Photo365-20100110 – Tea’s Bloomed, originally uploaded by HokiePerogi.
1/25 sec @ f/3.5, ISO 800, 50 mm (EF50mm f/1.8 II)
My sister gave my fiancee a blooming tea set for Christmas this year. The unbrewed tea comes in a sealed pouch as single tea pot servings. Today’s raw tea was pressed into the shape of a heart. When the boiling water was poured into the tea pot with the heart shaped tea ball inside, it started to bloom. For the next few minutes, we watched as the tea flower opened up more and more to reveal red tea leafs in the middle. I was snapping frames through the entire process. Unfortunately, we did not pick an ideal location to brew the tea in order to keep the background of the photographs clear of clutter. In today’s picture, a candle “photobombed” the shot. However, I did realize this issue during the shoot and tried to make adjustments to minimize the distractions as best as I could. Believe me, it could have been a whole lot worse with a slightly different angle.
Photo365-20100109 – Christmas, A Little Late, originally uploaded by HokiePerogi.
1/80 sec @ f/8.0, ISO 3200, 50 mm (EF50mm f/1.8 II)
Today was my family’s belated Christmas celebration. I had the camera out to take a few pictures when my nieces and nephew started to tear into their gifts. I did not have an “extravagant” light set up like I did for Christmas morning over my fiancee’s sisters’ house. Instead, I relied on the natural light coming in from the windows in my mom’s living room and a higher than normal ISO. Overall, I am quite happy with the quality of the photographs, even at the higher ISO’s. Maybe I have been too picky in the past on the 7D’s low light performance. Is it possible that I am a pixel peeper? Please, do not let it be so!
Photo365-20091229 – Peek-a-boo Bird, originally uploaded by HokiePerogi.
1/15 sec @ f/4.0, ISO 1600, 200 mm (EF70-200mm f/4L IS USM)
I have been finding it more and more difficult to dedicate the time I need every day to take a quality, well thought out photograph. It is also getting more difficult to process and post the photographs on a daily basis. As a result, I am about two weeks behind in posting my daily photograph. Do not worry though, I have not missed a single day yet in taking the pictures. They are all stored and backed up in multiple places. Over the next several days, I plan to work diligently to get caught up and start to make a push to the finish line.
With today’s photograph I wanted to play around with a strong bokeh element in the frame. My subject is a Christmas Advent calendar near our front door. When I framed one of the birds correctly, I was able to get the Christmas tree lights from across the room into the frame. Because of the wide aperture ( f/4) the depth of field was shallow enough to only allow the bird to be in focus and throw the Christmas tree lights deeply out of focus. While the photograph certainly is not a masterpiece worthy work of art, it is a stepping stone for me. The concept and techniques I learned while taking this photograph will be useful in future photos I will make.
Photo365-20091226 – Peace in Lomo, originally uploaded by HokiePerogi.
1/15 sec @ f/1.8, ISO 1600, 50 mm (EF50mm f/1.8 II)
I know I said no more pictures of the tree. That is why I am going to call this a picture of an ornament, and definitely not the Christmas tree. It is very difficult to ignore our huge tree in the house when I have no ideas coming to me late at night.
The post processing gives this picture its magic. I used a Matt Kloskowshi Lightroom preset called Matt’s Lomo Effect (Strong Blur). There have been several days when I tried applying this preset to a picture, but it never looked right until today.
Photo365-20091225 – Open?, originally uploaded by HokiePerogi.
1/50 sec @ f/3.2, ISO 400, 50 mm (EF50mm f/1.8 II)
I came prepared to Christmas morning over at my fiancee’s sister’s house for some “major” photography. I loaded up the trunk of the car with more gear than I thought I would need to capture the moments of the day. I took my tripod, two light stands, two umbrellas, and most of the flash modifiers from my gear collection. I had about thirty minutes to get set up before the kids woke up to tear into the gifts.
I wound up using two strobes, each extended as high as they would go on their respective light stand. Both flashes had a stofen-type light spreader on its head to send the light out in every direction. I wanted the flashes to act as if they were light bulbs hanging from the ceiling.
I placed the flashes set on their stands in the back corners of the room and positioned their heads so that they were pointed and tilted to the center of the ceiling. I then worked on determining my camera exposure and flash power settings. I set the camera to manual mode and locked the aperture, shutter speed, and ISO settings to where I wanted them. I walked around the room and took pictures of the back of my hand to see what type of light the strobes were producing. By doing this chimping, I was able to determine the proper power for my strobes. Thanks to the Canon 7D body, I was easily able to make the changes to the flash power using the menus in the camera body.
Today’s picture is just one of the many I was able to capture using this setup. I would have liked to have a bit more shutter speed then I wound up with, but my flashes were already set at 1/2 power. At 1/2 power, I was able to fire off about a frame every two to three seconds and get the light coverage I needed. I could have increased the aperture, but I would have given up more depth of field. The other option was to increase the ISO, but I knew from experience that at ISO 800 and above, the noise generated by the 7D sensor is not easy to remove. So while all of my shots were not keepers mainly because of motion blur, I was able to get some great shots of the day’s joyous events.
Photo365-20091223 – A Christmas Masterpiece, originally uploaded by HokiePerogi.
1/2 sec @ f/11, ISO 1600, 20 mm (EF-S18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS)
I am pretty sure this will be the last Christmas tree photo during the project. I am not going to promise anything, but I will try. You never know what opportunities may come when we take down the tree in a week or two. I am hoping that we take the tree down in the next week or two instead of leaving it up until sometime in February or March like we did last year!
With this picture, I wanted to capture the finished masterpiece that my fiancee put together this year for our tree. While last year’s, Virginia Tech themed tree still remains my favorite, this one is a close second. We never were able to figure out why half of a strand of lights completely went out the day after putting the decorations on. We decided to live with it instead of pulling off all the ornaments and stringing a new set of lights.
I used two flashes for this picture. Each one was set up on a flash stand and coupled with a reflective umbrella. I placed one umbrella and strobe combination atfar camera right and one far camera left. Both were set to a height roughly the size of the tree. The umbrellas were then pointed down at about forty-five degrees. If I had to estimate, each rig was about ten to twelve feet away from the base of the tree. I wanted to ensure that the light would spread evenly across all visible parts of the tree. I had to play around with the direction of the umbrellas to eliminate the spectral highlights on the walls of the room as much as possible.
In the end, I was able to produce today’s image. The ISO got a bit higher than I normally like to shoot with. In order to get more light out of my flashes, I was “forced” to raise my ISO so that I could keep the other elements of the photograph as I liked them. For example, I did not want to increase my aperture from f/11. If I allowed more light in by increasing my aperture from f/11 to, say f/8, I would have lost the star-bursting effect on the tree lights. I also did not want to slow my shutter speed down much more than 1/2 second. At 1/2 second, I was able to achieve a believable balance between the white light of the flashes and the yellow-colored light from the tree. If I slowed the shutter down to 1 second, I risked letting the yellow-colored light from the tree contaminate the rest of the light in the room and making it look more artificial.
Photo365-20091222 – Christmas Tree Bokeh Tree, originally uploaded by HokiePerogi.
1/10 sec @ f/1.8, ISO 800, 50 mm (EF50mm f/1.8 II)
Tonight I decided to try playing around with custom bokeh shapes. Usually, bokeh appears as circles of out-of-focus light when shooting a wide aperture. However, you can easily change the shape of the bokeh by placing a sheet of paper or card stock with a cut out directly in front of the camera lens.
For today’s picture, I used an Exacto knife to cut out the shape of a Christmas tree from a sheet of notepad paper. I then held the paper up against the end of my lens so that the tree cut out was centered on the lens. I set my lens to manual focus and threw the image of our lit Christmas tree completely out of focus.
Photo365-20091218 – Ginger-yum House, originally uploaded by HokiePerogi.
25.0 sec @ f/14, ISO 400, 50 mm (EF50mm f/1.8 II)
Today my fiancee and her nephew made a ginger break house together. Upon coming home and seeing it on the dining room table, I knew it was going to be my subject for today. It was practically in the perfect place too, right in front of the tree. In order to get the star bursting effect on the tree lights, I knew I would need a small aperture and a long shutter speed.
I set the camera up on the tripod and placed an Apollo softbox at camera right. I then set up the white disc reflector on camera left to open up the shadows on the left side of the house. I took a few shots to determine the best flash power settings to light the ginger bread house. I quickly determined that I needed to modify the light from the flash with a CTO (color temperature orange) gel to more closely match the ambient light from the tree. After getting the ginger bread house lit to the way I wanted it to look, I started to slow down my shutter speed little by little until the exposure of the tree was spot on.
In hind sight, I should have corrected the white balance during post processing. It seems that there is an abundance of yellow in the final picture. My guess is that the 7D auto white balance chose a flash setting instead of a tungsten setting. I should have manually set the white balance to match the color of my gelled flash to avoiding having to make an adjustment during post.
A Christmas Wrap, originally uploaded by HokiePerogi.
1/80 sec @ f/1.8, ISO 400, 50 mm (EF50mm f/1.8 II)
While listening to one of my weekly podcasts, I heard a great suggestion by one of the hosts for a holiday photograph. Scott Bourne said on his Photofocus podcast, Episode #23, that it would be interesting to see more photographs during the holiday season of people wrapping presents rather than the cliche photographs of people opening presents.
This suggestion came to mind immediately when my fiancee told me she was going into our basement to watch television and wrap some gifts. I grabbed the 7D with the fast 50mm lens and followed her downstairs.
I used the available light in the basement to get the shot. In post, I adjusted the tint, sharpened, and applied an ever so slight vignette to the edges.
1/30 sec @ f/1.8, ISO 1600, 50 mm (EF50mm f/1.8 II)
I know I promised not to take any more Christmas tree pictures a few days ago, but here is another one. The silver flowers on the tree struck my fancy tonight. I opted for a tight in-camera crop for the flower to keep the distractions to a minimum. I really wanted this image to be all about the flower and nothing else.
I did not use any presets on today’s photograph. Instead, I played around with several of the settings in Lightroom’s develop module until I found a combination that I felt was intriguing.
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....
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