Sometimes just keeping your eyes open will bring you something beautiful and unexpected. I was at the Carrolton Public library this week, hanging out with a bunch of my Ham Radio friends and building Antennas. I had my camera with me so I could take pictures of the Antenna build, and I happened to look out the window at the Library and see all these Seagulls flying and sitting around a dock down by a little pond. Camera in hand, out the door I went. I only had my 24-104mm lens… not exactly the best for wildlife shooting, so I wasn’t expecting much… but I kept getting closer and closer, and this is the last shot I got before the closest bird got nervous and flew off. I was probably only about 10 feet away from him when I took this picture, and I am very happy with the results!

African Violet 180mm Macro f/32 ISO 800

Today was nice outside… probally in the 60s, so My wife and I decided to spend some time out on the porch. With a little digging, I ended up being able to find everything she needed to re-pot some of her African Violets. This was the first one I have seen bloom in awhile, so I took our new dedicated macro lens for a spin on an appropriate subject for the first time. I took a ton of pictures, but the ones I liked the best where all the ones with the highest depth of field, provided by setting the apeture on the macro lens all the way up to f/32. I had to bump the ISO to 800 and keep the camera on a tripod with a macro rail to focus, but I am quite happy with the results.

Stone wall in Lebanon PA

While digging through my iphoto library, I found this picture of a stone wall I saw in a park in Lebanon PA a few years ago.  This was taken long before I had ever even thought of owning a Digital SLR camera,  with a Kodak point and shoot.  I remember taking a long walk through the park, and just thinking this wall was beautiful.  At that point in time, I didn’t take many pictures, but I always had my point and shoot in my pocket, and when I saw something that really struck my eye a frame would be made.

I carry my SLR with me just about everywhere too, but it is usually in a backpack, not a pocket, so it is far less accessible.  Sometimes, I wonder how many images like this one I miss because its so much more work to get the SLR ready to create an image than that old Kodak.  If the Kodak didn’t have a broken screen, maybe I would just carry both.  Do you carry a point and shoot when you don’t have your SLR?  Or do you just carry a Point and shoot all the time like I did back then?  Do you ever miss a shot because you just cant get the camera out of a backpack fast enough, and its just not convenient enough to always have it in your hand or in super easy reach?  And if you do miss those shots, does it bother you, or do you just shrug it off?

To all of those who I have been torturing with my slow upstream, sorry!

EDIT:   As a further thought…. in order to speed page load times, I am going to start trying to keep the images even smaller….. and limit to two images per post on the front page. This doesn’t mean Ill never post more than two images…. it just means you will need to click “More” to get to the rest of the article if it would contain more than that.

Church Silhouette 24mm f9 @ 1/250 ISO 400

Sometimes you fail to achieve what you were looking for, but come up with something else you love.  This past Sunday,  the sky was doing awesome ray of light stuff through the clouds. I have had my eye on this little church, hoping to make a cool frame for a while, so I decided to drive over and see if the sky would do something nice for me behind it.  The pretty rays of light were nowhere near where they needed to be to get the image I was hoping for, so I set up on a tripod  with the Sun directly behind the church, and started bracketing exposures, thinking maybe I would use them for my first crack at HDR.  When I got home…..  and started playing with the image,  I realized that the underexposed images were actually really neat, so I started playing with them.  I came up with this with a bit of a crop, and shifting the color temperature to gold a bit.  The final image was totally not what I was looking for, but I am defiantly happy with the result.  There is absolutely zero detail, but you just know exactly what you are looking at.  The lessons here are twofold:  first off,  even if you cant get the image you want, you might still make something that works.  Secondly,  bad weather might mean good photos.  It had been rainy and nasty, and these left over clouds when it got sunny totally make the picture.

Jenny Graduation f6.3 1/500

What a whirlwind my life has been lately!  I have been our of town more weekends that I have been home latley, and there is a ton of stuff going on at work because My company, Dialysis Corporation, just got bought by USRenalcare, a Texas Dialysis company.  There is stress, panic, talk of moving to Texas, drama, excitement, and a ton of work to be done.  I spent the last two weeks working with and getting to know the US Renal IT staff, and they are a great bunch of guys.  My stress level is much lower than it was a few weeks ago….  and hopefully any shooting I do from Texas will be just as a visitor.

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of driving down to Roanoke VA with my Beautiful wife, to see her friend Jenny graduate from college.  This is really a big deal for Jenny, as she has been in college for seven years now.  Of course I had my camera, and got some great pictures.

When arriving at the Graduation, the first thing I did was try to figure out which way the ladies (all female school) would be comming from.  Once I had that figured out, the next order of business was to get as close as humanly possible to the area where they would be giving out the Diplomas.  It was actually quite amusing in a way…. there were about 30 people with cameras to the Left of the Podium… me right out in front, waiting for people to come from the right.  We started out about 50 feet away from the action, and as a group, kept sneaking closer and closer until we were about 10 feet away from the tent.  Of course I was being careful to be the closest person, but not enough closer to get yelled at by security.

Once in position,  I started figuring out the light.   Being aware of the light was, and always is critical.  It was extremely sunny out, and the podium was under a tent.  The result was that if you trust your camera, things are going to look like crap because there is way too much bright light in the background,  but your subject is in shade.  My solution to this was to play with a manual exposure, practicing on the people that came through before her and checking the results.  The histogram said the image was blown out… and it was right… the highlights are totally white in the background… but I don’t care because my subject, Jenny, is in the Shade.  Since you can’t have your cake and eat it too, I choose to ignore what my camera tells me is right, and expose for the ladies in the shade.  I probally played with spot metering on something that was in the shade to get close to what I wanted.  An Incident light meter under the tent would have been a huge help here, but I don’t own one (sadly) and wouldn’t have been able to get under there with it anyway without getting more attention from security than I wanted or disrupting the ceremony.

Jenny with Diploma, f6.3 1/400

There were some other photographers there who were obviously the staff photographers.  Im not sure if they were media folk from the paper, or just students who were there to create the yearbook, but everybody was posing for them either way, so I used them.  I watched the people comming through before Jenny, to get an idea of where and when the girls were stopping for the pros…. and used it as an opportunity to get a different angle on it.  The Staff photographers were using Flash….  I am guessing that they were doing Fill flash to try to achieve a proper exposure.  I think my overexposed images (exposed correctly for subject) looked great… I would love to see the images they were capturing with their flashes to compare the two.  If I was a betting man, I would bet that mine look better due to the better quality of light off of the 50 foot diffusion panels that were effectively my light source (the tent,) but I would love to know for sure.

More TK!

I have started looking at my blog again, and have discovered that the spam bots have found it.  I am trying to change the way the pages are organized, but this has broken the RSS feed. Guess Ill have to keep messing with it.  I have implemented two anti-spam plugins,  BadBehavior, and SI CAPTCHA.  Bad Behavior was a piece of cake to set up,  while SI Captcha is going to need some troubleshooting, but Im excited about the idea of the two working together.  Ive got some research ahead of me.

Ill Get back to posting pictures soon, I promise.  I have lots of catching up to do.  Lots of stuff going on,  Ill write about it more later.

Titmouse Bird Photo 1/320 f8 400mm

Its been a slow couple of weeks for photography , as I have been traveling and working way too many hours.  Nearly three weeks ago, at Middle Creek Wildlife Preserve,  Jennifer and I drove out and just sat and watched the birds for probably over an hour.

Redwing_Blackbird Photo 1/320 @f10 400mm

It was a Perfect day and time for Bird Photography.  There was Plenty of Daylight, but it was close enough to sundown to put the sun right where it needed to be.  The light was coming over from behind us, so it was lighting the birds well as long as they were not in the shade.  The ground was still covered with snow, so the birds food sources were limited.  This led to a huge concentration of birds at the feeder station….. and the areas around it.  One surefire way to get pictures of animals is to find their food… and when all the other fancy restaurants are closed from snow….  they all end up going to the McDonalds of the bird world.

Cardinal Photo f5.6 1/400 at 400mm

My strategy for the day was simple.  Experiment.  A lot.  I was playing with different exposures,  different shutter speeds,  different apertures.  The camera was on a tripod the entire time.  I was using my 100-400mm lens,  mostly at 400 the entire time.  I was also using my remote shutter release to make things easier on my body.  I was shooting through a large plate glass window, into the feeding area at the wildlife preserve. Wherever I could, I was trying to catch the birds when they landed anywhere but on a feeder.  I foumd that most of the pictures I liked best were the ones when sun was hitting them directly, which I attibute to better shutter speed,  and smaller apeture.  I was NOT just going as fast as I could….. because I wanted to have enough depth of field to try and get the whole bird sharp.  Instead, I was just trying to keep the shutter speed at 1/320 or faster.  This was enough to freeze most of the birds motion if they were staying put… but not enough to catch a takeoff or landing.  When you go to shoot birds, and you find many of them in one area, experiment.  Try different apatures,  different shutter speeds,  and different exposures.  I found that setting the camera to Spot metering may help with getting the exposure, since Birds are so small and you don’t care as much about the exposure of the background/foreground which is constantly changing.  I believe I did quite a bit of manual mode to try and guess close, using the spot meter and a larger surface that was in the same light as my target birds.  As far as auto-focus,  it was a big help to set the camera to only use the AF point, as there is just way too much non-bird for the camera to get tripped up on if you let it auto-select a focus point.

Bird_on_Snow Photo 1/320th f8 400mm

If you have an oppertunity like this, experiment.  Get as close to the birds as you can.  Try to find the right light….  so you can have a crisp subject.  The hardest parts are finding light that makes their eyes come to life, and their details stand out, and getting close enough.  If you can do these things, you will be happy with the results.

Crow Silhouette

Sometimes you get lucky.  This was definitely one of those weeks for me.  Lately,  when I drive,  I have been throwing my camera on the passenger side seat, with my 50mm lens. Usually, the camera is set up with something  in the 1/250th or faster shutter range, and as large a f-stop as that will allow.  The idea is simple: If I see a grab shot, I might get it.  I try not to pay too much attention to the camera,  and sure as heck am not messing with it if I am around other vehicles,  but with Live view and a quick framing, maybe Ill get lucky.  This week, I got two shots this way… one that my beautiful wife Jennifer and I love,  and one that I just think is neat.  The one we love was actually a terrible shot.  I was sitting at a redlight, and saw some low flying crows overhead.  I grabbed the camera and snapped the above frame.  The exposure was terrible, because the camera was not set up for shooting a backlit bird in the sky. I was way to far away.  When I looked at it on the computer however, I noticed that it was a perfect silhouette, and that it was fairly sharp.  I Cropped about 1/4th of the frame,  dropped the exposure,  played with the levels to make the sky a sexy deep blue,  and did a little sharpening and de-noising.  The result was a beautiful silhouette,  and in fact the only good silhouette shot I have ever taken.  Lucky accident, and even luckier I decided to take a look at the file on my computer. I should have just thrown the file away, but I am glad I didnt, because I love it. The second shot is the Kit Kat truck.  It isn’t well framed, and I didn’t put too much time or thought into it, because I was actually moving and really couldn’t be looking through the viewfinder.  The only thing I could really control was getting closer, to get the framing angle that looked good.  Its not a great picture,  the sky looks like crap,  but its neat because it is literally, a Tanker Truck full of awesome…. and I like it.  I always used to steal the Kit Kat bars and Resses Penut butter cups out of my brothers trick or treat bag, and replace them with Smarties for a reason. As far as editing this one,  I just played with settings to try and make the tuck look shiny, and make the pavement look black.  Nothing I did was having the effect I wanted on the sky,  so I just focused on my subject, the truck of happiness.

Necessary Disclaimer:  Be careful.  You are responsible for your actions, and I am not.  Especially if you read this article and then screw up.  If there were other cars around me besides what you see in the frame, I wouldn’t have been handling my camera.