09 December 2013

Depressing Spruce Trees: Day Three

It was foggy and warm today, so I walked down into the forest off my road hoping for soft, flat light and properly eery forest shots. Started first on a pond because I wanted a dead-on, flat panorama of spruce trees:














10 exposures taken in portrait orientation and then stitched together in photoshop.

f/6.7
1/2 sec
ISO 80
31mm lens (~47mm equivalent)

I think many will find this static and boring, but I like it. It's a very obvious rule of thirds composition, with the snow and the sky matched fairly closely (I lightened the snow a bit to make the sky stand out more. The fog was not thick enough to show up in this photo, but it does give the sky it's soft, featureless look, which is what I wanted. This is truly a depressing spruce tree photo. Really, it's too dark, but if I lighten the snow, what little detail there is in the snow washes out.

On the way home I tried to take some trail photos. Didn't get anything I loved, but I wanted to include something showing the way through the forest, so I'm turning this one in as part of the final assignment:


















This is another three-image HDR capture. It was nearly dark, so shutter speeds were 6, 10, and 20 seconds. ISO is 80 because I'm terrified of noise in these heavily processed images.

I'm not happy with the composition (especially the right foreground), but I do like the contrast between the white snow and grey sky, and I'm happy with the detail of the marks on the trail. A photo like this could work. This one isn't quite there.

07 December 2013

Depressing Spruce Trees: Day Two

I went back to Peat Ponds, took a different trail, and came out on a good sized lake. The middle had a few isolated tracks--ski tracks, footprints, a single track I couldn't identify (it's not a bike), and animal tracks. Tried to capture all of this, with the spruce forests behind, in a panorama:












Eight photos taken in portrait orientation and then stitched together in Photoshop.

f/4.5
1/10 sec
ISO 100
31 mm lens (~47 mm equivalent)

This is almost good. My best shot at a panorama so far. The tracks and the surface of the snow came out very well, and the sky is okay. I'm disappointed with the composition of the forest. The trees on the right really are larger, but the asymmetry of the panorama makes the right side look distorted. Also, this shot is not depressing! In the end, it's pretty but not a great success. I am learning that with care, you can take a nice panorama with a good normal lens due to the lack of distortion and vignetting.

05 December 2013

Depressing Spruce Trees: Day One

I chose to keep working in the spruce bog for my final assignment. It's a challenging landscape because it's so dark, cluttered and closed-in. Parked at the Peat Ponds pullout and followed a ski trail I'd never been on. I took some unsatisfactory shots in the forest itself before coming out onto a little frozen pond:


















Three exposures combined in HDR Pro. Various apertures and exposure times. The ISO is at 80, and I shot this with my excellent 31mm lens. I would like this if not for the tall trees on the left. Sadly this is not an island, so there was no vantage point that would clear up the left side of the picture. Walked past this and got a nice detail of it, looking back the other way:


























Same method as the last one. I took five exposures, but only used three. 

I'm very happy with this image. The leaning trees are cool, but what makes it work is the little white tree the larger trees appear to be threatening. And it's weird that one tree is white! It's a black spruce like the others, but the side of the trunk facing the camera is completely plastered with snow. Why aren't the other trunks like that? I have no idea.

I tried editing one of the lone images using Kaji's trick of toning down an overexposed image, but I could never get as much detail as I did using the HDR technique. I owe the detail in the sky and the contrast in the trees to using three images. This was taken maybe an hour before sunset.

02 December 2013

Reverse Macro Panorama!

Okay, this was foolish, but the assignment called on us to try new techniques. Here is a panorama of a drill bit shot with the reverse-lens macro technique:







ISO 80
.7 sec
50 mm lens mounted backwards
6 exposures stitched together in photoshop

You'll notice two things. First, the end of the bit is missing. Second, the bit seems to be getting larger towards the front, which of course a drill bit would not do.

The only way to do this properly would be to set up some kind of fixture to keep the camera and subject at exactly the same distance as you take each exposure. That wouldn't be so hard, really, but there would be no point making something like that unless you planned to take a lot of photos of small, long things. Worms or something.

One thing I learned from this is that old metal does look cool in macro photography.

01 December 2013

First Panorama

I wanted to shoot a panorama of the city on a very cold day to capture all of the smoke plumes and the inversion layer, but the sun was far too strong for me to shoot to the south. Instead I shot a panorama from the GI roof looking north, to the hills:



f/5.6
1/125 sec
ISO 80
40mm lens (~60mm equivalent)

There was very little color in the scene, so I converted it to black and white, which also helped photoshop deal with some differences in shading a little better. My silly mistake was to shoot this with my camera oriented normally. If I'd turned it on it's side, this would have a much more sensible aspect ratio. Nothing special as a panorama, but I did learn how to do it.

Smoke

It was thirty below outside, so I wanted to shoot in the comfort of my cabin. I googled indoor photography ideas and found some smoke art, which was delightfully cheesy. One hour (and one trip to WalMart) later, I had a bag of incense cones. Myrrh, according to the bag. It's brown and smells like incense. 

Re-used the macro set-up (fluorescent lights and black background) but shot with a normal lens. The smoke moves too quickly to really compose shots. You just have to watch for interesting things to start happening and then fire off a few shots in continuous mode:


























f/4.5
1/180 sec
ISO 100
50mm lens (~75mm equivalent)


























f/8
1/180 sec
ISO 200
31mm lens (~47mm equivalent)


























f/4.5
1/350 sec
ISO 100
31mm lens (~47mm equivalent)

These required a lot of work in photoshop. All are heavily cropped, the background is heavily burned, and I played with contrast and shadowing a lot to get detail out of the smoke. Several people told me they like these, which is nice, but I can't help feeling that photos like this are little more than lava lamps that don't change.

30 November 2013

First Macro Attempt

Bought a cheap plastic mounting ring so I could shoot reverse macros without holding the lens up to the body. New ivy leaves, about an inch across:


















1/2 sec
ISO 100
50mm lens reversed on body


I'm lighting the subject with two bright fluorescent lights clamped to my workbench. I've got a piece of black (not really black, unfortunately) card stock propped up behind. The camera is on a tripod. To get maximum depth of field, I'm not opening the aperture at all. Hence the long exposure.

This is a nice trick ($10 macro lens!), but the depth of field is so narrow that all of my energy went into just getting a usable shot. Trying to compose a nice photograph would be exceedingly hard this way.

29 November 2013

HDR Black & White Landscape

I wanted to try an HDR capture down in the spruce bog to see if I could get some contrast into the scene. I also wanted to see if I could convey the weird dread that place gives me. Here's the result:
















Five exposures, +-2 stops
Aperture: 8-16
Shutter speed: 1/4-1/15 second
ISO 100
31mm lens (~47mm equivalent)

It's creepy, which is what I wanted, but the problem shooting in the forest is that you're so hemmed in, it's hard to get a shot that conveys how it feels. This was taken from a realistic perspective, but the low angle makes the trees look much larger than they are. The eeriness of the forest comes from the trees being stunted, which doesn't come across well here. I might try it again with a stepladder sometime.

I created this using HDR Pro in photoshop, though I still don't understand the HDR editing options very well. I just played with them until I got contrasty trees and flat light. The sky is a little overdramatic.

24 November 2013

Night Shooting: West Ridge and Downtown

Went night shooting alone this time. Twenty below. First wanted to shoot one of the greenhouses. I've always been drawn to the green glow inside the snow-and-frost covered structures. I didn't get a good long shot, but some of my close-ups of the ice crystals came out:



f/11
1/45
40 mm lens (~60mm equivalent)
ISO 200

Show with a tripod and the white balance set to tungsten. I cropped this to a square because I wanted the three columns, each with a different ice pattern and a different balance between ice and leaves.

Next went downtown to try to shoot the frozen berries and frosty branches along the river. Got some okay ones, but on my way back to the car I noticed these two low steam vents (~8' off the ground) with the big stack from the power plant in the background:




















f/22
15 sec
40 mm (~60 mm equivalent)
ISO 1600

I got a few okay shots, but then the wind on the ground and the wind up high blew in opposite directions and I got this one, which I really like. The steam blowing out of the frame in both directions really makes it. I haven't done very much to this image. It turned out well. Didn't go looking for it--just saw it on the way back to the car.


23 November 2013

Night Shooting: Creamers Field and GI Roof



Went out for a second try at night shooting with Shadoe. We started at Creamer's Field and were surprised to find an early aurora. Shadoe advised me on keeping the shutter speed slow to keep it from looking like a blob:



f/1.8
6 sec
31 mm lens (~46 mm equivalent)
ISO 800

I was surprised by how well the camera captured it. The aurora was much fainter than this. Truly though, I have no interest in aurora photography. Other people can do it and I will look at their beautiful pictures.

We went from their to the GI roof. I wasn't interested in anything until Shadoe started taking shots of the big satellite dish. This one is kind of a mess (not easy capturing a person in the dark without a flash), but I liked the colors and I liked how it captured how dedicated and absorbed she is when she's shooting:

















f/1.8
1/4 sec
31 mm lens (~46 mm equivalent)
ISO 1600

The snow is red because its main light source is the red light on the element in the middle of the dish. You don't notice it with your eyes, but the camera captures it. It you try to make this snow white, the colors of the background go crazy. Anyway, I like it. It looks a little unreal.

22 November 2013

Event: GI Thanksgiving Potluck




Shot the Geophysical Institute Thanksgiving potluck for the event/photojournalism assignment. I had grander plans, but a series of disasters kept me from getting to other events. This shoot was challenging because the sun was very strong and the entire venue has floor-to-ceiling south-facing windows. Harsh, orange light, with huge differences from one part of the room to another. Still, I think I got some almost campy shots that get across my dislike for Thanksgiving:




f/8
1/125 sec
31 mm (~47 mm equivalent)
ISO 800



















f/4.5
1/125 sec
31 mm (~47 mm equivalent)
ISO 800

I didn't have to edit this one very much. They were well back from the windows, so the light and color came out well. I like how their bending towards each other almost intimately but completely absorbed in their carving.





f/9.5
1/125 sec
31 mm (~47 mm equivalent)
ISO 800

I like this moment. The turkey hats makes it sadder. The light was brutal, though, and I seem to have gone overboard on the noise reduction (it shows especially in the plasticky look to Susie's skin). A cloudy day would have been so much better for this.





jklh

21 November 2013

Night Shooting: Parking Garage


Went shooting at night with Shadoe and Allison. It was very thirty below. Went first to the parking garage downtown. We had to sneak in behind a car. On the top floor I found this fake owl hung from the ceiling to scare away small birds. I liked how it looked with the snow on its shoulders and East Fairbanks behind it:

















f/1.8
1/60 sec
50 mm lens (~75mm equivalent)
ISO 1600

I shot this handheld, with the camera up above my head, and the focus and exposure turned out great. Not bad for a plastic $200 lens. The colors came out a little garish, which surprised me for a night shot, but I desaturated a little to make the scene look a little colder.

Went down one floor and looked south and saw people in their apartments in the Northward building. It was a cold and depressing scene (everything looks depressing to me when it's 30 below):


























f/1.8
1/60 sec
50 mm lens (~75mm equivalent)
ISO 1600

I white balanced this and cropped it very slightly to make it straighter. I'm very happy with the original shot on this one. Two weeks later a woman jumped from this building but was caught and saved by firemen. Again, handheld. Very pleased with this lens at night.


13 November 2013

FLASH!

An interesting thing happens when you have to do an entire assignment in one day. You'll take pictures of anything:


















f/8.0
1/125
ISO 100
31mm lens (~47mm equivalent)

This was taken in a dark room, bouncing the flash off the ceiling. I've cropped it a little. Hard to compose a shot in the dark. I also toned down the highlights and lightened the shadows just to smooth out the transition from top to bottom. The cool thing about using flash as the only light source is that the color comes out almost perfectly. I don't think I white balanced this at all.


















f/9.5
1/60
ISO 400
31mm lens (~47mm equivalent)

Another bounce flash shot, again taken in a dark room. Flight suits. I should have arranged them instead of just leaving them as they were. Maybe move the orange suit on top so it's not right over the orange suits below. I don't know. 


















f/22
1/180
ISO 100
50mm lens (~75mm equivalent)

Last bounce flash shot. Dark room again, this time with a low ceiling. This one was significantly underexposed, but I like how it lightened up when I adjusted the exposure in photoshop. There isn't much contrast, but I like how Scout blends into the blanket. I think it brings her eyes and nose out. Also note that Scout has learned to use a pillow like a person would.

But here's what I mean when I say you'll photograph anything when you're desperate:

























f/4.5
1/180
ISO 800
50mm lens (~75mm equivalent)

This is a fill slash shot. That's a daiquiri, except it's almost entirely rum because too much lime juice would have given it a urine-like hue. It's strongly backlit by a high-output fluorescent, with paper masking the tubes. I'm directing the camera flash directly at the glass. 

It was fun playing with this one. In the end I bled a lot of light and color out of it to emphasize things like the texture of the paper and the condensation on the glass. I had to crop heavily to get a white-only background. I didn't have enough blank paper readily at hand. Not an interesting photo, but don't you want a drink now?

And here is the direct result of drinking that daiquiri:
















f/11
1/180
ISO 400
50mm lens (~75mm equivalent)

That's my direct flash shot. I stuffed the pig with paper, mounted it on a shovel, and doused it in diesel. The shot was taken at night, from a low angle to exclude snow and brush. The black background came out great. The flames came out great. I never did get the pig to talk.

I would have liked to get a greater variety of shots to work with, but you would not believe how fast this thing burned. The flash only managed to charge four times before the pig was totally unrecognizable. Still, it turns out that direct flash on flames works pretty well.

04 November 2013

Self-portraiture II

I looked back at the coffee photos again and found that I liked different ones this time around. I spent some time working on two:


















f/2.8
1/45
ISO 400
31mm lens (~47mm equivalent)


















f/2
1/125
ISO 400
31mm lens (~47mm equivalent)

I liked how the top one looked in b&w. It captured all of the age in my skin, which doesn't come across as well in color. It was interesting to see myself looking that old. I mean, accurately. I can't use this one because of the dark shadow from the coffee cup. I had to tone down the light a lot for this photo to look good at all, but that shadow clearly shows that the photo as edited is lying.

The one in color is maybe an obvious joke. The coffee is in focus but I am not. Which pretty much describes every morning of my life. I like this one. I like the soft focus and the transition out-of-focus. The Atka mug says something about the subject, if the viewer wants to look into it. I like that I'm looking away from the blank space rather than into it. Also the white corner (mug) and the black corner opposite.

Still needed one more self-portrait:


























f/5
1/50
ISO 100
Zoom at 18mm (~27mm equivalent)
Camera in auto mode, triggered with remote

Wanted to get one more picture out of that pig. Ripped the plastic eyes off and burned the eyeholes bigger. I wanted to spend some more time on this. Try a few different compositions, inside and outside, shoot in manual, etc. But the second I put my head inside the pig, my eyes started to burn. This was only meant to be a test shot. I had to spot lighten my eye a little. Goodbye, pig.

02 November 2013

Peregrine at Creamer's Field

Took Scout for a walk on Saturday evening, and we met a man with a falcon on our way back to the car:


















f/2
1/45
ISO 1600
31mm lens (~47mm equivalent)

It was 6:00pm on a very clear evening, and this was right at the edge of what I could do handheld without jumping up to ISO 3200, which is notably worse in terms of noise. I was lucking to get any decent shots of the bird at 1/45sec because it was moving quite a bit as it tore up that pigeon.

Also, it's that time of year. Everything is blue. The actual scene was nowhere near this blue. I tried to improve things in photoshop:


















Did I go too far? I'm not sure. But I enjoyed the challenge of trying to make the colors truer while keeping a late evening look. I like the apartment building in the background. I think the shape and the yellow help to fill out the background, and they show that this is an urban scene--that this guy is flying his bird in the middle of town. I think that's important.

Here's the other decent one I got:


















f/2.8
1/45
ISO 1600
31mm lens (~47mm equivalent)

Really the only good thing about this photo is the eye contact between the man and the bird. I had to stop down to get enough DOF to have them both in focus, and I knew it would be underexposed. The whole right side of the frame is empty as well, and the background behind the bird is way too busy. Here's the best I could do with it:


























Really had to up the exposure to get the detail I wanted on the bird and the gore. Made it square to emphasize the relationship between the man and the bird. There's a diagonal line across the center between their eyes. In spite of the problems, I like this one. Will work on it some more to try to get the evening sky a little better.

Anyway, a good lesson in the importance of carrying your camera and talking to strangers.

31 October 2013

The Studio Portrait

Let me get this out of the way. I did not enjoy working in the studio. I don't ever want to work in the studio again. The studio exists for control, especially control of light, and the chaos of the environment is a large part of why I like photography. So the studio portrait assignment was pretty rough for me. I found myself wanting to take pictures of the set-up more than my model:


















f/16
1/180
ISO 80
Kit zoom set to 18mm (~27mm equivalent)

The assignment was a good exercise for appreciating what goes into studio photography. Getting the light right is hard. I did not come anywhere close to getting the hang of it. It was also hard to get Jason to relax. He doesn't like to sit still. In the end all I could do was let him pace around while I tried to get decent shots. Got a small handful that I sort-of like:


















f/19
1/180
ISO 80
Kit zoom set to 47.5mm (~71mm equivalent)

This might seem like an odd choice, but I like the way he's moving out of the frame, and he's kind of doubled by the shadow on the other side. And I like that you can see how beat-up the paper is.

Truly, I don't like being in such an unnatural environment. I understand the value and purpose, but I don't think I will ever do it voluntarily.

27 October 2013

Self-portraiture

Spent a long time today drinking coffee with the camera pointed at me, set to shoot at ten-second intervals. Took some with the 50mm lens and some with the 31mm. Found myself wishing that I had a darker coffee cup and also a smaller coffee cup. The giant Atka mug kept dominating the photos:


















f/1.8
1/60
ISO 400
31mm lens (~47mm equivalent)

I'm sitting at a counter in front of a south-facing window. It's a clear day, so the light was too strong except when it passed behind the trees. I might like this photo with a smaller, darker mug. I did get a few that I liked:


















f/2.0
1/90
ISO 400
50mm lens (~75mm equivalent)

On the one hand, this is a much less silly photo than the previous one. On the other, I think it lacks the element of self-awareness that characterizes good self-portraits. This could have been taken by anyone. It's just mimicking a portrait taken by somebody else. Whereas the top one, with the staring eye, seems more like a self-portrait even though I don't like it as much. I'll just have to keep at it.

Two self-portraits I like:


















Lee Friedlander. This one cracks me up. He's intentionally "failed" to hide the camera (its shadow is on the hood), which subverts the entire scene (there's no question that he's not really driving). That's the kind of self-awareness or intentionality I'm talking about. I also like this one because the self-portraits of photographers with their cameras to their eye get tiresome fast. Here's an exception, by Ilse Bing:























Two mirrors, obviously. I like it because the curtain fills in the composition perfectly, and there's something arresting in the way the two iterations of the camera are aimed exactly 90ยบ apart, and the front-on face in one mirror and the perfect profile in the other.

I'll keep at it. Don't think I'll turn in either of the above.

23 October 2013

Blackout

They shut the power off in the Elvey building tonight. Tried to get some stuff for my environmental portrait assignment, just following around the folks who were trying to keep their stuff alive. It was very dark. The backup power failed. The emergency lights died. Had to do most of my shooting with the lens wide open and the ISO at 3200 or 6400. Hard to focus in the dark, and even when I got it right there was a lot of noise in the photos:


















f/1.8
1/45
ISO 64000
31mm lens (~47mm equivalent)

It was a large room, and the fish tank was the only source of light. ISO 64000 is really too high. I think 1600 is the limit on my camera for decent looking photos. It's a shame because I know I'll never get a better shot of Dolores than this one--it's just so her. But the high ISO noise makes it unusable.

I never got Dale against a decent background, but Dale has no expressions that aren't funny. Every single picture I take of him is funny:


















f/1.8
1/60
ISO 800
31mm lens (~47mm equivalent)

The power was back on at this point, so there was more light. Hence the lower ISO. I don't think I got a keeper of Dale. I ruined several shots by missing the focus, which is easy to miss at f/1.8. Need to practice, especially if I'm going to by an f/1.2 lens.

Also tried to get some shots of Mitch, but his position made it hard to get his eyes in. Also, lots of motion blur and missed focus. Might have had a keeper in there otherwise. Like the Dolores shots, the only light source in these was Mitch's monitor. Very hard to get Mitch without the monitor just coming out bright white:


















f/2.0
1/125
ISO 1600
31mm lens (~47mm equivalent)

Could have brought this down to 800 ISO, which looks a lot better. I'll play with this in photoshop, but I don't know if I can make anything of it.

The takeaways here were that I need to work on focusing in low light, and there is no such thing as a lens that is too fast. So I need one of these:























f/1.2!!!


Update: Beginning to like this shot of Dale. The closed eyes and ambiguous, possibly lewd gesture make it a lot more interesting than the others.


















f/2.4
1/90
ISO 1600
31mm lens (~47 equivalent)

20 October 2013

Scott Fortino & the GI showers

Found a book in the library called Institutional. Photographs by Scott Fortino. He is or was a cop in Chicago. The book is filled with interior shots from empty jails, schools, hospitals, etc. Color. Square format. The colors and compositions have an effect like abstract paintings even though the images are entirely concrete:



























It's hard to explain why I find these so moving. Details like the camera in the top one and the in-boxes in the bottom one. The screen partly pulled down. Fortino must have done a lot of arranging to make them look so perfect. The spaces look oppressive, but at the same time, like they're waiting to be reoccupied.

I took my own stab at something like this for assignment four, in the men's showers in the basement of the GI. Mine, even if they were good, would lack the impact of Fortino's because my subject is all wrong. But it was a good exercise in trying to make nice compositions out of masses of unattractive squares and rectangles:



















f/16
15 sec
ISO100
18-55 zoom at 18mm (~27mm equivalent)


















f/16
20 sec
ISO 80
18-55 zoom at 18mm (~27mm equivalent)

Kaji thought it was strange that I shot these at such a low ISO. There was no special reason. Lower ISO's are supposed to produce the least noisy images, and I had a tripod and a remote, so I figured, why not?

19 October 2013

Frank's Church

Went back to Frank's Church on Ester Dome to try to shoot the graffiti. It was painted with broad passes so it looks out-of-focus even to the eye. I think some would call the designs disturbing, but to me they look playfully weird:


















f/2.4
1/45
ISO 200
31mm lens (~47 equivalent)


















f/3.5
1/20
ISO 200
31mm lens (~47 equivalent)

Nothing great, but I'm glad I have pictures of the place. It's hard to get across the feel of that room. Maybe a fisheye or a super-wide-angle would do it. It's a strange place. On the way back down, because we were supposed to shoot 30 different subjects, I shot some plants (desperate photo student's last resort):


























f/1.8
1/250
ISO 80
31mm lens (~47mm equivalent)


















f/1.8
1/350
ISO 80
31mm lens (~47mm equivalent)


















f/1.8
1/350
ISO 100
31mm lens (~47mm equivalent)

In all of these, I'm lying on the ground with the lens wide open. It was the only way I could think to get unusual perspective on cranberries. Also, there were so many bushes that the scene was so twiggy that throwing everything out of focus was the only way to even have a clear subject. It was late afternoon on a clear day, so the sun was low and shining directly through the cranberries. Got some shots like the top one where they seemed to be glowing, but none that I liked. On the bottom, I'm holding two bunches of cranberries in the foreground to make those two smudges. Didn't get anything good like that, either, but I bet that will come in handy someday. The middle one is the best one. The red is more subtle, and I love the shading of the blurred background. Twigs along the bottom are too busy.