Downtown McKinney Photo Walk

When I uploaded and started looking at the photos from today’s photowalk in McKinney, TX with the Dallas Photo Walk MeetUp group, I realized two things: 1) I’m getting a bit better, but not much, and 2) my photos from photowalks all pretty much look the same.

So I need to do something to shake things up. But what? Shoot in full manual instead of Aperture priority? Tried that in the Worldwide PhotoWalk a few months back, and may try it again, but don’t really know what that would help. Pick a focus to stick to, say ‘textures’ or ‘shapes’ or somesuch? This might help, if I went on photowalks more often than once a month or so, but the occasional-ness of the walks means that any lessons I learn from one walk are largely forgotten by the time the next walk rolls around, especially since the rest of my photographic work is done mostly from the safety of the apartment. I want to get better at making pictures, and these walks are good as they get me out of the house and shooting with people, but if I keep going this way, I’ll keep coasting along with this part of my photographic practice.

Enough of that.

I took the Ricoh 35-ZF along with me today, and used the D7000 to calculate exposures. This meant that I spent a lot of time shooting at ISO400 instead of my usual 100, so the shutter speeds on the digital side were insanely high most of the day. On the film side, I was mostly at 1/250th or 1/500th (the max for the Ricoh), and at f/11 or f/16. I tried to underexpose from what the D7000 told me, but 1/500th at f/16 is the fastest and smallest the Ricoh will go, so I don’t really know what to expect from the film side.

I shot roughly half a roll of Fuji PRO 400 H color film, and it’ll be awhile before I get the rest of the roll shot and processed. But it was nice to have something else to play with, if it did start to become a bother to have two cameras to mess with all morning. I’m glad I took it, though, and I look forward to comparing the shots from the 45 year old Ricoh with the shots from a year-old D7000…

All in all, the walk was good times, and about a dozen of us (or maybe 16?) went out to lunch afterwords, which was quite nice.

tl;dr: if I want to grow photographically, I need to do many more of these, and I should probably shoot more film.

365.37 Meh Multifun

So I stumbled across “Photographic Impressionism” early this morning, and spent the bulk of the work day with a few things I read about it running through my head. Naturally, I had to try it out, but not on pretty landscapes or flowers, on something mundane and controllable and within the safety of my apartment.

This shot ended up being something akin to HDR, but all done entirely within the camera.

How? With multiple exposures, of course…

The first 60 or so attempts were all handheld. I liked the blur that was possible, but couldn’t seem to control it very well, so I pulled out the tripod.

The next 20 or so seemed sort of flat.

Then it hit me: don’t just shoot ISO100, 1/160th, f/1.4! Vary the exposures!

Cha-Ching.

The D7000 is limited to three exposures in its multiple exposure mode… I would like to try many many more, several dozens of exposures, but that will have to wait for a different camera. Ended up, 3 exposures were plenty.

I’m not entirely happy with this shot, but it was about the best of the lot, and did everything (almost) that I was trying to do: oversaturate the colors slightly; get multiple areas in focus; capture the orange tungsten and the blue of the overcast afternoon and expose properly for both. Good times, but still kinda Meh.

The first exposure, focused on the tree in the middle background: ISO100, 2 seconds, f/11.

The second exposure, focused on the same spot and also ISO100, 1 second, f/8.

The final exposure, focused on the coffee cup, ISO100, 1/200th sec., f/1.4, with the SB-700 on the camera, aimed down slightly, with its tungsten filter and diffusion dome in place, at 1/4 power.

And *poof!* an in-camera HDR with three exposures and only one photo…

This is something to play around with, for sure, and I have hundreds of ideas running through my head. Time to put some on paper before I forget…

Any thoughts/suggestions/jeers you have will be appreciated!

365.36 His Nobs

Homage JPB

This took a long honking time for a quick after-work shoot. Jeez.

I started out just wanting to play with flash some… then I needed a second light (enter the DIY SoftBox-Type-Thingy from several weeks ago)… then I needed a third light (hello bedside lamp)… then I needed to change the setup, bring in a chair because my back and knees began to ache from stooping and squatting… and then I just gave up and went with this one. Only took 115 shots. (This was number 90-something… I lost count when I removed all the black pictures: damned sleep setting on the flash that I still don’t know how to change!)

Kudos to anyone who knows this game and has played it in the past year.

Nikon D7000, Nikkor 50mm f/1.8G, ISO100, 1/50th, f/4, flash at 1/4 held above the scene and fired through the cereal-box strip-box, beside lamp at camera right, softbox-ish thingy on the left.

365.35 The Birth of Clouds

The clouds have been rather amazing lately, and today I managed to get around to shooting before they all returned to the sky or banded together to blot out the sun. And I’m patting myself on the back a bit, since I actually left the confines of the apartment complex to shoot! I didn’t go far (just outside the gates on the other side, down the alley, and back in on my side), but it’s farther than I’ve ventured out alone with camera in hand in many months. Go Me.

Sigma 30mm f/1.4, ISO100, 1/500th, f/11, and rather heavily processed (for me) in Aperture – pulled back exposure by half a stop, increased black point and brightness, contrast pumped by 10% photo wide and by an extra 75% on the sky parts, Definition increased by 80% photo wide and an additional 75% on the sky parts, Polarized photo-wide at 75%, and Brightness/Saturation/Vibrancy increased by ~20% everywhere. Slightly overcooked, perhaps, but it was needed to draw attention to the cloudbirthing action. Fun stuff, though I usually prefer less obvious manipulation. Oh well.

365.34 Fully Automatic, Fully Adjusted

This began as three jpegs, shot in full auto -2–0–+2 bracketed, merged to HDR in Photoshop CS5.5 and shipped out with some custom slider settings, sent to Aperture, edited with Topaz Labs Adjust 3 and B/W Effects 5, and presented here for your enjoyment.

Apologies, but I had some prior obligations and thus didn’t really have time to shoot the 365 properly today… but I did shoot it, and it did make it to the interwebs, so GoGo.

And no exposure data for this one, as the D7000 and Photoshop and Topaz Labs did all the work. I just pointed the camera and pressed some buttons.

365.33 Abstraktes Bild

And this time I had some fun!

Yesterday, I shot four subjects for 5 hours and ended up just picking a bad picture to share at random.

Today, I reshot one of those subjects with an intent to create an HDR image of an object that really didn’t need one.

This is the interior of one of those small rubber balls that bounce like crazy and that the cats love to stalk, pounce upon, chase, and generally terrorize. I lit it with the usual desk lamp and a led bicycle light.

6 exposures, roughly one stop apart, all with the macro rig, and HDRed with Photoshop 5.5. This is the built-in ‘Photorealistic’ automation.

Nikon 75-150mm f/3.5 E Series, reversed, on 49mm of extensions, ISO100, 1/50th, 1/25th, 1/13th, 1/6th, 1/3rd, and .6 seconds, @f/3.5.

All in all: Good Times.