A productive morning

I went out to shoot some pictures this morning. When I got home, I looked at my watch and couldn't believe that it was only 12:05. It's amazing what you can get done if you get up early. It was raining when I got up and I wasn't going to go anywhere. Then I checked in with Intellicast on my iPad and saw that the rain was about to end, so out I went! By the way, If you don't know about Intellicast, go to their website here and scroll down to the interactive weather map at the bottom. Click it, go full-screen, zoom in on your location, then (assuming there's some weather around where you are), press "Play". Amazing. And it's available free for the iPad.

Anyway, on with the story. Yesterday afternoon, I was fooling around with my macro setup. There was this obstinate dandelion puffball on my lawn, backlit by the sunset. I mounted the bellows, pulled the offending weed and set it up on a table. Here's the result:

That's one seed from the puffball. OK, two of them. Focusing is such a difficult issue at these magnifications!  

This morning, there was a running race in Minden. I decided to check it out and see if I could get some pictures (you didn't think I was considering running, did you? Shame). The bellows was still mounted on the camera, Intellicast said the rain was just ending, there were water droplets hanging on the pine trees... I had already put the tripod away, so I thought, "can I shoot handheld"? Bottom line is, I needed some help with the shutter speed and I have this thing called a flash...

Did you know that pine needles have these rows of white dots on them? Neither did I. You can click on the picture to enlarge it if you want to look closer. I think this was at f/11 but I can't see it in the Exif data with the bellows on: it says f/0.0.  

Anyway, I went to the race in Minden and got a surprising number of 'keeper' pictures. Here are a few — it's hard to choose, I got so many!

You can't see the legs for the forest. I mean, um... 

Pretty sure that wave was for me. She wanted her picture taken. This was just before the start of the 10k. 

I love how this turned out. Truth? I wanted to shoot some blurred motion shots and was trying to figure out what shutter speed would work best. This girl was warming up with a little sprint, so I shot two shots and !Eureka!. This is 1/15 sec at f./20, ISO 100, 12mm. I set the camera on shutter speed priority. All I did to the shot in LR was to select the shoes and increase the saturation of the bright colours. 

At the finish, I was shooting faces. I got about 75 great shots with my 70-200mm lens at f/2.8. This was my favourite. I think she wanted to win but didn't: is that  disappointment on her face? From the number, by the way, she ran 5K, not 10.

Had to be father and son. They ran 10k and I think dad was elated that they finished. They actually came in together. 

On the way home, I stopped at the white water. I wanted to put the 400mm lens on the gimbal mount, and try some action shots. I got a few, nothing extraordinary, but I noted that it's much easier to get sharp images when the camera is on a proper mount. Anyway, I got one that I liked:

I've got thousands of freeze-frame kayaker pictures shot at 1/1000 second, but I really like the dynamic of shooting at a low shutter speed sometimes. This is 1/40 second at f/22. 

More to come, as usual. Later...

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Musings from the Highlands

Just some goings-on up here in God's Country. It's been hot (for the benefit of my readers in other parts of the world. Of course if you live in the area, you already knew that. How hot was it?

The bottom numbers are the outside temp/humidity. Muggy when I took this.

In addition to the new BBQ Gazebo...

An HDR shot of the new gazebo on the deck. Designed to keep the rain and snow at bay. I barbecue year-round and this is going to help a lot!

... I bought an interesting new product that I first saw at my friend Lori's place in the city. It replaces my sliding screen door — it's two panels held together by a set of magnets (that's the black vertical line in the middle) and it snaps together nicely after you walk through it. I walked through my screen one too many times!

"As seen on TV". Magic Mesh, I think it's called. $25 at Canadian Tire. I did have to roll up the bottom a bit because it won't close if it's dragging on the ground..

It's perfect. It keeps the bugs out, you can just walk right through it with both hands full, it snaps closed right away. OK, well ALMOST perfect. There's someone else who can just walk right through it without any difficulty:

With the nice weather, we've been spending a lot of time outdoors, walking, swimming, and working very hard ...

Hard at work! 

Guest Photo

During my last DSLR class, Val, one of the students, went out on assignment to shoot some pictures and came back with this one:

So I spent the afternoon after class looking for this guy again, without success! I haven't seen him since. Val is a really good photographer and I hope I was able to take her up a step or two.

A few more of my shots

A couple of people asked me about the range of my bellows attachment. I shot a couple of sample pictures to demonstrate that.

This is about the minimum magnification with the bellows completely retracted. That said, zooming the lens changes the magnification and I don't know where it was set.

And this is at the other extreme,  Both of these shots are right out of the camera, as you can see, holding exposure is not easy — also depth of field at these extreme magnifications is almost non-existent. 

Whitewater shots

I dropped by the whitewater preserve on Sunday and took a few shots. I was on the bike and only had my 24-120 lens with me: it was dwarfed by the lenses that the 3 or 4 other photographers there had! Interestingly, they were all Nikons, ranging from a lowly D300 (like mine) to a D7000 to a new D800! Nicest lens I saw was a Nikkor 300mm f/2.8. Can you say envious?

In my humble opinion, there are two different ways to shoot action: slow, and fast. This first shot is at 1/1000 second, so the water is frozen.

This is a tone-mapped image — not exactly an HDR because it was made from one photo. I treated it that way because I wanted to emphasize the muscle tone and detail. What attracts me to this shot is the facial expression: I call it "focused" but someone else said, "he's obviously 'in the moment'" which I thought is a good way about saying it.

But I think you get a more dramatic and dynamic image at a slow shutter speed, like the 1/30 second used for this shot. Which one do you like best? 

I'm dong another basic DSLR class this weekend: it's light because of a cancellation so if anyone wants to come up at the last second, give me a call (416 630 5921) or email me, there's room. Saturday and Sunday, 11-4.

TTFN

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Up Close and Personal

In today's blog, I'd like to share two topics with you: first, getting up close and personal shooting pictures of little wee things, and second some guest pictures from the moose workshop I could not attend.

Close Up photography

As I posted a couple of weeks ago, I now have a bellows which allows me to shoot closeups of really small things. This will give you an idea of scale:

This is nowhere near full magnification. This shot has NOT been cropped, that's what my sensor saw.

And I did that with a $35 piece of equipment (well, added to the camera and lens and tripod and Speedlight and light tent and...). Technical details are on my tech blog here, as well as other pictures. It's a basic tutorial on all you need to know to get started shooting this stuff yourself. Here's another image:

Same flower, more magnification. This was slightly cropped because there was something ugly at the bottom of the frame.

I also shot the following picture in the light tent at the same time. It's not a "macro" since the flower is quite a bit larger than the frame:

I did a bit of work on this image, just to sharpen it and do something other than pure white (or black) for the background. I think it's called a "Day Lily", maybe someone will come along to confirm or correct that. By all means, click on this to blow it up to check out the detail.

Now that I know how to fold up my light tent, I'm going to use it more!

Moose Workshop

As you know, I could not attend the Mike Bertelsen moose workshop in Algonquin Park mid-June because of family circumstances. I'm rather sorry I missed it, maybe I'll have another chance in a while. Two of the people who were on that trip sent me pictures yesterday, and with their permission, I'm able to show them to you here.

Without further ado...

These first two outstanding images were captured by Mark Girard

These two fabulous images are by Dennis Phillips.

Basic DSLR Workshops

If you're a relatively new DSLR owner and photographer, you too can improve your photography. One-day and two-day workshops are available here in the Haliburton Highlands or elsewhere at your convenience. Check it out at www.photography.to.

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