light strobe was to the back and right pointed straight up to provide a very soft, semi directional fill. The other strobe was was to the front and left pointed to the wall to make a soft, but directional key/fill. The idea I was going for was to make a nice, white background and have the pie in very soft, wrapping light.

It worked out pretty well, it's really hard to tell how something is actually going to look when you get it on a big screen. What I would do differently next time is to ramp up the power output of the backlight strobe to make everything around the pie very white. You can still see the texture of the background and the front is fairly dark....  But that's okay! I still like it, it's a different style that I usually do.

For this time, I've tried to not focus on getting the whole pie in the shot as getting pieces or just bits in a composition that looks interesting. For this shot, I liked the composition of the utensils fill in the lower right, and the pie makes a nice circle for the rest of the upper left third. Shooting from a low angle helped to make the pie look big and full.

Editing...what did I do for editing. Whites up...both in over all tone and in a local adjustment around the white cloth. That's about it though. I was a little bummed I didn't get a better specular highlight in the utensils, but that's okay.

See you tomorrow!

Orcas Porcas It's 1 in the Morning

Soooo, last night and today Maclin and I went over to Orcas for photos and some videos. Friday night was probably one of the most amazing sunsets of the summer, if not the year. There was super high, and almost complete cloud cover. At first we thought that was going to ruin the sunset, but it turned out to be the thing that made the night. The sun reflected off the ocean, the land, and basically everything to turn the world into a surreal orange glow land thingy. Plus, there was mist and flog along the mainland so that everything was just exceptionally epic.

For shooting this one, I shot at ISO200, f5.6, 1/50 and 41mm. I wanted to zoom in a bit to get more of a view of the mountains, and less of the foreground. I got pano shots of both focal lengths, but I really liked the tighter one. But since it was zoomed in, it took 20 shots to get a full 180 degrees. And used a tripod, definitely used a tripod.

Here's what the editing process looked like.

And for the next day, we got up for sunrise, and it was kinda lameeeee. No clouds :( but down by the lake it was pretty cool! The sun was hitting a mountain, and it was reflecting off the lake. Pretty cool shot, so I took a 3 shot bracket starting at ISO100, 19mm, f22, 1/20. I wanted to use a longer shutter speed so that the water would look nice and soft.

Here's the editing process on that....

See you tomorrow!