1/2 sec @ f/8.0, ISO 400, 5.1 mm
Here is a picture of the newest member in my photography workflow. Say hello to the Drobo. This puppy is packed with four 500 GB disks for a bit over 1.5 TB of redundant storage. I worked most of the night hooking it up and migrating my Lightroom 2.x and 3.0 (beta) catalogs onto their new home. I am hoping to get the iMac back up to speed by freeing up a lot of the internal hard disk space. I also hope to finally consolidate and catalog the fifty or so cd-roms that my dad burned before he passed with all of the family photos on them.
I snapped this picture with the Leica D-Lux 4 in the middle of my migration process. I applied Matt Kloskowski‘s Matt’s Sin City – Light Red Lightroom preset to the image during post-processing.
4.0 sec @ f/10, ISO 400, 21 mm (EF-S18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS)
We put the Christmas tree up today. Most of the decorations found their way on the tree too by way of my lovely fiancée. During this holiday season, I want to try out a couple of “tricks” that I have been reading about on various blogs for photographing holiday lights. Tonight, I played around with the lens aperture to achieve the starburst effect on the Christmas tree lights.
The trick to getting the starburst effect, whether it be for tree lights or any other light source, is to use a wide aperture. I used f/10 for this shot. Because the aperture was so wide, I needed a long exposure to capture enough light from the little tree lights to exposure the rest of tree. It should be no surprise that I had to mount the camera on a tripod. The last element I used in creating the raw imagine in the camera was adding some additional light to the angel tree topper. I used a gridded strobe atop a fully extended light stand. I used a full CTO gel on the flash too. However, it looks like I could have stacked a few gels together to better match the color of the light from the strobe to the color of the tree lights.
In post-processing, I desaturated the background walls and the floor. I also increased the saturation of the ornaments to try and make them pop a bit more. My last edit was adding a bit of a vignette around the image.
1/40 sec @ f/2.8, ISO 400, 9.3 mm This was sample cake number three for my fiancée and me. Unfortunately, we are still not happy with the proposed cake. The ratio of cake to gnash to icing is off. We are going to go back to the drawing board and try a few other combinations before we make a final decision.
I thought I would have at least a couple of interesting pictures today. However, upon reviewing them in Lightroom, I found that I did not like the look of any of them. The Leica D-Lux4 that I shot all of the pictures with today seems to be introducing a lot of noise into the pictures it takes. I guess the room was darker than I thought it was because at f/2.8 and ISO 400, the camera selected a shutter speed of 1/40 sec (I was in aperture priority mode). But at ISO 400, I thought the D-Lux4 would be less noisy. Maybe I just need more practice.
When I am not feeling any of the pictures for a certain day, I start to play around with applying presents and using Lightroom or Photoshop plug-ins. I used Topaz Adjust for today’s photograph to arrive at the final image.
1/250 sec @ f/8.0, ISO 100, 28 mm (EF-S18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS) Before I had to temporarily move the white seamless paper out of our living room / dining room area to make room for the Christmas tree, I wanted to put it to good use. I grabbed one of the flower arrangements from the Thanksgiving dinner tables and practiced some high key, still life photography. You can see by looking at the highlights on the glass vase, that I had the Apollo softbox set up on camera left and a reflective umbrella on camera right.
Post-processing of the photograph consisted of some sharping and slight boost to the color saturation.
1/80 sec @ f/1.8, ISO 400, 50 mm (EF50mm f/1.8 II) Today was a big day for my fiancée and me. We hosted our families for Thanksgiving Day for the first time ever. We had twelve people in total over at our town home. The day went wonderfully. The food and company was top notch. I also got to take a ton of pictures. Both my fiancée and I have historically been bad at making sure we have enough pictures of the members in our families to complete the projects that we have in mind. I have decided to change that for good.
This picture of the turkey, fresh out of the oven, was one of the first pictures of the afternoon. It is making me hungry again looking at it. While this turkey was resting, I set up my two strobes on their light stands and raised them as high as I could go to get a nice bounce of light off of the white ceilings. For the rest of the afternoon and part of the night, I was able to capture some really great pictures of my sister, brother, mom, future mother and father in-law, nieces and nephew, and even some of my fiancée and me. It will probably take me a weekend or two to get through and process them all.
Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!
1/6 sec @ f/2.8, ISO 400, 7.9 mm Tonight I hung out with my good friend over at his place. Our significant others headed into Washington, DC to see a live appearance of a Real Housewife of Atlanta. Us guys figured we should hang out too. I brought the Leica point and shoot with me in hopes to find something fun to take a picture of.
Something fun wound up being Reese, their minpin. Reese was a great subject, both sitting and laying quite still in her bed while I invaded her personal space with my camera in macro mode. The backgrounds of all the images were quite distracting. To address this issue I took the approach of over saturating the subject and applying a vignette using Topaz Adjust and Lightroom. This helped to draw attention to Reese instead of the background. The preset in Topaz Adjust smoothed out the image too, almost making it look like a watercolor painting instead of a photograph.
1/8 sec @ f/2.8, ISO 400, 6.8 mm I played around more with the our new Leica D-Lux 4 tonight. I am really interested in its macro capabilities, so I took another closeup shot. This time, it was of one of the chargers on one of the two Thanksgiving dinner tables we have prepared for Thursday. I am really impressed in the amount of detail that this little point and shoot camera can capture. I did not apply any additional sharpening to the RAW file in Lightroom. The only sharpening that was applied is the default amount that Lightroom applies to all D-Lux 4 RAW images that are imported (based on the camera profile created by Adobe).
The image was a bit noiser than the final photo. I used Noise Ninja to process and remove the noise. I also used a duplicate layer and mask to clone out and blur a light stand that made its way into the background of this image (between the two chairs). I did not do a perfect job doing the editing though. With a bit more time I would be able to remove the two or three flaws in the area between the chairs.
1/6 sec @ f/2.0, ISO 400, 5.1 mm My fiancée and I are now the proud owners of a Leica D-Lux 4! While I was at Ace Photo for their customer appreciation day, I entered both of us in the contest for the Leica point and shoot. Earlier today, my fiancée received an email from Ace Photo informing her that she was the winner. She was able to swing by the store when she got off of work to pick up the camera. I spent an hour playing with our new camera tonight. I snapped this picture of my work laptop. I am looking forward to be able to carry around our new Leica on a daily basis instead of carting around my 7D in the trunk of my car. What makes the Leica D-Lux 4 so special, other than its famous name, is that it has full manual controls for the aperture, white balance, shutter speed, ISO, exposure compensation, and flash exposure compensation. Bascially, it has most of the same creative manual controls that DSLR’s offer.
I processed this image in Nix Silver Efex Pro. I used one of the presets which come with the Photoshop plugin.
1/250 sec @ f/10, ISO 200, 18 mm (EF-S18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS) My fiancée and I are continuing preparations for our Thanksgiving celebration with our families. We will be hosing a total of twelve people in our townhouse. Today we spent some time hanging things on the walls in the dining room. We bought these shadow bulletin board boxes and clocks a few weeks back and never got around to hanging them. Today we did. I wanted to take a picture to show off our handy work. We hope to one day be able to fill all three shadow box frames with pictures from each of the three cities found on the clocks: New York, London, and Paris. We have New York covered already, but we need to plan our trips to London and Paris.
I did significantly more post processing to this image than I normally do to my Photo365 photographs. After increasing the exposure with both the Exposure and Fill Light sliders in Lightroom, I sharpened the image to bring back the details in the clock faces. These tweaks resulted in a noisy image, so I brought the picture into Photoshop CS4 and removed most of the noise using Noise Ninja. The last step was to remove an electrical outlet which was partially blocked by the chair in the lower right section of the picture. To do this, I first selected the chair which was cutting through the outlet. I then inverted the select so that everything but the chair was selected. This allowed me to use the Clone Stamp tool without having to worry about disturbing the chair.
1/250 sec @ f/5.0, ISO 400, 50 mm (EF50mm f/1.8 II) I have a confession to make. I bought some new gear today. And, of course, like every other time I have gone to Ace Photo to pick up one thing, I wound up leaving the store with more than planned. Sigh! The plan was only to buy the 28″ Westcott Apollo soft box shown in today’s picture. However, I was ultimately tempted by the Cash for Clunkers promotion Ace Photo was running in conjunction with Manfrotto. I wound up walking out of the store with not only the soft box, but also with the tripod and ball head seen in the picture. The tripod is a big step up from the old Phillips video tripod I have been using over the past twelve months since getting into this photography thing. I am looking forward to finally being able to shoot in the portrait orientation with my DSLR cameras when they are mounted on the tripod.
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