Saturday Morning Shooting

It has been forever since I went out JUST to take pictures. I left the house at 6:15 this morning with my gear bag and found out a few things:

1. 28 degrees Fahrenheit might be warmer than most Saturdays have been recently but it's still damn cold.
2. My shooting is way out of practice
3. I really need to practice shooting with my zoom lenses again.
4. In general, I really have to watch my shutter speed and focal length and use my tripod more. Using the 50mm at home under lights has gotten me too confident in handheld shots when I got back outside using a zoom lens.
   
5. I still love photography and need to get back to it outside of the kitchen.

Water Hazard
Yellow golf ball frozen in the shore of Lake Loudon. I like the shot but should have used the 50mm/1.8f lens.

Martian Landscape
Actually is the exposed and frozen clay shoreline.

I loved the color in this shot, the sun was just peaking over my shoulder. I HATE the focus. I had been shooting manual focus before this shot and wonder if I thought I had switched back to auto. I don't know but this could have been a great shot.


High and Dry
I like the stratified layers of color in this shot, but it's a bit washed out in the lightest layer.



Lost Summer

This stump of a post embedded in concrete caught my eye because of how the water erosion has etched the natural rings of the wood out. I should have used the tripod more to get cleaner shots.

Dang, I have long legs at 7 in the morning!

The ONLY shot I took all morning that I really liked. At least it's the only one that didn't make me think I should have done something differently.
As disappointed as I was in the pictures, I feel like I learned a lot, or more to the point, "re-learned" a great deal.

The Afterglow

I have been feeling so unimaginative lately. But there is one scene that has caught my eye, night after night. I kept thinking, I should try to take a shot of that one day.

The scene? Just one of those ordinary everyday kind of things, the afterglow of the compact fluorescent light bulbs when I turn off the bathroom lights each night.

I played around with the settings and ending up catching it best with about a 20" shutter speed. I'm sure the neighbors where wondering what in the hell I was doing, turning the lights off and on for about 15 minutes straight. Then again, what the hell where THEY doing looking at/in my bathroom window? Perverts, I should call the cops on them.

After that, I was having so much fun, I took a shot of this glow too.....

A space heater in the basement.

Sometimes I look for inspiration outwardly in so many other places, people, and things when all I have to do is look around me.

Stay warm.

Trip The Light Fantastic

My back deck was bathed in gentle shadows late this afternoon when I found a firehose of light being splashed on one spot.

One of my hobbies other than photography is cooking, but especially BBQ (See the little green guy over there to the right in my side bar? That's my food blog.) For 25 hours straight this rainy weekend I was smoking chicken and pork so the deck was a wreck! I was cleaning it up, taking down my EZ-Up cover when the brilliant beam of sunlight reflected off my neighbor's window like the ending scene from Raiders of The Lost Ark.

I chased it as it moved from my pile of thin sliced hickory.....

To the batch of bok choy Alexis is growing....

Then I went out front and chased Trevor around the maple tree....

He's my favorite model....

But I have a technical question about lighting for all you photographers out there. Here are two action shots I tried to take of Trev the past two afternoons.

Yesterday with an external flash (SB-600) to light up the shadows on the front side of Trevor. I could have started to work on the exposure but since I'm firing a D-60 with a maximum shutter sync speed of 1/200th of a second I won't be able to stop the blur while using a flash.

So today I tried just using no flash and a shutter speed of 1/320th. The blur is better but the lighting is not good. I need a light source from the front.

So what do you think? Is it just an issue of my camera being too slow of a sync speed? Or is there something else I could try?

Late Night Street Lights

This was another first for me as a developing photographer (ha ha, I said "developing".....oh, I kill myself). I've never really shot much at night when I used Auto mode because it always involved flash photography. The pictures were okay, not overexposed (sometimes) but they were just snapshots. Now I get to try my hand at some long exposures, something a little more artistic.

It was a quarter til midnight when Trevor (9 y/0) and I left the house, bundled up to face the biting cold night air. The frozen snow crunched like grinding rocks as we walked down the street. A light fog had moved in so I was hoping to get a few moody or eerie night shots.

As always, click the picture for a better view.

This was a shot of my neighbors house. I thought the back lighting of the craggy old tree in the mist was eerie enough. [f36, 30 seconds, 55mm, 0 ev comp, 400 iso]

I intended this to be a throw away shot because I knew Trevor couldn't stand perfectly still for a 30 second exposure but in the end I liked how it turned out, blurry face and all. I changed it to black and white. I thought it had an Oliver Twist-ish kind of feel to it. [f36, 30 seconds, 55mm, +2 ev comp, 400 iso]

Yeah, it's just a floodlight in a yard, but I liked the starburst effect from the light and the bright white light on the trees. [f36, 30 seconds, 55mm, +2 ev comp, 400 iso]

Another back lit tree....one trick pony, huh? [f32, 10 seconds, 200mm, +2 ev comp, 400 iso]

I never really quite got the shot I was looking for here. I was trying to capture the feel of gas lamps on a foggy night. [f36, 30 seconds, 55mm, +1 ev comp, 400 iso]

Another throw away shot but Trevor liked it. I was trying to take another shot in the middle of the road (it was about 12:15 at this point) when a car came into the neighborhood during a 30 second exposure so I had to move the tripod during it. I mean.....these are orbs....ghost orbs at a cemetery. Wanna buy proof of ghosts? It's yours for the bargain basement price of $15,000.

I liked the rays of light coming off of the left corner light (you have to click on it to really see them). [f22, 30 seconds, 55mm, +2 ev comp, 400 iso]
So nothing really spectacular but it that is why its called practice. I wouldn't have even TRIED these shots 3 weeks ago before I started taking the Digital Photography - Fundamentals I course at UT. I am thoroughly enjoying this and can't believe how much control I am getting over this picture takin' box I've got!

1.31.2009 Frozen Head State Park

(Click on pictures to enlarge for detail)

It was a glorious winter day in East Tennessee today with brilliant blue skies and unseasonably warm temps in the upper 40s. There was no way we were spending the day inside, so my wife, my 9 y/o son and I headed off for a drive with no idea of where we were going. We took a circuitous route of country back roads through six counties and ended up somewhere we'd never been before.

You know you are in for something special when your navigation system literally has you in the "middle of nowhere". Don't you think they should be more colorful in situations like this and just say "There be monsters here" like they did for unknown areas in the old sea charts?
Old railroad bridge in Oak Ridge (A secret city built in the 1940's to make the uranium-235 used in nuclear weapons). As with all photos I am taking while I'm in this class, none of these have been photoshopped except for resizing and the third bridge picture was cropped just to make it even on both sides.We ended up in Frozen Head State Park. Fortunately I had a pack mule to carry my camera gear bag on the hike to DeBord Falls.I felt so alive smelling the forest and hearing the roar of the falls, as we approached. When I first looked down into the gulch and saw my first glimpse, I KNEW this was going to be something special.
I took advantage of this trip to practice the shutter speed/aperture skills I learned in class this week. Self portrait using the 10 second timer.North American Tail-less Monkey in a tree. I should have used a shallower depth of field on this one but I was so caught up in the moment.I still have SO much to learn, but looking at these when I got home, I can say I am no longer a guy that takes pictures....I'm evolving into a photographer.

1.29.2009 Shooting Assignment #1

You might notice I am not including materials from class or the actual assignments here. That is because all of that information is Tom's proprietary teaching material. He's worked hard to develop his lesson plans, examples, and handouts and I am going to respect his intellectual property.

I will tell about the general info and pass on a few tips he might give out. For example, he gives a good general rule of thumb for when you need to use a tripod. If you are shooting at a shutter speed that is less than the inverse of your focal length, use a tripod. Well, yes, that involves math but it's not hard. If I'm using my 18-55 mm lens at 55mm, then the inverse would be 1/55*. So if I use a shutter speed SLOWER than around 1/60th of a second, I should use a tripod.

*Technically speaking, Nikons have a crop factor of 1.5 so the focal length equivalent would actually be ~ 82.5mm. But that's another discussion!

The assignment generally had us practice manipulation of exposure, speed, and depth of field. Again, the focus here is on mechanics of the camera and nothing to do with composure or anything artsy like that yet. So these are boring pics.

Exposure bracketing:
Shutter speed control, notice the pendulum.Depth of field. Notice the potted plant in the far corner of the room in both pictures.