More Fall Colours

1/50 sec, f/4.6, ISO 400, 18mm, hand-held

1/20 sec, f/5.7, ISO 400, 55mm, hand-held

1/25 sec, f/5.7, ISO 400, 55mm, hand-held

Fall Colours

It's been a while.

1/25 sec, f/5.7, ISO 400, 20mm, hand-held

1/800 sec, f/5.7, ISO 400, 55mm, hand-held

1/30 sec, f/5.7, ISO 400, 35mm, hand-held

Bee

1/125 sec, f/16, 50mm + extension tubes, tripod, lit w/ Sunpak 622 @ 1/64 power hand-held above through wax paper with reflectors on either side


1/125 sec, f/16, 40mm + extension tubes, tripod, lit w/ Sunpak 622 @ 1/64 power hand-held above through wax paper
View Original

Behind the Scenes

Here's our little studio. The white paper was used as reflectors, wax paper was set across the two reflectors to defuse the light and the flash was held, by hand, above the wax paper.

The second photo is a composite of about 20 photos. Since the depth of field is so narrow, I took many photos adjusting the focus between each one and then pasted together all the in-focus parts of each photo. It could be better.

All the orange bits is pollen from the flower.

Car

Alain and I set out to photograph his car. There was a lot of trial and error, but I think they turned out half decent.

1/200 sec, f/9.9, ISO 100, tripod, flash SP622 ~1/4 power hand-held
View Original


30 sec, f/9.1, ISO 100, tripod, flash SP622 ~1/8 power hand-held fired many times from camera left to right
View Original


1/10 sec, f/18.2, ISO 100, hand-held
View Original

Apples

I'm trying to get back into taking more pictures and updating this blog more often. My wife was out and Reuben was in bed a couple days ago so if I was going to do anything it had to be inside. This is what I ended up with. For more info, check out Behind the Scenes

1/125 sec, f/36.4, ISO 100, 35mm (56mm eqv.), hand-held, SunPak 622 @1/128 power ~12cm above, slight right.
View Original


1/125 sec, f/28.1, ISO 100, 55mm (88mm eqv.), hand-held, SunPak 622 @1/128 power ~12cm above, slight right
View Original

1/125 sec, f/36.4, ISO 100, 55mm (88mm eqv.), hand-held, SunPak 622 @1/128 power ~12cm above, slight right
View Original

Behind the Scenes

Here's a shot exposed for the ambient light in the room. The apple was (badly) edited, otherwise that area would have been completely blown-out (totally white). It was about 7:45 in the evening so sunlight was still coming in the windows. The ambient was quite bright, I had to close down my aperture quite a bit (f/28 and 36) to block out the window light. With the flash so close, about 10 - 15 cm, 1/128th power was enough to properly expose the apple at that aperture. The flash was actually in the shot for the first one and needed to be edited out. A spray bottle was used to add the water droplets.

In the first photo, you can see that the table reflects some light back up to the lower part of the apple. For the second photo, I wanted the lower part of the apple to go completely black so I found a blouse (I think that's what it's called) in my wife's closet that's made of a black, fuzzy, light-absorbing material and set the apple on it as you can see in the photo below. This killed the reflected light. In the last photo, the apple was on a white piece of paper.

Bubbles

Blowing bubbles inside makes for a slippery floor.

1/125 sec, f/2.5, ISO 100, 50mm, flash bounced off ceiling, hand-held

1/125 sec, f/2.5, ISO 100, 50mm, flash bounced off ceiling, hand-held

1/125 sec, f/2.5, ISO 100, 50mm, flash bounced off ceiling, hand-held

100 Followers!

Yay! 100 Followers.

Thanks Everyone!!

Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day

Look at that, I took and posted a photo all in the same day. Like I said in the previous post, today is Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day. So here is my photo taken with the pinhole lens I made for my DSLR. Spring is slowly making its way to my part of the world, so I thought that a photo of new leaves on the trees would be appropriate.

10 sec, f/stop - unknown, ISO 100, pinhole lens, tripod

Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day

Today is Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day! So I'm going to try to get out sometime today to and use the pinhole lens I made a while back, this will be the first time since then. I've been going through a dry spell photographically over the last little while, maybe this will get me going again. Hopefully I'll be able to get the photos from today up in a timely manner, my computer has been on the fritz lately. We'll see.

About Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day
Wikipedia Page

Splash!

1/160 sec
f/19
55mm (35mm eqv. 88mm)
ISO 200
lighting: Sunpak 622 Super Pro @ 1/128 power on camera left, reflecting off a white background

1/160 sec
f/14
55mm (35mm eqv. 88mm)
ISO 200
lighting: Sunpak 622 Super Pro @ 1/128 power on camera left, reflecting off a white background

Behind the Scenes

Update:
Actually, the camera in the picture is Alain's 50D with a 50mm f/1.4, but the pictures above were taken with my XSi (450D)

Splash!

1/160 sec
f/16
55mm (35mm eqv. 88mm)
ISO 200
lighting: Sunpak 622 Super Pro @ 1/128 power on camera left, reflecting off a white background

Bath Time

Reuben's graduated to the big tub.









All:
1/160 sec
f/2.8
ISO 200 or 400
50mm (35mm eqv. 81mm)
Sunpak 622 flash reflected off white tub and ceiling

Splash!

1/160 sec
f/16
55mm (35mm eqv. 88mm)
ISO 200
lighting: Sunpak 622 Super Pro @ 1/128 power on camera left, reflecting off a white background

Splash!

Did some more splash photos. I finally got a flash (I'll talk more about it later), which makes things much easier. No longer do I need to worry about having the fastest shutter speed possible, so I can close down the aperture to get a deeper depth of field.

I think this picture is interesting because it's actually two drops colliding in mid air. The first drop makes a splash and then a drop from the splash moves up and hits the next drop coming down. There's many other, much better, examples of this on the web, but it's the first time I've caught it.


1/160 sec
f/16
55mm (35mm eqv. 88mm)
ISO 200
lighting: Sunpak 622 Super Pro @ 1/128 power on camera left, reflecting off a white background

Where Have I Been?

It's been a while since my last post. Things have been a little slow around here lately since I pulled a muscle in my back a week ago and was confined to the couch for about four days. I'm mobile now, but not quite back to normal.

In other news, I'm starting a new job today so it's hard to say how much time I'll have for pictures. The first little while may be stressful, but I'll get something new someday.

I had to go back a ways to find a picture for today. I'm a computer programmer by day. I have a friend who has recently started a website (http://maritimes-jug.ca/) for programmers in my area who are using a programming language called Java. He mentioned to me that he'd like some sort of Java related image to put in the header of the site. It didn't take me long to come up with an idea for an image. Java could also mean coffee, which many programmers seem to run on, although I never picked up the habit. I thought mixing the two would be fitting.

Behind the scenes

Here's the original, unedited photo. I should have took a picture of the whole setup too, but I did not.

1.3 sec
f/8.0
ISO 400
18mm (35mm eqv. 28.8)
ambient lighting

I used a polarizing filter to get as much reflection off the coffee as I could. I wanted to have some bubbles and maybe some steam coming off the coffee, but with an exposure of more then a second, that wasn't possible. I tried using a straw to blow some bubbles, but they would pop during the exposure, moving the remaining bubbles and making ripples that would blur the reflection. I would have needed to add more light, which I didn't have.

For the reflection, I wrote a simple program (all it does is print "Maritimes JUG" on the screen). The different colours are done automatically by the text editor to help programmers read it easier and point out potential errors. Then I took a screenshot by pressing the "Print Screen" button on my keyboard and pasted the screenshot into GIMP and flipped it up-side-down so that it would appear right-side-up in the reflection.

I had two pieces of computer paper in front of the mug to reflect more light back up to the mug to light the side a little more.

As far as editing, it's hard to say. It was a while ago and I didn't write anything down. I know that it was cropped :) Other then that, your guess is as good as mine. Looks to me like the white balance was cooled down a bit to get a whiter keyboard, which also made the light part of the reflection in the coffee more blueish. More work to make the keyboard whiter should have been done. Then a curves adjustment to brighten the highlights quite a bit and darken the shadows just a little to bump up the contrast. Then the blur tool to smoothen out the vertical-ish lines above "String args[]" in the reflection. I'm noticing now that I was a little sloppy and blurred the tail of the "g" in "Jug{". I'm such a slob! Looks like the mouse cursor is just below "println", must have cloned that out. Then a little sharpening with the unsharp mask. And lastly a vignetting type thing to darken the left and right sides a bit to bring the viewer's attention to the reflection. I think that's it.

Reuben's Getting Bigger

I never run out of photo opportunities with Reuben around.

1/100 sec, f/1.8, ISO 1600, 50mm (35mm eqv. 81mm), hand-held, ambient lighting

1/60 sec, f/1.8, ISO 800, 50mm (35mm eqv. 81mm), hand-held, ambient lighting

Urban Spulunking

Found a cave (a.k.a. storm drain) near my house with lots of huge icicles.


1/15 sec, f/5.6, ISO 400, 55mm, hand-held

1/40 sec, f/5.6, ISO 800, 42mm, hand-held

1/10 sec, f/5.6, ISO 400, 25mm, hand-held

1/60 sec, f/5.6, ISO 800, 55mm, hand-held

Kiwange

1/50 and 1/80 sec, f/5.7, ISO 400, 55mm (35mm eqv. 88mm), hand-held, halogen lighting and a little on-camera flash for the orange

This is another joint effort with Alain.

Behind the Scenes

Old Houses Downtown

1/400 sec, f/9.1, ISO:200, 43mm (35mm eqv. 69mm), hand-held

Splash!

1/4000 sec, f/1.8, ISO 800, 50mm (35mm eqv. 81mm), tripod, halogen lighting

Thanks to Alain for the use of his hand :)

Snacks