1/30 sec @ f/2.8, ISO 640, 35 mm (EF16-35mm f/2.8L II USM) I got my butt kicked again at the gym tonight. But coming home and trying out a new rental lens made me quickly forget about the “pain” I was in earlier. The special occasion for this lens rental is a trip to Riviera Maya, Mexico with my company. I am lucky enough to work for a medium sized business which rewards its employee each year with a retreat. This year is the first time we will be leaving the country for a long weekend. The trip will be Thursday to Sunday. I made sure to have the rental lens show up a couple of days early so I could make sure it worked and that I could get used it to. For this rental, I decided to get a wide-angle L lens. While on the trip, I will only be carrying the rental (16-35mm), 50mm and the 70-200mm lens. The kit lens will be left behind in Virginia.
In playing around with the lens tonight, I was surprised at just how wide 16mm looks on my 1.6x crop factor XSi. I cannot imagine how wide this lens is on a full frame body. I also tried some close up shots to determine what the minimum focal distance was. Once again, I was pleasantly surprised at how close I could get to a subject and still focus on it.
It was one of the latter macro-type shots which produced today’s photograph. You may recognize this Buddha from a previous photograph, “5-29: Blackout Buddha”. The vignetting and golden effects you see in the picture are the result of stacking two different Lightroom presets on top of each other. This was not the effect I was actually going after, but when I “tripped” on it, I liked it too much to change it.
2.0 sec @ f/3.2, ISO 400, 50 mm (EF50mm f/1.8 II) Tonight wound up being a Strobist night. I decided to play around with the Honl Color Effects Filter Gel Kit along with our relatively new colander from Home Goods. It took me more than a handful of attempts to zero in on a picture which I like. I tried pictures using all sorts of exposure settings on the camera and flash settings on the strobe underneath the colander. I also tried some more flash dragging, except this time I dragged the flash by adjusting the zoom on my lens. Ultimately, I settled on today’s picture which involved a bit of light painting while using my 50mm prime lens..
To achieve this result, I turned off all the ambient light sources in the area and set the shutter speed to two seconds to allow me to paint the needed light into the scene. A wider aperture was used (f/3.2) in order to allow the light emitted from the strobe to be bright without cranking the flash to full power.
1/1600 sec @ f/1.8, ISO 200, 50 mm (EF50mm f/1.8 II) On the way over to my friends’ house to BBQ and watch some timeshifted UFC, I tried to stop by Burke Lake to see if I could get some good pictures. Unfortunately, I was greeted at the gate by a $8 per car fee for out of county residents. It was a quick decision to just turn around and look for a subject in my friends’ neighborhood instead.
Forty yards from their front door was a regular old fire hydrant. I recently decided that I should concentrate on finding interesting subject within everyday objects. This was the goal for today’s picture. What intrigued me about the fire hydrant was the way the chains were hung uniformly to all the end caps. I wanted to play around with a very shallow depth of field while photographing a subject only inches away from the camera. What I like best about this picture is the out of focus chain in the background. It is still recognizable as a chain in the middle of the picture. But as you follow it to the top, it becomes less and less recognizable. If the photo were extended another inch or two higher, it would probably be unrecognizable.
1/3200 sec @ f/3.5, ISO 200, 50 mm (EF50mm f/1.8 II) I was out and about today running some errands in Leesburg when I decided to check out White’s Ferry for the first time since moving to the area. White’s Ferry is the only ferry operating on the Potomac River. From 5am to 11pm, the cable-guided ferry traverses the river nonstop, only stopping to let cars, motorcycles, bikes, and pedestrians on or off.
I gave the photograpy an old-time, antique feel during post processing due to the fact that a ferry has been operating in this location since 1817! Sure, there would not have been any cars on the ferry in 1817, but you will just have to look past that fact.
1/15 sec @ f/6.3, ISO 200, 50 mm (EF50mm f/1.8 II) Tonight I wanted to play around with a strobist technique I learned about while at the gym earlier in the day. The technique is called flashing dragging. When I light a subject in the foreground with a flash and rely on the ambient light to exposure the background of the picture, it allows me to achieve this effect. The subject which was lit by flash is perfectly in focus and sharp while the background is all sorts of streaky and blurry. This is because I twisted the camera as I took the picture. This works because no matter what flash power you use, the flash happens in an extremely small fraction of time. This freezes the subject for the instant when the flash hit it. However, because the exposure was 1/15 of a second, it allowed me to create a blurred background by having the camera moving while the shutter was open gathering light from the background.
This technique opens a lot of doors when using flash and there is a bland or distracting background. I will definitely keep this technique handy and practice it a bit more for when I get into taking portraits.
1/60 sec @ f/3.5, ISO 200, 50 mm (EF50mm f/1.8 II) Have I told you how much I like my new 50mm f/1.8 lens? This thing is amazing for being only $100. If you are shooting a Canon body and do not already have one drop what you are doing and pick one up right now. The clarity is amazing.
After first getting the lens, I was worried because the majority of my pictures were not coming out as sharp as I had expected. But now that I have had the lens for a week and shot pretty much exclusively with it, I have gotten much better results. The biggest lesson I have learned with this lens is that when shooting at f/1.8, my focus has to be spot on. If not, say goodbye to the clarity I was expecting in my subject.
Today I practiced looking at a normal occurrence from a new angle in order to see and capture an interesting image. Leila spends majority of her time out on the deck with her head poked through the railing watching over everything that is going on in our area of the neighborhood. To make the picture, I stood a few feet to the side of her and bent out over the railing as far as I could safely go. Then I snapped away.
1/125 sec @ f/2.0, ISO 200, 50 mm (EF50mm f/1.8 II) …to figure out what today’s picture is of.
Give up?
It is in Herndon.
It is red.
It once moved.
Ready for the answer?
It is a caboose. A caboose which was once part of the W&OD line to be more exact. Herndon’s train stop is still standing today and that was my photo shoot destination for today. There is not much there other than this caboose and the old station building which is now converted into a tiny museum. Unfortunately, neither the museum, nor the caboose were open while I was there.
To take the picture, I placed my lens right up against window of the caboose. This eliminated all of the reflections and glare. A few other ways I could have tried to get rid of the reflections when shooting through glass were by using my rotating polarizing filter or by experimenting with changing the angle that I was taking the picture through the glass.
In Lightroom, I applied a free preset to the photo to give it more of an antique black and white feel.
To see the other pictures I took while visiting the station, head over to the Flickr set.
1/60 sec @ f/4.0, ISO 400, 50 mm (EF50mm f/1.8 II) With a new month upon us comes a new scavenger hunt list from one of the photo 365 Flickr groups to which I belong. Inspiration did not hit me while over my fiancée’s sister’s house for dinner tonight. Nor did it hit me after we returned home. I decided to visit the scavenger hunt list to see if any ideas would spring up from there.
Sure enough, it did. The concept for today’s photograph was “follow the leader”. I decided to portray feet walking up the stairs. While collecting several pairs of shoes from the closet, I decided to add a bit more meaning too. The shoes which I picked represented those that I wear on a regular basis throughout the day. The progression of shoes shows a typical day of wear and are arranged in the order by which they are worn. At the top, the cycle starts over again.
The lighting was a bit difficult for this photo. The available light in the stairway was not the most flattering. I decided to compliment it by adding some light from a strobe. I set up the strobe so that the light would bounce off of the white ceiling and evenly fill the area as best as possible. I tried several modifications to get the light just the way I liked it. In the end, the strobe was gelled with a full CTO and had a gobo on the bottom and the right side of the flash head. The gobos were used to stop the light from harshly reflecting on the right stairwell wall and from hitting the bottom few shoes directly.
During post processing, I cropped the image slightly, applied an out-of-the-box Lightroom antique present and added some vignetting.
1/50 sec @ f/2.0, ISO 400, 50 mm (EF50mm f/1.8 II) I spent the latter part of the evening over at my fiancée’s sister’s house tonight. This provided a great opportunity to find some new and interesting subjects for my Photo365 project. One of my favorite objects in her house is the clock hung up in the living room.
I used my 430 EXII strobe with a blue gel and 1/8″ grid spot. The flash was set on the ground at about 45 degrees camera left and pointed up at the clock. I zoomed the flash head to its maximum, which I believe is in the 110mm area and set it to 1/64 power.
Earlier in the night, my fiancée and I worked on a different photograph together. Click on it below to be taken to the larger version at Flickr.
1/125 sec @ f/16, ISO 200, 50 mm (EF 50mm f/1.8 II) Single RAW HDR After making a wrong turn out of Landsdowne Resort today, my fiancée and I stumbled upon an interesting looking house set back in the middle of a field. It caught our eyes so much, that we tried to find a road to gain access to the property. Within seconds, we found ourselves at a gated entrance guarded by a security shack. After a prompt u-turn, we continued in the opposite direction looking for a road on the other side of the property. We got to within 100 yards of the property before being greeted by private property signs. This only made us more curious.
I parked the car right by the private property signs and pulled out the camera. I took several shots from a bunch of angles with both the 50mm and 70-200mm lenses. Upon returning home, we did some Googling to find out just what Janelia Farm was all about.
The first search result yielded a biotech company website. The website explained that Janelia Farm is a research campus owned by Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). Yup, THAT Howard Hughes; the aviation mogul which the movie “The Aviator” dramatizes.
Further Google results yielded more historical information. The AshburnWeb page for Janiel Farm described how the grounds were used mainly for horse and dog breeding by the original owners of the property and house, Vinton and Robert Pickens. The name Janelia was created from the names of their two daughters, Jane and Cornelia.
The land and the buildings are now owned by HHMI. One website noted that HHMI plans to renovate the buildings and use them for lodging and tours. Luckily, Janelia is in the National Register of Historic Places, so even though it is currently boarded up and looking abandoned, I believe it will be preserved for the future.
I decided to process this photo as an HDR image to make it more dramatic. The range of tones in the sky, field, and buildings were quite wide and the HDR certainly brings them out. I over-processed the image to exaggerate this range. My goal was not to overdue it and make the photo look entirely surreal, but to bring a sort of mystique and eerie feeling to the viewer.
A self-proclaimed tech-geek, I enjoy anything powered by batteries or electricity. I'm not happy until I understand the full potential of any new gadget I get my hands on....
