Photos # 5

Time to move on to #5

Not one of my favs. (or a puppy) but this is what I see every night after I turn out the lights in my house and walk towards my room.

Damn trigger happy return pinky!!!

Canon 10D, 28-135mm @28mm, F11, 54 sec ISO200

Just picked up a used 24-105L and went out for a hike.

Berry Creek Falls, Big Basin CA

Nice shot Chris, I'm going to have to get over there and do some hiking/ shooting there. It's been years since I've been there!

Thanks Rich. Be aware that its a 6hr trip out to the falls and back

I finally dove into the world of RAW, and shot some of a softball game yesterday at school. What a difference in processing after the fact.

Nice work Kevin.

from tonight. Cab 3 off a small drop durring a rail jam.

Fri so cal

Couple more from the day.

BOTH OF THOSE B&W'S ARE PRICELESS!!!!!!!

This one should have been my self-portrait. Too bad it was taken this weekend. Oh well.

Love the jet engine in truck look!

Love locks

haha! Awesome!

Just learning with a new camera, liked this shot. Rare blue sky was pretty sweet that day.

Bakes,

the locks shot is very cool, I'm always looking for subjects like that. I'd love to shoot that with my tilt/shift and have the entire fence in DOF - kind of a different look. Here's a couple of duck shots from this am. The second one is at least a 50% crop.

I like that lock shot too. Nice mallard shots Rich.

I missed the good light on this one so I'll have to go back.

Very nice Walt. I really like the flowers, they really pop and give the picture a nice balance.

Rockets eh? This was shot this summer in northern MN while shooting for Push Process.

ryan, your snowboard shots are so sick. it almost makes me want to head up to the mtns. to get some shots.

So do I man. I am stuck here in MN where I live in the land of the jibbers. That jump was built in a field and the riders were towed in by a winch. Here are a couple of photos. I wish I had a better one of the whole setup but its hard to take a photo of a pile of snow in an empty field.







Actually, I am super jonsin' to get to somewhere warm and wakeboard for a little while. I am pretty close to grabbing a ticket and heading down to Orlando for a weekend. Unfortunately I am swamped with work this month. Maybe the beginning of April.

Ryan, where were you guys at in Northern MN?

WaterDrops:

Nice shots Jakober.

Thanks Walt,

I really your stuff. Playing with a little HDR in that last one? It really makes it stand out!

Thanks. Here are a few more HDR shots from today.

Very Nice!! I think I am going to have to play around with that a bit.

It's a great option when the light sucks like it did today. All of those were from a single raw file except for the first shot of the winery.

Where is that Chris ?

Sinko, we were up in International Falls. Basically Canada. That is the place where Rathy Cab threed that big rock. Actually a lot of Rathy, Adkinson and Wing's parts were shot up there.

Walt, I am really jealous about those HDR's. I still have yet to take one. Its driving me nuts. I was going to tonight but the sun went down as I was getting home from a shoot and wasn't able to grab my still camera in time. Maybe soon.

Jakober, those droplets are awesome! How many lights were you using?

WCW, how many different stops did you use for the last shot?... if you remember, if not...no biggie

Nick,

All the shots were from a single file (One stop) but the winery shot was four different exposures.

sorry. thats what i ment, looks great, i would have guessed more than four. thanks!

Ryan,

Just the flash on the camera.

Thanks for the compliment. I really like the shot you took of the winch handle.

Nick,
They would of looked much better had I taken more exposures. I was shooting over a six foot tall fence so a tripod was out.

I'm working on getting access to this place. http://flickr.com/photos/sigma/1022075635/?addedcomment=1#comment72157604065431276

There's some real cool stuff to shoot there.I'm thinking it will make some great HDR shots.

Nice drops....here is my attempt

Nice! Straiten it out a little bit and you got yourself a keeper!

Are you guys using macros? And are you just shooting in your kitchen sink? I have always wanted to try these. This could be my Saturday night.

Shot this in a white bowl on my counter with the pop up flash (speedlight ran out of batteries and I am fresh out), 17-55 lens, tripod, release, food coloring, and a syringe with water.

This is my first attempt and I really don't know anything about drops but here is what I figured out yesterday over the course of about 40 shots.

Food coloring helps
Fill the bowl as high as you can
Lower angles are better
Most of your shots will suck (unless you have nice triggering equipment)


Things I am going to try
-- Clear bowl with a couple of speedlights shooting up the bottom
-- build a laser/sound trigger for the flash
-- Back off and use a zoom to reduce the angle
-- Different liquids (like hot Jello)

There is a pretty nice gallery on pBase that has some pretty cool ones.

Bakes

Bakes/JJ: Those are awesome! Now all you need is a penthouse in New York to go with it where you can proudly hang the prints!

Jakober,

Do you remember what your shutter speeds were? (the exif isn't showing them) and I'm curious how you got the BG above the bowl blue. Did you photoshop those at all? If you didn't that's very impressive!

Walt, I'm not a big fan of over manipulated images but in the case of your waterfront shots you really made those work. There's a writer of horror novels (can't remember his name at the moment) that uses that kind of look in his illustrations that I immediately thought of when I saw those.

These threads are getting very entertaining as you guys keep getting more and more creative!

Walt, its the south end of Big Sur, Julia Pfeiffer Burns state park, Mcway falls.

Guys,

I don't know if you really want to get started shooting water drops, it's kinda addicting. After you look through 100 plus shots of nothing you will find a few that are OK and then you will want to try again, and again, and again

Ryan,

No macro, I used my 18-180 zoomed all the way in.

Rich,

Don't know why the Exif isn't showing for you, I use OPanda IExif 2 and can right click the picture and see the exif? The shutter was 1/180th as thats the fastest it will sync with the flash. I rely more on the flash burst to stop the motion, rather then the shutter. No photoshop other then to crop and resize. The blue above the bowl is just a piece of white paper standing up at the back rim of the bowl. The blue color of the photos was actually an accident. I started playing around with the white balance settings on the camera and one of them created a blue cast on everything! So I got lucky and didn't need any food coloring.

Like Bakes said, lower angles really help keep the entire drop in focus. Here are some I did a while ago at a higher angle and you can see where the tops of the drops are slightly out of focus do to the shallow DOF.











These were taken in a bowl with a red towel sunk in the bottom of it.

(Message edited by jjakober on March 08, 2008)

Yeah...there's definitely EXIF info in those last few photos.

I like the details that towel provides.

CS3 was showing me everything but shutter speed for some reason. Thanks for letting me know what you used.

A startrail I screwed up a bit. This shot is 60 30 Second exposures stacked together. I screwed up the exposure by not doing a couple of test shots so everything was about 4 stops underexposed. I salvaged the effect in photoshop but it is still pretty rough. One of the whole points of stacking is to avoid blowing out light pollution...unfortunately jacking around with levels as much as I did screwed that up.

Anyways, its too late here to try again...maybe I'll try again tomorrow.

Thats really cool!

Here are some I did playing around with marbles and slow shutter.

The marble shots are great. How did you do that ?

Few from tonight.

Ryan,

That second picture makes me laugh. The look on his face is something along the lines of "why am I doing this?"

Great stuff!

A couple from downtown this morning.

Riding the tube

Walt,

For the marbles I built a ramp that the marbles roll down and then shoot into the air. I used 1/4sec shutter speed to allow time for the marbles to fly across the frame. I used 1-3 lights hitting the marbles to create the trails and either first or second curtain flash to freeze the marbles.

Few from my travels today. I couldn't decide on my favorite one so you get a few different versions. Enjoy!

Oklahoma Airport:

A couple taken at 800mm.

Nice! You should post some pictures of your rig. That lens must be a monster!!!!!

Grand Coulee, Central WA

It's actually not that bad overall, that's a 400 f4 DO IS with Canon 2X TC attached. The combo still weighs a lb less then a 300 f2.8L IS and is about the same length overall. IQ is every bit as good as the other Canon superteles with or without the convertors plus I get AF with both the 1.4 and 2X (which is still f8 because it's an f4 lens).

Domain Chandon #2. HDR and LAB color in photoshop.

This is from a 5 shot bracket and merged with PS HDR. I handheld it and shot the exposures at 10fps and it looks like they aligned up good in spite of that. I couldn't get rid of the blown areas around the sun however without messing up the rest of it. I guess I should convert the RAW files first and fix that before merging.

Walt,

On that shot above what are you getting by using HDR that you wouldn't get from the regular image (I'm assuming the sky?) Can you post the original normal exposure so I can see what the HDR conversion did for that image.

Rich, I thought you had a 400 5.6?

As you can tell by the photo the sun was coming from the side so the hedge was under exposed.The sky would of blown out if I tried to expose the hedge properly.I can get a better overall exposure in some cases.

If you couldn't get rid of your blown high light areas you probably didn't vary your exposures enough.Are you working with curves or levels ?