Not sure where to begin really – this is all kind of surreal, because I really didn’t think that this milestone would see me where things are today with the blog. Needless to say, the blog has succeeded beyond my wildest expectations, so thanks to everyone who’s made that possible. Without further ado, here’s the big news (via YouTube video, so feed readers, stop in and get the news by taking a few minutes out of your day for this exciting video news bulletin!):
For the data hounds, here’s a rundown of some of the stats for a snapshot of what’s that’s happened thus far on the blog:
Posts = 500
Comments = 1107
107 Categries
544 Tags
Total Visitors = 231,000
Single Highest Traffic Day: Thursday, April 10, 2008
Subscribers: 1006
Highest Subscriber Count Ever: 1018 (4 days ago)
That’s a lot of stuff when you think about it. So, for all the thousands of you that have been tuning in regularly, thanks so much for all your kind thoughts, words, and contributions over all this time. Tune in to the YouTube video for the contest news and some other fun stuff! In the meantime, keep on shooting – you know what’s coming up in the next 500 posts! Happy shooting everyone. Have an awesome weekend and we’ll see you back here on Monday for post #501!
Rather than go through another hardware review today, I thought I would share a different kind of hardware with you – the DIY kind! Over the weekend I embarked on a little project on building a device to track stars as they move across the sky (even though it’s really the earth that’s moving and not the sky). Now granted, there are better ways to build star trackers, but many involve electronic motors, are more complex (in my mind anyway), and can get kind of costly (at least from what I’ve read). So, I figured I’d start simple, and go from there. Join me in this adventure in building my first star tracker for under $20!
It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot in doing it, both about other methods, some of the short comings of this approach, but for the cost, figured it’d be a good entry into doing these kinds of things for comparison sake. Check out the main YouTube video that gives a narrative on the process and my finished result:
The reference material I used for building this leaf-style star tracker came from a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology (sounds impressive enough to me!), so figured I should give credit here as well: http://people.rit.edu/andpph/text-star-tracker.html
If you have thoughts, comments, feedback, or suggestions to either improve this one, on how you’ve made your own (or plan on making one), and even if you have shots to share made from DIY star tracker kits, please feel free to et me know via either the comments or email! I will start a photo gallery for all shots shared and plan on updating that monthly with all the photos received, either via links in the comments or via email!
Happy (star) shooting, and we’ll see you back here again tomorrow!
P.S. Don’t forget, we’ve still got the Wacom Bamboo Fun Giveaway going on all this month! Share your shots in the Flickr thread and you’re entered to win this prize worth $100 retail! Thanks go out to the folks at Wacom for contributing this awesome tool for blog readers and podcast listeners!
Heh, cheesy headline, but they all seam together on this week’s episode of Learning Digital Photography! Yup, the podcast is done, and for those that didn’t catch my Twitter tease, this week I had the distinct pleasure of talking with none other than Scott Bourne on the show! If you don’t know who Scott Bourne is, then you’re living in a cave.
Scott is a regular contributor to Mac Break Weekly, This Week in Photography, and owner/operator of PhotoFocus. You can find him there, via his Bourne Media Group online presence and a bazillion other places like Photoshop World, Aperture Nature Photography Workshops, Bosque Del Apache, and much much more. I could link to it all but that would take an entire post of it’s own, so will point you to his main presence at Photofocus and Twitter:
http://www.photofocus.com
http://www.twitter.com/scottbourne
We had a great talk on this week’s show, covering his photo background from Motocross to Wedding work, and of course his Avian work as well. We took a look at a little of the gear side, got some nuggets on branding and the business side, and even had a chance for a couple twitter questions. Great stuff and all packed into a mere 30 minute interview! Thanks again to Scott for taking the time to talk to me on the podcast!
Other content from the show includes a discussion on some of the things to consider on matting and framing (hence mats in the title), and an in-depth look at the finalists from the last LDP contest. There’s also nuggets and links for other contests out on the web as well as what to look for in future LDP contests, so some teaser stuff there too. All in all, a great (but long) show so grab it from your preferred source point, whether with the folks at PLM, or in iTunes!
So, there’s the link love for the show – it was a lof of fun this week, but the weekend is almost upon us. This Saturday it’s another photoshoot with the Meetup Group and then some night photography as I prep for the next article of PhotographyBB Magazine! Make sure you get out and do some shooting too. Have a good weekend everyone and we’ll see you back here on Monday! Happy shooting!
Today the post is going to revolve more around a set of photos I took the other day – you see while en route back to the house, I noticed that the clouds were passing over the mountains and the sun was starting to set. It had the makings for a really nice sunset. Never one to turn away the opportunity to capture a sunset, I hurried home and gathered my gear, and took off to my favorite spot near the house for landscape work.
Well, the clouds and the sun didn’t really cooperate so I gave up on that and starting fiddling around with some HDR kinds of things. I saw a traffic light nearby and there wasn’t much traffic so tried to time some bracketed exposures (my shutter speed was getting near 30 seconds on the top end of the bracket). Some possibilities developed, but nothing too earth shattering, and I was starting to feel a few drops of rain, so I packed up to head back over to the house – about 2 miles away.
As I was coming back to the house, the clouds that evaded me on the mountainous horizon were ominously hanging over the cityline of Denver (another scene I’d been meaning to shoot) and flashes of lightning were coursing through the clouds, with some pretty regular spikes coming down. All of this was about 30 miles away, and heading away from me so i was feeling pretty safe except for the possibility of some raindrops now and then.
So, I found a nook by the open range, set up the camera on my trusty tripod, and tried to recall things I’d read about how to shoot lightning. Apparently some of it stuck, because I came away with this:
Lightning over Denver
So, how did I do this? I kept four key things in mind:
I used my tripod! Stability was key because every single exposure was no less than 15 seconds! When shooting lightning, you want to open the shutter for a longer time to increase your odds of catching it. Because it was flashing so regularly I eventually dropped my shutter to 15 seconds and still managed 6 or 7 really good captures.
Keep the noise Down – I dropped my ISO to 100 for all shots and made sure long exposure noise reduction was turned on in camera. Sure it took twice as long to capture each image, but in the long run it was worth it because there was much less noise to process on the back end.
Don’t touch the camera! I set the camera to bracket exposures and put it on a two-second delay. So, by the time the camera shutter opened I was no longer touching it, and then the second and third shots fired automatically.
I made sure I was in a sweet spot of my lens. Part of this is knowing your gear – I was shooting the 10-22mm (wide angle) from Canon, and know that when it goes below f4 it can get fuzzy. So, I was at f11 for most of my shots. Great depth of field and everything is sharp!
Well, a fifth one was post-processing. After a few rather unpleasant attempts to process as HDR images, I enlisted the aide of friend-of-the-blog Terry Reinert, who you know from our podcast talk a short time ago. Terry is wicked smart (he’s an engineer) and knows the heck out of HDR. I asked him what I was doing wrong (because the clouds were getting blotches scattered through them and generally looking poorly). He gave some insights, what he was finding yielded better results and sent me a low res sample via email. I liked the path he took, but the colors were not quite where I remembered them from Sunday, so dove in again with the new-found knowledge. I tried a few quick variations on his technique, but in the interests of time, just did a short version to post here. Once I get my final edit done (probably this weekend, I will likely be adding the image to my portfolio, so will also post that here as well. For now though, I wanted to share the back story and a quick version of one processed version that I found appealing. I am not crazy about the black across the bottom, but since my time was limited here, I’ll likely be addressing that this weekend when I have more time. For now though, the quick version and a panorama crop looked kinda cool!
Thanks go out to Terry for giving a hand. In our discussion he also mentioned possibly doing a tutorial on blending using the images, so keep your eyes on Terry’s blog (Where Art and Engineering Collide) as I may be a featured artist! (How cool would that be?) ETA: On posting the link to his blog, I see he’s already put his tutorial together – thanks Terry! 🙂
In other blog/photo news, as you all know from yesterday, the OnOne Giveaway concluded with Pete Petersheim being the big winner. The new contest is underway though, with a new thread up at the Learning Digital Photography group on Flickr, so be sure to stop in there and share your images in the new thread (the theme this go around is “Fun” since the price is a Wacom Bamboo Fun!) Good luck to everyone and don’t forget to have some fun!
Happy shooting and we’ll see you back here again tomorrow!
Rules of Composition are all around us, and we are reminded of them all the time. Terms like Rule of Thirds are bandied about by everyone (including yours truly, having blogged about it myself here, here and here). Other terms and compositional “best practices” and rules of thumb include things like “The Golden Mean”, “Sunny 16” and many many more. But one that I have found to be most successful is the one of “filling the frame”. This holds true for many types of photography. For instance, there’s floral photography:
Filling the Frame in Downtown Denver
There’s also portraiture:
Filling the Frame with a Face
Architectural work also can use this concept:
The one that probably does not lend itself too well to the compositional approach of “filling the frame” is landscape work. But, as we all, know, exceptions often prove the rule! And as much as I hate to admit it, and agree with the rules, here’s one that can almost always be used to improve your photography. Here’s three reasons couple reasons why filling the frame works a lot of the time:
It eliminates distractions – everything else around it becomes cropped out of the scene, leaving the viewer with nothing to grab their attention but the subject of the photo. In the first shot, what else can you see besides the flower? The second? The third? There is literally nothing else to look at.
It accentuates lines and points of focus or interest in your pictures. In the first shot – your eyes can’t help but go to the center because that’s where all the lines are pointing. In the second, the girls eyes are a natural point of focus, and then in the third – the flame naturally draws you in as well as the sharp lines of the lamp itself.
Backgrounds become blurred and/or beautiful! Bokeh, or soft blurring of out of focus areas is a natural side effect of getting up close and personal. And if your f-stop is set lower to catch more detail, you are likely in close enough where the entire background is one consistent color like in the latter two shots.
This is, of course, just my 2¢. What are your thoughts on filling the frame? Does the approach work or is it too “in your face”? These are questions that will likely be posed until the end of time, because they are by their very nature, subjective. nevertheless, in sharing our thoughts, we can increase our appreciation of, and become more cognizant of the works of others and grow as artists. So, share your thoughts in the comments!
In the meantime, happy shooting, and we’ll see you back here again tomorrow!
For many photographers, the Mecca of accomplishments is to have your work displayed on a wall – and in many cases that means a wall other than your own home. In other words, gallery displays. There are lots of ways you can go about accomplishing this, and for the record, I have not had my work featured in any galleries to speak of. However, in talking with people who manage galleries, and in hearing nuggets and useful tidbits of information from those who have had work featured, it seems there are commonalities that can be seen no matter where you want to have your work shown.
So, here are 5 tips for getting your work into galleries:
Have a theme to your work – while we all enjoy showing off “Best of” works, that doesn’t really work in galleries, so make sure the work you want to have shown has a theme to it – whether the theme is urban architecture, natural landscapes, gritty portraiture, or fruit baskets, gallery owners will be sold better on displaying your work if there is a flow to it.
Follow the submission guidelines – Galleries get people from all walks of life and submissions all the time. To make their process flow easier, they establish parameteres to make the process easier. If you want to get into a gallery, respect their time by following their guidelines. As a corollary, a quick way to get rejected is to think their guidelines don’t apply to you.
Be consistent – besides the theme of your work, make sure all your images are printed to the same dimensions, matted the same, and framed the same. You want the gallery owner to see your work, not a mish-mash of geometric shapes and colors that will only serve to distract them from your work.
Deliver prints loosely – in the event they don’t want matted work, framed work, or shrink-wrapped work (many don’t), deliver your prints loosely. This allows the reviewer to lay all your images out on a table, move them around (seeing how things might flow best on the walls), and awkward mats or heavy framing can be a detraction.
Let them know who you are – this doesn’t mean just walking in, saying your name and dumping the prints on their hands. It means having an Artist Statement that talks about your background, your creative vision and artistic goals, or even a little about the body of work. Title it how you want, whether it be an “Artist Statement”, “About the Artist”, or even “Fruit Montage” – give the reviewer more information. Include your name, address, phone, email, and even a website if you have more work featured there. How sad it would be if an owner wanted to give you a show, but couldn’t find you!
SO, there’s the quick tips for today on how to get your work featured in galleries. I’ll be back tomorrow with a Friday wrap-up, and some more useful photography information as we head into August! Don’t forget, tomorrow is the last day to enter your best “Numbers” themed photo in the OnOne Software giveaway. Check out the details on the Flickr Thread.
After a couple diversion-driven weeks of postings, hardware reviews are back in full swing, and this week the 18-55mm lens from Canon undergoes analysis. Since the lens has already seen a great deal of feedback and reviews in the community, a discussion of the technical features of the lens is somewhat meaningless. Instead, here are a couple great resources that talk about the quality of the lens in great detail:
So, why talk about the lens if it’s already been covered so well? For two reasons…first because the lens really offers a great range of focus and image quality for its size and cost (it’s light and cheap), and because it really has become more of an historical note as it’s been replaced. It’s new cousin is the 18-55mm IS lens with improved optics and the Image Stabilization feature that has become popular among photographers and aficionados. So, since this is a lens that will probably not be around much longer, other than auction sites like eBay, not only is this a review post, consider it also a eulogy.
This really is a great lens given it’s relatively low cost. It allows you to go fairly wide, yet also zoom in nice and tight for close-ups. Granted it’s not going to zoom very far as it’s not intended to be more than a standard range lens. On a crop sensor camera (it won’t fit on a full-frame due to design) the range adjusts from the design range of 18-55 to a broader 29-88. This actually means this lens is good for anything from architecture to portraiture and landscape subjects. Sure, there are other lenses that will produce better results, primarily because their optics are more refined and the “sweet spot” is wider, but if you want to go light and mobile, the 18-55mm is definitely one to consider if you can still find it. Lucky me, I kept mine from the XT days when I first entered into Digital Photography!
Here are some sample shots from this lens that I took recently for this review/eulogy:
Wide Open
Zomed to 55mm
An Abstract Perspective (at 18mm)
The same abstract from 55mm
A few sunflowers
And if you like the sunflower shot, then take a look at the small gallery I put together here (all with the 18-55)! Sure, I had some lighting help and it was a controlled indoor environment, but it just goes to show that just because it’s dated, doesn’t mean it’s bad. Coming up next week, another product review/eulogy from the Canon arsenal that is no longer made: The Canon 550EX (the light used in the gallery above). In the meantime, don’t forget that this is the last week fr contributing shots to the OnOne Software Plugin Suite 4.5 Giveaway. The Flickr thread is here and links to all the contest details. Good luck, and until tomorrow, happy shooting everyone!
Have you ever had some crazy idea for a photo and then realized it might not be as difficult to pull off as you thought? Something just off the wall, not really something that would ever grow into anything other than “just for fun of it”? No project, no marketing, no commercialization, no selling, no limited prints, nothing like that at all…
In case you couldn’t tell, I had one of those moments a while back, and finally decided to pull the trigger trip the shutter! Here’s the small version of my Martini Memory! There are, of course, a few versions, of it, but this one was probably the one that first jumped off the screen at me.
Martini Memory
It’s certainly not going to win any awards, but sure was fun to put it together and just see how it came out! This is the kind of creativity that makes photography so awesome! So, what about your own zany crazy ideas? Anyone else have any they’d like to share? Feel free to link your own images in the comments. Who knows… this could turn into a contest if there’s enough participation. Wanna win something? Share your ideas! Spread the word – because we all learn best from a community of sharing!
Speaking of sharing, winning, and contests, don’t forget the OnOne Software Plugin Suite 4.5 giveaway. There are officially 7 days left to enter, so if you’ve been laying in wait to get those images in for consideration, now is the time to start posting them. I’ll be collating the 10-12 best ones off the Flickr thread to post into a dedicated gallery here on the blog, then passing things over to the folks at OnOne for their thoughts on a winner. If you want to be considered, time’s a-wasting! Link to the contest thread on Flickr is here: Numbers Contest
Happy Friday and Happy Shooting all – this is the last weekend to get a shot for contributing to the contest, so get out there and good luck to everyone!
Ever have a moment of “oops”? You know the moments, right? We’ve all had them:
That moment when you realized you said the wrong name..
That moment when you realized your ISO was set too high all day…
That moment when you realized you forgot your battery…
That moment when you realized you forgot your memory card…
Yes, these happen all the time – in the military they were referred to as “brain farts”. Your brain stops thinking, or thinks wrong, and it’s just embarrassing! Well, this happened to me on the photo walk last Saturday. Remember the photo walk? It was the one after I wrote a post about making a check list noting what to remember? Well, it happened anyway – I forgot my battery – left it charging in the charger in the kitchen! Well, with roughly 50 photogs around, there were enough Canon shooters, I figured I had a 50-50 shot. So, when our leader asked if there were any questions, I swallowed my pride, shamelessly raised my hand and called out:
“Any Canon 30D, 40D, or 50D shooters that have a spare battery? Mine is in the charger on the kitchen counter at home…”
Fortunately, there was someone with a spare. So, I was able to resurrect the day after all. I did have a back-up point and shoot camera, but it just wouldn’t have been the same for me – I had rented some glass for the day (a 28-135mm IS – review coming soon!), had my macro and wide angle, a monopod and all, so I was very grateful.
Well, today another “oops” moment happened – the blog post scheduled for Thursday, July 30th, not the 23rd! So, for the readers that are wondering if their feeds are broken – nope, it was my brain today. So, what was the point of all this? That we are all human, and thus, not perfect. This concept holds whether it’s a blog, a photo, or anything else you care to apply to the situation. In other words, to put things in photographic terms – you could find fault anywhere if you look hard enough for it. When looking at photos, whether it’s your work or others – don’t forget that a human being took that picture – it is that persons’ creative vision. It’s okay to critique things, but never expect perfection, because sometimes it’s the imperfections that make things so enjoyable!
Happy shooting and we’ll see you back here tomorrow for the regularly scheduled blog posting (which I actually have pushed back a few hours so the feed isn’t double whammy’d)!
We’ve all seen the term used, and the approach should not be a novel one to most of us at this point. Heck, I’ve even talked about it here before to a certain degree. But today, I’d like to take the Rule of Thirds and look at it from two distinct approaches: landscape and portrait photography. The reason is because the rule can be applied in different ways and these two genres illustrate well how the same rule can be applied completely differently.
To start, let’s just review real quick…
The Principle
The Rule of Thirds is a general rule of composition that suggests we divide our image up mentally into horizontal and vertical thirds to try and compose things interestingly. In general, the rule suggests that you can make things more interesting by placing the subject either on a hotspot or on one of the imaginary lines. I’d written on this in the past, so even have a demo grid to illustrate it:
Rule of Thirds Grid
The problem comes in defining what is interesting. Do we place our subject on a hotspot or on one of the lines? It also is a matter of which hotspot or line to place your subject on. Think about it, we can put a subject on the lower third or upper third, but which looks better? One person may look at the picture and say the upper third looks better, while another may say the lower does, and yet another may say that the image calls for breaking the Rule of Thirds and centering the subject! Clearly, there are many different interpretations. Today though, we’re focusing on the two distinct approaches of using the hotspots versus the lines.
The Results
The upshot here is that it seems the hot-spot approach works well with portraiture while the linear approach seems to work well with landscapes. If you look back in your own image libraries, I bet your favorite landscapes have the horizon on one of the horizontal “thirds” lines. If the horizon is on a bottom third, then the emphasis is likely on the sky, while if the horizon is on an upper third, the emphasis is more focused (pardon the pun) on the foreground. Here’s a few examples of landscapes that incorporate the Rule of Thirds to illustrate what I am talking about…
Folly Beach, SCBull Island, SC
Can you see the “thirds” lines? I could do the overlays, but think you can probably get the gist. But now, try to visualize the hot spots in these images. A little trickier isn’t it? I think it’s because hot spots as subject points in landscapes are scarcer. This is not to say they do not exist because they do, and there is sufficient evidence to support that, but overall a landscape image is more about the entire scene, and the best way to convey that scene is by composing to accent the best elements, which are often the lines – whether it’s lines of water rippling, lines of trees, or lines of mountains and such, the best way to position these is with lines rather than hotspots.
Likewise, if you are shooting portraiture, some of the best results I’ve seen have been where the subjects face (and particularly, the eyes) land on a hotspot. Take a look at these examples here:
JoAnneArmani
Can you see the hot spots and where their eyes are? I could do the overlays but again, think you probably get the gist here. Where are the imaginary “thirds” lines though? Not as easy to imagine here either, and for similar reasons. Because it seems as though portraits tend to lend themselves toward what I am calling “hot spot composition”, while landscapes seem to tend toward “thirds line composition”.
Then again, I could be completely off my rocker – so what do you think? Is there merit in the idea? Should I patent this, write my first book and become insanely wealthy? Or, is this a farce? Should I give up trying to come up with new ways of looking at classic approaches to composition? Okay, obviously I am probably somewhere in between these two extremes, not completely off in Bizzaro world, but also not poised to make a mint either! Regardless, I’d really like to hear the reader thoughts on this approach – do you notice certain types of photography lend themselves toward particular rules of composition? If so, which ones go best with which rules? What about the “why”? Why do you think some rules seem to work better for some images and others not at all? Or, do you tend to avoid the rules of composition and make things up as you go along? Chime in with your thoughts in the comments or via email.
Happy Shooting and we’ll see you back here again tomorrow!
