Kootenay Rafting

I went on a 4 day river rafting trip last week, and one of my objectives was to get some decent photos. I ended up keeping 103 in total. Here's a few that I particularly like.

Given that the trip passed through some pretty nice looking mountains, it would be a shame not to include a landscape shot. Here goes.

I chose this photo because of the trees in the foreground. I think they really stand out. I'm very happy with their sharpness, as well as the variation of tones and hues. I'm not sure how I managed to pull this off. The right lighting (bright sunlight above and to the right) as well as accurate focus were contributing factors. In processing, I mainly upped the saturation and contrast. Too much? You be the judge. I like it for now. Maybe next week I'll take another look and think it's too gaudy.

The next shot is my friend gearing up in his tent in the morning. Technically, I don't have much to say about this photo. I just like how it captures what I would call a camping mood. With the warm sunlight filtering through the tent fly, which frames the scene to give the impression that we're peering into the tent. He's happy, bright eyed and his hair is a mess. Ready for another day outdoors.


Had to give the stacked lens macro thing another try. Here's a flower about to bloom. I really like how the shallow depth of field causes the background to be a single wash of colour (I've also got a shot of a purple flower with green background). I don't really mind how much barrel distortion is going on. This was taken with my 18-55mm zoom set at 55mm, with my 50mm prime reversed on top of it.


Here's the trail of a jet that passed overhead. I think it turned out pretty crisp.

I believe I once heard someone say not to put things in the corners of your photos. The heck with them, I think it works out well here. I really like how the sunlight projects through the image, as if it's a spotlight aimed at the little cloud. Again, some may argue that the colours are overly saturated, and that the sky doesn't look this way when you look at it with your eyes. To them I say: your eye and my camera differ in how they see the sky, and this image is my camera telling your eye what the sky looks like in its opinion.

Lastly, here's a long exposure (6") near dusk of our raft pulled up on a bank of river rock.

The raft itself is a little unsharp. Either because of slight movement of my camera, or because the raft was moving a bit with the water, or both. Given that the rocks on the bank are fairly sharp, I'm guessing it was mostly the latter. I like the colours in this photo. Lots of grays, with a few small splashes of yellow and green. I think it gives the photo a tranquil (as opposed to depressing) feel. I left the saturation as is, and lowered the contrast to go along with this theme.

Macros

I had a friend tell me that I can reverse my 50mm prime lens for macro usage. While searching the web for an adapter that allows this, I found this post by David Chin on stacking lenses for macro use. He didn't use any special adapters, he just held his 50mm (in reverse) up against another lens. So I thought I'd give it a try.

I used my Nikkor 55-200mm zoom, attached to my camera body, with the 50mm reversed and hand held on top of it. I also used an off camera flash to get enough light to permit me to use a fairly short exposure time.

Here's a picture of a Panamanian coin, poorly focused.

To get a sense of scale, the eagle's wingspan is 14mm. I had the zoom set to 66mm here.

This is a moon snail shell. With the zoom at 66mm again.

The hole in the centre of the shell is about 0.5mm wide.

And here's part of a fax I received. The zoom is set at 200mm.

The 'e' is about 1.5mm wide.

Except for the fax, I cropped a bit out of each of these photos. As David Chin's article noted, vignetting is a problem. I noticed this especially with the shorter focal lengths. It wasn't so bad at 200mm. I used f/16 for the coin and shell, and f/25 for the text, in order to maximize depth of field. Unfortunately I can't control the aperture on the 50mm lens. It's set at f/1.8 and is stopped down by the camera right before the shutter opens.

50mm Prime

The 50mm f/1.8 lens I ordered on ebay is in. It's an older one (from the 80's), and although it has a bit of dust, I'm really happy with how it works. It's heavy (made entirely of metal), and the focus and aperature rings turn nicely.

I was in Seattle doing some sailing for the weekend. Here are a few pictures I took with the lens. Not much to say about them. Didn't really make many adjustments. Judging the exposure (given that my camera body has no clue what aperature the lens is set to) isn't as difficult as I thought it would be. I usually get it on the second or third guess. Focusing in some circumstances can be tricky, but this is something I imagine will come with practice.

Here's a picture of a lamp shade, one of the first pictures I took with my new lens.



And here's a picture of my mom having a snack on deck between races.



More to come.

Sophie

I don't want to be one of those people who take hundreds of photographs of their pets, but our cat Sophie was napping on a pile of laundry today and the afternoon light was falling nicely on her side. Similarly to an older post of Chester, I used a long focal length (145mm) to get nice and close. I'm not too happy with the composition, with her body taking up most of the background. I had a hard time deciding whether to crop this out to have a final photo consisting of mostly face (the original composition includes all of her head and a bit of her ears). In the end I cropped it this way so that she has some space to look into.



A big challenge for me with this shot was getting her to be still enough. With such a slow lens (f/5), I couldn't really expose for any less than 1/13s. It took lots of repetition before she happened to be still enough during one of them.

Garibaldi, Nairn Falls, and English Bay at Dusk

Wow, 2 months since my last post. Embarrassing. No excuses, just got a bit lazy. My interest has increased a bit over the past few weeks as I picked up Tom Ang's Fundamentals of Photography again. Also, last week I attended a meeting of PhotoClub Vancouver. Unfortunately, I did't get my act together enough to prepare a photo for their monthly theme (April Showers), but I did meet some people and learn some things.

Moving on, I have 3 unrelated photos to share in this post.

The first is a photo I took while snowshoeing in Garibaldi Park on New Year's day this year. I can't remember the name of the trail, but there's a few spots where a view opens up onto Squamish, and the light spilling through the clouds was just amazing.



I don't really have much to say about the capture. For post-processing, I did a ton of spot removal (didn't realize just how filthy my lens was), upped the contrast a lot to cut through the haze, applied a bit of luminance noise reduction to eliminate some of the grainyness in the clouds, increased the color vibrance/saturation a bit, and applied a slight vignette to make the tree-frame less distracting.

The second photo was taken at Nairn Falls (just North of Whistler) about 3 weeks ago.



I was experimenting with different shutter speeds to see which one would make the water look the most violent. I ended up going with 1/160. Any lower, and the water loses its shape and tends to look more flat. It was a sunny day, giving the rock some nice texture. Here, I was also extra mindful of focus accuracy and camera stability, which Tom Ang's book emphasizes as being essential to high quality image capture. At this level of magnification though, I'm not sure how much difference my efforts made. I did very little post-processing.

The third and final photo is for PhotoClub Vancouver's May theme: 1 second. I was driving to a friend's house just after dusk and noticed the lovely cloud patterns above me. My intention was to shoot the clouds and skyline, but once I arrived at a park overlooking English Bay, I noticed the sky's reflection in the windows of the waterfront mansions.



Again, I made a conscious effort to focus accurately and not jar the tripod. I think it was a mistake to focus on the clouds though, as the overall image would appear sharper if I had instead focused on the mansions. For post processing, a bit of luminance noise reduction, contrast, and fill light. I also increased the saturation and lowered the luminance of the reds, oranges and yellows to bring out the sunset.

Rob at the Velodrome

I went over to the Burnaby Velodrome to practice some more remote flash stuff on moving subjects. Learning from my past trip to the Richmond Oval, I placed the flash ahead of the riders, right at about eye level. I also made sure to give it lots of juice.

This is my favourite shot from the day.



I had the same issues with composure and lack of autofocus points, but seem to be getting more skilled at tracking the subject in my viewfinder.

What I've done with this photo, that I haven't done in the past, is spent a lot of time making adjustments using Adobe Camera Raw. It's frustrating because I'm just wandering aimlessly through the controls, using a very subjective method of figuring out what changes are good and what are bad. I can improve in 2 ways: 1) thinking ahead of what look I want to achieve, and 2) applying a principled workflow. I think this will be something I will constantly need to improve on. For this particular photo, I aimed to desaturate and darken the track surface in order to emphasize the subject, while trying to retain natural skin tones. I made some luminance adjustments; bringing up contrast and recovering highlights, corrected lens vignetting, reduced noise (ISO 800), and did some minor sharpening.

Speed Skating (again)

Made another trip to the Richmond Oval. I had learned how to set my flash by following some formulas in the manual. I found this to be no better than trial and error, since any distance measures are guesses, and the amount of light required also depends on the subject. The number I had calculated turned out to be much too dim for what I was shooting, and the sad part is that I didn't clue in to this very well and ended up with some pretty lame shots. On the bright side, at least I know what the numbers on the my flash's display mean.

During the shooting, and after looking at the pictures on my computer, I picked up a few pointers.

Firstly, I now understand why a larger number of autofocus points is desirable. For example, I wanted to have my shots composed so that the entire skater is in frame, on the right side (with lots of room on the left to "look into"). I also want the focus to be on the face. With my measly 3 autofocus points, the best I could do was keep their bum in focus, and hopefully not cut off too much of their feet.

Secondly, dark lycra is hard to shoot against a dark background. Drawing attention to the subject in this situation is tough. Not surprisingly, all of my favourite shots ended up being of people who were not wearing dark lycra.

Thridly, I figured out that by not closing my other eye, I can simultaneously track the skater in frame while looking ahead to time the shutter release so that they are passing through the flash's range. It works somewhat reliably.

Lastly, position the flash so that the face is well lit. I had ended up placing the camera and flash as shown (experimenting with various elevations for both).



My reasoning was 2 fold: 1) I want the skater to be coming towards or past the camera, and 2) I want the flash to be far off camera because it produces interesting shadows. Unfortunately, what could have been some great shots turned out to be disappointing because of shadowy faces.

All said and done, my favourite shot is not of someone skating hard, it's of Matt being a goof. And I like it because the subject is well lit and sharply focused, standing out against the dim and out of focus background. I also think the low flash (in this case, on the floor) produced some interesting shadows, except for that annoying nose shadow. Notice the lack of dark lycra.



Update (03-03-2009): After learning some more features of Adobe Camera Raw during the processing of Rob at the Velodrome, I went back and did some retouching of this photo. The white balance for the subject was about 250K on the low side. I warmed up his skin, upped the saturation of the green, lowered the saturation of the ice, added some noise reduction and slight vignetting. What a difference!