Similar in theme to last week’s photo. More rust.

I’m actually enjoying simplifying my photos a bit. In this case, rather than taking a photo of the whole boat, I’ve taken a photo of a specific part. Once again, a very wide aperture (well, as wide as I can go on my 200mm lens) to blur the background to remove it as a distraction.

I like the whole old vs. new in this photo as well. The old being the levers, and the new being the pipes. I think the wooden pole makes a good frame for the image too (along with the metal poles).

As for criticisms, composition could have been a little better (I’ve cropped it to get it to this stage), maybe a bit more processing (Lightroom has done a bit of a bad job at the noise reduction, so I can’t bring out the texture of the rust as much as I’d like), the white (sign?) in the background is a distraction, but overall, I think it’s fairly sound.

Funny story with this photoshoot though. I was walking along the Geelong waterfront taking photos and due to it being on sunset, I was using the tripod fairly often (didn’t with the above picture though). As I was taking a photo of one of the bollards that has been painted up (the one painted as a footy player), a hens party walked past. Due to me having my 55-200mm lens on my camera, at full length with the hood on it, my camera, to the layman, looked like a fairly pro camera. So as the hens party walked past, one of the girls (who was dressed like Jasmine from Aladdin) asked me what I was taking a photo of and then proceded to ask which publication I shot for! Ha ha, I look like a pro!

On another note, as I walked along, I wasn’t replacing the lens cap on the camera. Worried about dust/scratches? This has convinced me otherwise (along with the fact that I have a UV filter on my lenses for protection) – http://www.lensrentals.com/news/2008.10.30/front-element-scratches

No write up last week as I wasn’t really a big fan of the photo. A bit of a learning lesson. Funny thing was originally I went to Williamstown to take a panorama but then got a photo of the sunset as a bit of a backup shot. Wasn’t really happy with the panorama at first, so went with the backup. In the mean time, I’ve played around with the panorama a bit, and have actually got it looking quite nice (still needs more work), but I may end up putting it up anyway.

Anyway this week was a bit of a surprise (make sure you view it in full size as the thumbnail really loses a lot of the impact of the image).

I was going to make a black and white photo of the dilapidated chook shed in our backyard. I took a couple of photos but wasn’t really happy with them (I was trying to do it quickly too as it was raining slightly), then I took a nice close up off the door and was really happy with the result. I guess this really proves the point of when going out to take photos, make sure you take lots, and lots from different angles to what you had planned – often you will surprise yourself with which photos end up being the strongest.

I think in this case, the main reason why it works, is that it’s cropping out all of the useless information, and filling the frame will all of the interesting part of the shed.

As for post processing, like normal, first thing was adjusting the levels. After that, I actually tried it in black and white, but saw that it worked much better in colour, so from there, I just started playing. I ended up duplicating the image on a second layer and set that to “overlay” which gave a really high contrast effect that I liked. So the way this photo ended up, I guess you could call it “grunge” and a little “artsy” at the same time.

I did consider cropping the grass and paint out of the bottom of the image, but I think ultimately it added to the photo as a bit of subject contrast (old rusty wood and nails compared with nice fresh green grass).

I may end up playing with this photo a bit more in the future to see what I can come up with.

This week I decided to head to the beach. Was a very nice evening, and wanted to take some photos during “The Golden Hour“. Originally I was going to do a panorama, but when I got down there, another opportunity presented itself.

This is what I came up with (make sure you open this in full size. Thumbnail doesn’t do it justice):-

So, taking this, I shot it at 200mm with the aperture wide open (unfortunately, it’s only at f/5.6 on this lens), I put the ISO up slightly (to 400) so I could keep the speed up high (was trying to aim for 1/1000, but only got 1/640). As I was shooting at such a high speed, vibration reduction was turned off (as it can make your images worse at high speed). White Balance was set to daylight to keep the golden glow. I was shooting in continuous mode capturing JPG’s (rather than RAW which I normally shoot), this was done to keep my frame rate high.

Post processing wise, fairly simple here. Cropped, adjusted the levels, masked out the rider himself and brightened him up (as he was a little dark), masked the sky and darkened it slightly to make the wires show up a bit more.

So, time to critique it. For starters, this is the wrong time of day for sports shots. You don’t really need that golden glow that the hour before sunset gives you. White balance should have been set to “cloudy” as it turned out a bit more orange than it actually was (that said, I don’t mind it too much). I was shooting in aperture priority, whereas I should have been shooting in shutter speed priority to keep it at 1/1000 (and had the camera automatically adjust the ISO). Finally, I should have used my 300mm lens that I have, even though it would have been full manual settings, I would have been able to get a lot more detail (as it is, it’s quite heavily cropped). I had the lens with me, but due to sand/wind, I didn’t really want to change it outside of the car.

Due to this being late in the day, there were only 2 kite boarders out and they were only out for 5-10mins before packing up. Next warm, sunny, windy day, I’ll head back and take some more during the middle of the day with a longer lens (and hopefully get some of a few tricks).

Overall though, I had an awesome time just walking along the beach and snapping off some photos. Can’t wait to get out again (already looking at the forecast)!

As a bonus, I’ve processed one of the other images as well.

Week 2. Bought a new flash during the week (Nikon SB-600) and decided to experiment with bouncing light around. Result is below:-

A fairly simple setup here. The model was set up with A4 paper below and behind it (many sheets) to create a seamless background. As I used multiple sheets of paper, I had to clone out the seams of the paper. From there, due to each page not facing directly the same direction, I had to blur the background to even it out. From there, a mask was created on the background layer to bring the shadows back in.

The bounce was created by pointing the flash upwards, using the camera in portrait orientation and bouncing the light off a polystyrene which was set up out of frame on the left of the image (about 60cm or so away from the flash).

Once in post processing, apart from cloning seams and blurring the background, I removed seams from the model itself, adjusted the levels (to increase contrast) & sharpened. Slightly more work than I’d do on a typical picture, but still quite a small amount of work.

This was a good lesson in shooting models as well. I had to put the f-stop a lot higher than I would have expected. I ended up using f/8, and probably could have gone higher as the finger closest to the camera is out of focus (that said, I think the finger out of focus actually makes the image slightly more dynamic). Other option would have been focus on the finger (or slightly behind it) as depth of field tends to extend further past the focal point than it does closer to the focal point.

Overall, I’m fairly happy with the lighting (which is what I was mainly focusing on here) on the model. Not so much the background (the upper right is brighter than the rest). I could probably fix this by moving the bounce source back further and aiming it a little better (would probably need to set up a tripod for that as I was already using too many hands).

As an incentive to progress in my photography, I’m currently doing a project where I will take at least 1 photo every week of the year, post process and upload it here (may be a bit of delay in uploading during late May when I won’t be in the country – unless I find free/cheap WiFi somewhere). No matter how average the photo is. With any luck, you will see an improvement over the year. The link to the gallery is:- http://sdickinson.com/wordpress/?page_id=46&g2_itemId=498

First photo is pretty average, a lot to improve on from here.

I did a bit of post processing work on it, mainly brightening the plane and darkening the background to bring out the cloud detail a bit more (unfortunately there wasn’t much detail to bring out, but I did like the darker blue sky).

This particular photo was taken on Shutter Priority with a value of 1/1000 to stop any motion that may appear from such a fast moving object. ISO was set to 200 to keep any noise quite low and the aperture was left up to the camera to decide (which is the opposite of how I normally shoot – aperture priority, let the camera work out the shutter speed). It was taken with a very basic 18mm-55mm kit lens.

As for current gear, I’m shooting with a Nikon D5000 with 3 main lenses (and one lens just to play with) – AF-S Nikkor 18mm-55mm f/3.5-5.6G VR, AF-S Nikkor 55mm-200mm f/4-5.6G VR and a AF-S Nikkor 50mm f/1.4G. I also have a really old (late 70’s) Tamron 300mm that works on my camera, but so far I haven’t done anything serious with it (taken a moon photo, but that’s it).