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!

Speed Skating

I visited the Richmond Olympic Oval yesterday during open speedskating hours. They were nice enough to allow me access to the infield, where I practiced using my wireless flash trigger.

This was my first time really using it in practice, and I took a trial and error method. Being used to TTL flash metering, I was pretty clueless as to how to adjust the power and range of the flash (TODO: learn). One challenge was ensuring that the subject was in the flash's path when the shutter was released. I found the best way to do this was to take a photo of the ice, look at the area lit by the flash, and line that up with something on the far wall.

It was actually tougher than I had anticipated, especially since I was tracking a fast moving target while looking through a telephoto lens. I did manage to get one decent shot of Jen. I had to use ISO 400 in order to use an acceptable shutter speed for my lens (f/5). Remembering a tip from the National Geographic Photography Field Guide, I cropped the photo to leave space into which the subject can look.



I plan to become more proficient with the wireless flash by practicing at the Burnaby Velodrome... after I learn how to do manual flash metering.

Lightman Takes a Leak

I received a copy of Digital Photographer magazine for Christmas, which contains an article on painting with light. I had heard of painting with light where an object is "painted" with a non-strobe light during a long exposure (see here). The article in this magazine however, discusses directly exposing the light source to the camera, so that the photographer can draw with it. After reading the article, I crudely wrote "Hi!" in my mom's living room, not revisiting the technique until today.

Witness lightman taking a leak in my bathroom.


Although admittedly only slightly less crude than my initial "Hi!", and by no means a work of art, this photo helped me understand some of the basics of light graffiti. It's really a matter of planning. I found it best to draw each line using only one stroke, and plan the order of the lines to minimize misalignment. For Lightman, I found the following order to work the best: head, arms (down), wee wee, torso (up), legs (down), pee, pee splashes. Initially I had done the arms near the end and had trouble aligning them with the head and torso (which were done first). Expect a future post on light graffiti when I can spend a bit more effort on creating an image which is pleasing as a whole.

New York

Whew, it's been a while. Shortly after my last post, I traveled to New York. Then to Seattle for Christmas, then to Victoria. Now that I'm settling back into my routine it's time to think about some photos.

I decided to pick a few of my favourite photos from the New York trip. While traveling to NY I had blazed through a lot of the National Geographic Photography Field Guide, and probably didn't remember much of it. So the following photos don't necessarily practice anything in particular that I have learned, but in the end turned out nicely (in my opinion).

The first is an entrance to the subway on Trinity Pl. and Rector St. I'm not really excited about the composure, but I'm very happy with how wet and dirty the surfaces look. That is what I was aiming for. I think the reason is that this particular entrance was exposed to very little outside light, and so the scene was mostly lit from the fluorescent lamp. I tried this shot with a few other subway entrances which were exposed to outside light (it was slightly overcast), with a far less interesting result.



The second is of the lobby of the Guggenheim Museum. The structure of the building is interesting, and I think I did a good job of capturing the scale by also including the people near the entrance. This is entirely by accident, as I had to set the camera on the floor and couldn't get my eye up to the viewfinder to see exactly what was in frame. A few other features that I like are the blurring of the people in motion, and the glare from the single spotlight aimed at the camera. Again, entirely by accident. What I don't like about this photo is the slice of ceiling at the top. The ceiling is an interesting structure, and this little piece of it kind of tells you it is there, but doesn't tell you much what it looks like, which I find a bit unsatisfying.



The last photo is not one of my top 3 favourites to look at, but I'm putting it here because it is an example where I set out to get a particular shot, and was successful. I am fascinated with the New York subway system. The thumping, screeching and grinding of the trains, the damp dark stations, and the characters you find there. Although I would have liked to capture more of the surrounding scene in this shot (perhaps with a secondary, static subject like a person), I think I did a good job with the train. It took a while to find the right shutter speed (1/3 seemed to be just right), to wait for the right train (there are 3 tracks, the first being too close and the last 2 being too far), and to get the timing right (using a 10 second shutter release delay, because I didn't have a cable release or remote with me).



The full photo set can be found on Picasa