Category Archives: photography

Orion over Lake Johnson, Banff

Orion over Johnson Lake, Banff

I arrived in Banff in Alberta, Canada yesterday afternoon to beautiful, clear skies and temps in the 30s (F). Much better than the below-freezing temps and ice storms I left back home.

I took this shot of the constellation of Orion on a moonlit hike on frozen Lake Johnson last evening. I haven’t done a lot of night photography and was surprised by how much difficulty I had focussing (time exposures can mislead — it was much darker out than it appears in the photo). I had to switch to manual focus because it was too dark for the autofocus to lock. Knocking the focus all the way to infinity didn’t result in sharp images, however. I needed to “pull back from the edge” a bit and stop down to use the depth of field to widen my in-focus area. It still seemed hit or miss at times (cold and increasingly numb fingers — and brain — might have also been contributing) but I managed to get a few reasonably sharp images.

Another photographer I was with, Michael DeFreitas, suggested using a fluorescent white balance — something he had learn on shoots in the Antarctic. I have to admit, it did give fairly clean whites and nice rich blues in such dim light. Thanks, Michael. I look forward to getting these back to the big screen in the office to see what detail and color I can pull out of them.

Life is a blur

Warming up the thoroughbreds

I think I’ve shown other shots from this series on my previous blog but I don’t think I’ve shown this one in particular. It’s from last Spring in Lexington, Kentucky. The jockeys were giving the thoroughbreds their morning warm ups at Keeneland. I was looking for a blurry, almost abstract image and experimented with several shutter speeds to get different amounts of blur. This one was 1/5 of a second at f/14. With speeds that slow I was only getting two or three shots on each pass so it was a bit hit-or-miss.

I’m posting this photo today because – 1. I didn’t want a week to go by without posting (bad me!), and 2. this is kind of how my life feels this week. It’s all a blur. As I’ve mentioned, I’ll be leaving for the Canadian Rockies at the end of the week and I have a lot to get done before I can head to the airport. Usually I use weekends as my compression valve to get things done that I know I won’t have time for during the week but this was a busy weekend as well.

Saturday we attended PodCampMidWest in Kansas City. We met lots of great folks (hey everyone!) and learned a lot about the podcasting industry. This will make more sense to you as the year wears on but consider it a clue to some of the exciting new projects that I hinted are in the works for 2008. More on that later.

Sunday was my chance to hit the office and make some progress but a freakish rain/thunder/snow storm hit and as I was driving downtown around 8:00 in the morning the ice and slush was terrible. I was driving on a straight section of road, not accelerating, not braking, and the car decided to suddenly go into a spin (Mom, if you’re reading this, I’m okay). Time went into slow motion as a brick retaining wall was coming closer and closer but, luckily, no traffic. Finally, my tires got enough grip that I could stop but I was now facing the wrong direction. Seemed like a sign that I should head back home… so I did. Nothing got done at the office that morning but I was able to make it in around noon and crank out a few projects.

Today’s been a blur, too, and looking ahead at the calendar it looks like I’ll need to be at full-power for the rest of the week. Maybe I can sleep on the plane.

So, I’ll try to post again soon and definitely — technology willing — several times from the road. Wish me luck!

Nikkor 24mm tilt-shift lens

Nikkor 24mm PC lensNikon has announced new products including a D60 DSLR as a follow-up to the popular D40X. Interesting to a smaller segment of the population is the addition of a 24mm Perspective Control lens. Canon has had one of these for some time while Nikon only offered an 85mm PC lens.

Perspective control, or tilt-shift, lenses have movements that allow you to correct for perspective distortion (Wikipedia has more info). For instance, when shooting architecture from a low angle, you can “straighten” the building so that it doesn’t appear to lean back. Happily, that particular function is now also available in Photoshop. I use the “distort” function to do this but there is also a “perspective” option.

An additional advantage of tilt-shift lenses is their ability to distort the plane of focus. By tilting the front element you can angle the plane that is in focus to artificially create deeper (or more shallow) depth of field. Landscape photographers have been doing this with bellows movements on large format cameras for decades. And then there is the ability to use this effect to take shots that look like tiny models.

Whether any of these uses allows you to justify the rather steep price is up to you but at least those of us on the Nikon system now have a wide-angle, tilt-shift option.

Coastline

Nova Scotia

Today I’m posting a photo that’s been a favorite of mine for quite a while. For me, “favorite” shots are not the shots that I think are my “best” but sometimes they are just photos that put me back in a place I love. This is one of those. I took it a few years ago near Yarmouth, Nova Scotia.

I don’t typically do a lot of post-processing on my photos. For the most part I want the image to look as much like the scene that I saw as possible. Occasionally, however, I like for a photo to “feel” more like the actual scene than it may have looked in person. You follow me?

In this case, it was a dreary, grey, foggy day (my favorite!). The photo, as recorded, seemed to hold very little color information. It felt dead. When I opened it up in Adobe Camera Raw I decided to push the saturation a bit to see what happened. I was amazed to see all kinds of color coming out of the image. With just a little tweak to the white balance and contrast, I had an image very close to what you see here. I think the only other thing I did was to add a heavier gradation to the sky to hold the image in a bit.

What I ended up with is a photo that looks more like I remember that place feeling than the straight shot did. Did the scene look exactly like this? No. But there is a kind of sadness to parts of Nova Scotia. Especially if you know some of the history. It feels to me like an echo of the people who suffered there in the past. Probably all in my mind but there it is. And this photo seems to convey a little of that feeling – at least for me. Whether it’s one of your favorites I guess depends on what you bring to it.

Twas the night before Macworld

Macworld ExpoTomorrow is one of my favorite days of the year: the Macworld keynote. The end of all the speculation on the rumor sites about what Steve Jobs will unleash next. Last year the iPhone. This year? Will it be the MacBook Air? We’ll soon find out.

Until then, I have this news from the BBC and other sources that Egypt wants to copyright its antiquities including the pyramids and the sphinx. The BBC reports:

Egypt’s MPs are expected to pass a law requiring royalties be paid whenever copies are made of museum pieces or ancient monuments such as the pyramids.

Most of the focus seems to be on three dimensional replicas at the moment but will photographic images also require permission and royalties? According to The Guardian, “the law would not prevent artists from drawing images of the monuments or historic sites, as long as the images were not exact copies.” One could assume that a photograph would be considered an exact copy. Hopefully more details will be available soon.

Now I’d better get downstairs to put milk and cookies out for Steve Jobs so that he’ll put something good in my stocking tomorrow. Merry Macworld, everyone!