Busy, busy, busy…
Well, been shooting but not much blogging. But I will try to post some results here in on a more regular basis. Expect to see posts on new newborn work with antiques, some new abandoned places photos from German and some landscape shots from the Canadian Rockies. I’ll start with a newborn image created using a nursery scale that I really like.
Oloneo PhotoEngine
Here is the same photo as below, but this time it was processed with the Oloneo PhotoEngine. The PhotoEngine is a relatively new tool for HDR work that has some compelling features/interface advantages over other HDR tools. One of its most touted features is performance and the speed at which it can produce HDR results. Also nice is the ability to preview the images at 100%. The only disadvantage for me of using Oloneo PhotoEngine is that it is only available for Windows. I run my Windows systems under VMware Fusion on my Mac Pro, so switching back and forth between OS X and Windows is not a huge inconvenience. So far my Oloneo PhotoEngine experience has been positive.
Treasures in Taber
I had the privilege to meet and shoot with photographer Pat Kavanagh “The Kav” (http://www.flickr.com/photos/the_kav/) yesterday. He was kind enough to offer to show me around Taber, Alberta and more specifically, some of his favourite locations for photographing old abandoned vehicles. He certainly has found the mother load in terms of old car and trucks. It was a long day for me (up at 3:30am and back home at 9:30pm) but I did find time today to have a quick look through the images I captured. There are lots of them and I’ll get to them in the coming weeks. In the mean time, here are two images that I pulled and processed with my “Grungy” Lightroom preset. These are not HDR images but single images processed only in Lightroom (radical use of Clarity, Vibrance and Recovery) with one push of a button. I have used this preset (to varying degrees) in many of my abandoned urban landscapes. It certainly has a look that seems to be suitable for things old and left behind. Thanks Pat for a great day and don’t worry, I won’t mention the running shoe incident to anyone 
And now for something completely different…
a WEDDING!
I know, I know, call me crazy but I agreed to shoot a wedding and survived. I spent about two weeks planning for every contingency and sweating over all the details. Gear was checked and double checked and to add to the stress, the wedding was about 3000km from my home. If I forgot something, I would just have to make due. Weather for the outside wedding was also a major concern and a rainy day would have dampened (pun intended) all my plans. In the end, the weather was great and the wedding is pretty much just a blur. Many of my pre-planned images never happened. I had to just rely on what I know and instinctively shoot. I have done fashion and glamour work but this was different. Weddings are a “strap in and hold on” photo shoot.
I’m now sorting and categorizing about 2500 photos with a heavy emphasis on separating the very best keeper from the masses. It is a daunting task and very tedious at times. So I just decided to take a break, convert two images I liked to B&W and do a blog post to keep myself sane.
Below are those two images. The Bride has not seen any images yet but I know she will be seeing these soon (she subscribes to my blog)
Another image of the Old Tree
Here is another image of the same old tree that was used in the star trails, but this time photographed across the valley and converted to B&W. This image was taken facing east, where as the star trails shots were photographed from the south (right side of the tree as shown below) facing north (true north, not magnetic).
I tried to line up the solitary tree on the foreground hill to match up with Fisher Peak in the background. Click to see a larger version.
Canon 300 f2.8 at f8 on a Canon 1Ds MIII.
No sleep was lost in the making of this image
Star Trails in East Kootenay
The two images below were part of a small self-assigned project I gave myself while vacationing in the East Kootenay region of BC. I found this interesting tree on a hill top and decided to photograph it in a few different ways; near, far, day and night, etc.
Shooting star trails has some basic requirements that you probably already know. These are things like finding an interesting location away from city lights and being there with a camera, tripod and remote trigger (for long bulb exposures) on a clear cloudless evening. Knowing the location of Polaris in the sky is also important. You may have also heard that you should plan on shooting on a moonless night as well. On this point, I don’t agree. What you must know is when the moon will be up and when it will set and be able to determine if there is sufficient time after moon set to get a few hours of exposures in, before sunrise starts to happen. The reason I think the moon is important is because it is extremely difficult to focus in pitch dark. If you have a foreground object in the scene (like the tree in the images shown) focusing can be tricky. You can’t just slam the lens focus to infinity and expect to get good results. Even though a 17mm lens at f4 will provide a fair amount of DOF, if you want good focus, you are going to have to work at it. For the images below, I did a series of short exposures (3 minutes) using the moon light until I found a lens focus position that gave me both the tree and stars in sharp focus (reviewing each one on the LCD until I found it). Once I had the focus set, I waited for the moon to set (2am in this case) and then did a series of unattended exposures of 10 minutes each for the next couple hours. In post, I used one of the moon lite images (masked) to provide a little more detail to the tree (may be hard to see in the small versions of these images, but it is there).
From a single camera I get a collection of images from the one stationary point that I combine in post to produce the single image with longer star trails. The shorter exposure times (10 minutes) minimize issues with digital noise and avoid one single event (an airplane or other unexpected light source) from ruining the entire evening’s efforts. And since all that time with one camera produces only one finished image, I use two cameras so that I will have at least two images to show for my lack of sleep. If you try two cameras, just make sure that each one is out of the field of view of the other; otherwise your images could be ruined by the lights/LCD display from one camera back showing up in the images captures by the other.
Midway Fun #1
Well the Calgary Stampede has come and gone. I arrived back from the Kootenays just in time to spend one of the final days down at that Stampede grounds. I had just picked up a Canon 50mm f1.2 lens and thought this would be a good chance to take it for a test drive. I have lots of images from that afternoon that I like, but I thought I would start off with this colourful image.
This young fellow had won a large stuff animal but somewhere along the line it had sprung a leak. The styrofoam stuffing was pouring out and leaving a trail down the midway. It was quite funny to see the young kids rushing the see what the white pebble trail was made of.
