Didn't really feel like it but sure glad I dragged myself out to take this photo. I wanted to try and capture some sunset photos since it's been such a long time since I've done so. I was quite pleased with the result although the location wasn't all that good. The combination of the colour intensifier, circular polarizer and reverse grad worked to put life in the image.
Monday, May 30, 2011
impatient tourist
Stumbled on this little area and I knew I had to take a shot so I grabbed my wife and unwilling as she was I managed to take this capture which I dearly love.
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Cloudless day so I took this morning as a day to experiment. I first tried shooting without the intensifier and polarizer so I could see if the blues would be less and to get a wider shot as each filter adds to unwanted vignette. Tried it for a little while and then added the intensifier and polarizer to get a slower shutter speed. Eventually I just went with the 5-stop and 10-stop NDs to get the slow shutter speed. Wasn't that successful as I was unable to get the right shutter speed. Seems like the two needed at least 4 minutes to expose properly. Need to try this again...
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
brisk morning
Interesting result with the slow shutter speed blurring the clouds that were moving on this windy day. Love the effect...
Wednesday, May 04, 2011
workflow
Finally remembered all the steps in this morning's shoot. Set the manual focus by determining dof for the focal length, checked the diff exposures so I can use the correct GND filter, attached the trigger release to eliminate shake, closed the viewfinder to eliminate stray light, checked the focal length to make sure there is no vignetting and finally made sure my finger was not in the shot(!).
Monday, May 02, 2011
dof and focus and sharpness
Macros have the additional problem of sharpness as it has very narrow depth of field. One has to be aware of the dof and when it is sufficient it will be nice and sharp like this image. If not, focus stacking may be necessary.
focus stacking
A camera/lens only has so much depth of field specially when working up close as with a macro lens. To get more dof requires "focus stacking" whereby one takes different photos with different focus points and then blends them all with software.
Friday, April 29, 2011
3
Wanted to blur the clouds so I needed to add 2 ND filters to get a 2-3minute shutter speed. It kind of worked although it is a little darker than I want. However the big problem is the white streak across the image which I believe is caused by light leaking through the viewfinder. So I closed that and it seems to be the source of the problem. Have to see if the dark image is caused by the filter.
Tuesday, February 08, 2011
Mountain View in the dark
Early morning shot at the cemetary. There was a crew shooting a Smallville episode for TV. I liked the smoke they were using to provide some mood I guess. The morning was fairly sunny and bright and I thought a darker mood would be better. So I underexposed by 2 EV's and got this dark mood.
breakfast for one
Something clicked with this photo. Tried to overexpose the shot and thought it came out quite well. Nice and bright for a food shot...
Friday, December 24, 2010
holiday lighting
My initial attempts didn't adjust for tungsten and I didn't really like the orangy tone so I added an orange gel and set the WB to tungsten to get a more natural tone. My color tone is just about right but the walls are a bit more blueish than I would like. I maybe should have done the white balance for fluorescent...
Monday, December 06, 2010
bright sky over UBC
No foreground to use and wasn't able to use a tripod and the only filter I was able to use was the polarizer. I brought out the blue sky by applying curves to the blue layer and I like the effect.
blue sky
No tripod or filters for this one...just a quick one. So I was unable to bring out the detail in the trees. So I used both a polarizer and an intensifier to bring out the blue. Unfortunately I couldn't get a ninety degree angle on the scene to maximize the effect of the polarizer.
False Creek panorama
My third attempt at creating a panorama. Discovered that shooting vertical images was a better way to create the panorama which I did. Not sure as I think as long as it fills the frame that it would work and might technically create a better image as there would be less images to stitch together. The clouds have been really interesting lately which helped this image (I went back in the afternoon and gave up as the cloudless sky made for an extremely boring photo)as well as the reflection.
Science World blues
Used a polarizer and a soft GND for this image. I was able to get more width (less vignetting) from the added filters. Just enough blue as I didn't use the colour intensifier which would have given it more of a bluer tone.
Sunday, November 28, 2010
panorama image
Don't seem to remember to try doing panoramas as much as I have liked the ones I've seen. My brother Ben does it now and then and they look really nice. So here is my first try...I can't remember how many but I stitched this from about 6-8 diferent images.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
dof
Another experiment and this time with dof. It was a bright day but I wanted to use the 50mm f1.4 lens set at f1.4. This made for a very high shutter speed that I didn't want to use to I used the 10-stop ND to cut the light and the shutter speed to around 1/8s. A 5-stop ND would have been better as the shutter speed would have been around 1/250s which would eliminate blur due to movement. It would also allow one to see better through the lens and get a better composition.
snow
It snowed the day before and I guess you can say the Winter shooting season has started. Hopefully I will be able to go out when it is not so gloomy,
and again...
Got off from work to discover that it was just about sunset...a great time to be shooting and as Science World was close by I stopped to play around again. I finally realized/remembered that there was big difference in exposure between the sky and water so a GND was needed. This balanced out the light but I couldn't make the sky more dramatic by using a greater GND than necessary as it also darkened the Science World building as well and the result was not pleasing. Post processing using photoshop was a better approach for the desired effect.
unprepared
Decided to explore the Olympic Village...quite an impressive housing area. Great views and interesting architecture designs made for an interesting shoot. Unfortunately I brought the wrong camera which I couldn't attach to the tripod. I also forgot that I had my camera bag in the car with spare batteries and what have you. No filters to balance out the exposures...dumb.
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