It Snowed A LOT this Year!

Here's a picture out my front window.  I should have put a black shirt on, instead of my white one, before taking this to cut back on the reflections.

1/320 sec, f/5.6, ISO ~100, hand-held, polarized filter, taken Feb 26, 2011.  This is a composite of five photos stitched together with Hugin.

Snow

1/320sec, f/5.6, ISO: 800, 18mm

1/800 sec, f/5.6, ISO: 800, 18mm

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.

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

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

Snowy Forest

1/200s, f/9.1, ISO 200, 18mm (29mm eqv.), polarizing filter

1/100s, f/9.1, ISO 200, 55mm (88mm eqv.), polarizing filter

1/100s, f/8, ISO 200, 18mm (29mm eqv.), polarizing filter

Geese and Cattails

Corn

This almost turned out to be the most expensive photo I've ever taken. On the way into this field I had to walk through some tall weeds and got burdocks stuck all over my clothes. When I picked them off they would stick to my hand so I shook my hand to get rid of them. I didn't even notice that my wedding ring flew off with them into the corn field until my friend Alain picked it up and handed it back to me.

Thanks Alain!

First Snow 2009

It snowed for the first time this season a few days ago. Didn't stay long though.

More Fall

Fall Trees

Fall has Fallen

Fall is Here

(Click to Enlarge)

Sunset

More Ducks

Ducks

HDR Tests

I've been playing with some HDR (High Dynamic Range) techniques. Not really sure how I feel about the outcome, I think they look fake, but I think I'd rather look at them then the originals. There's a battle between "trying to represent reality accurately" and "making something that looks nice". Don't get me wrong, reality looks nice when I'm looking at it, but it's not the same through the camera (no matter how sophisticated/expensive).

My other HDR attempts
The link above will show other post with at least one HDR image, not every image is HDR.

Dynamic Range in photography refers to the ratio between the lightest and darkest amounts of light the camera can see at one time in a scene. It's nowhere close the dynamic range of the human eye. A camera has a hard time seeing details in clouds on a bright day and the shadows under a tree at the same time. One way to get around that problem is to take multiple photos at different exposures and then blend them together on a computer afterward. That's what I did here, using GIMP. But the problem with that is all it really does is darken the light areas and brighten the dark ones so the details can be seen. It looks un-natural because there could be areas in the sky that are darker then areas in shadow, that really shouldn't be.

I've also adjusted the colour saturation and contrast too.

Anyway, what do you think? Where do you lean, would you rather photograph/look at an accurate representation of reality or something that looks nice?


I thought a farmer's field was a strange place for this.

Fundy (Part 3)

One more low and high tide shot.


There was a nice cool breeze most of the time.

Most of the coast line is pretty rough.