Project 365 - Day 14 - Covette

I had an idea for today's shot, but it didn't pan out.  I'm not ready to give up on it just yet, it needs some tweaking.  But then I just started fooling around with lighting from below.  This is a crystal corvette that I got as a gift when I was 18 or 19 years old.  I lit it from below with two full green gels on my speedlight.  I tried different colours, but this worked best for this setup.  I will be trying other things with these gels, but for now this is what I have.

Here's the shot.

The only retouching was to bring the exposure down a hair and clone out some reflections from the gels right under the passenger side door.

Here's my setup for those who are wondering how I did this ...

24-70 lens, f16 at 1/30.  ISO400.  Tripod braced on the coffee table and I had the lens as close to the car as possible.  You can see my gels on the table at the bottom of the pic.  They are held on by velcro to my SB600 speedlight.

Project 365 - Day 13 - Brook Valley Park

On our way home from Niagara Falls this weekend we passed by one of our local parks.  There is a system of trails that runs through the woods around our house, and every once in a while the trail opens up into greenspace.  There is also a brook or creek that runs through this area.

Apparently early this morning there was a significant rainstorm in the area.  This, coupled with the recent snow melt, created a bit of flooding in the area.

So what's a guy to do?  Grab his camera and tripod of course!  I put on my hiking boots and layered on the clothing and off I went.  It was a good walk, and I stopped a lot to check out the scenery and snap some shots.  I got covered in mud and burrs and got my camera a little dirty.  My tripod has mud splashes on it as well.  It was a good day ... :-)

You can see all the shots on my facebook account here

My favourite shot is the one I am sharing today. The rain has soaked the flat areas around the creek, and saturated the earth to the point that there is ponding.  But a pond is just a big mirror, right? Here's the shot:

This area is supposed to be just flat parkland, where you could sit and picnic.  The actual creek is off to the right...And this was late in the day, so you can imagine how much water fell this am.

Project 365 - Day 12 - Canadian Vegas Baby!!

It's time for the annual pilgrimmage to Niagara Falls to celebrate my birthday. We go to Copacabana and eat our fill of meat and grilled pineapple, and then we head back to the hotel for some drinks and board games (catchphrase anyone?)


In our hotel this year, we have a fireplace. It's one of those electric fireplace things, where the bulb shines through a pattern that looks like fire.


So, what better place for a long exposure... :-)


Here's the shot:

Okay, shot done for today. Time to party!!

Project 365 - Day 11 - Happy Birthday to me! (this time it's real)

So this is a little late, but I did start the picture before midnight.  Got it finished just after mid and posted to the folder on facebook at 12:12 EST.  Well, it's still Friday the 11th on the left coast ... :-)

This pic was inspired by, well, my birthday.  I turned 42 today.  It was a great day, and I totally lost track of time until my wife reminded me about this little project.  So I took one of my birthday cupcakes and stuck a candle in it, grabbed my D300S and the 24-70 lens and snapped about 20 shots with a lit candle in various light.

This shot was taken with halogen lights overhead behind the cupcake, and CFL bulbs overhead in front and behind.  There was no flash.  White balance was set to auto (heaven forbid) due to the mix of lights.  The camera did a very good job, I just set the balance a little cooler as it warmed it up too much.

ISO 200, 24-70 lens at 56mm, f5.6 and 1/200 shutter speed.  Here's my shot...

 

FYI.  For the more technical, I only had to drop the temp by 290 deg.  Camera did pretty well.

Project 365 - Day 10 - Colours again

All I have to say is I am not looking forward to my water bill this month .... :-)

This started as a simple experiment.  I had seen something like this done before, and the basic technique was described.  There were no setup pictures.  I made some changes which turned out to be problematic.

First of all, this is done with a very deep vessel.  It is a vase from one of the many flower arrangements that my wife has received over the years (some even from me! :-).  The shot I saw was done with a smaller vessle, which was about 2 inches across.  Mine is about 9 inches across, which means I had to close down pretty far - to f22 - to get focus across all the colour.

Initially I had the light under the vase, but that just highlighted the flaws in the glass, as well as any dirt spec no matter how small.  So I moved my white background away from the vase, and hit it with the speedlight to create a white background.  This worked.  Finally something was going my way.

Then came the drops.  Time and time again I tried to get something that I liked.  It wasn't working to my expectations, and I tried various setups.  I had to put the camera on a tripod to maintain a constant shooting angle, and I had to keep the camera perpendicular to the front of the vase.  I put tape just above the point at which the lens would pick up the drops.  So the pattern was, drop in food colouring, wait, take a couple of shots, drop more food colouring in, swear, empty vase, fill vase with clean water, place marker in vase to readjust focus, drop in food colouring ... etc.  I probably did this about 10 times.

But I got it.  I finally got two shots worthwhile that are sharp.  I stopped, ran downstairs with my media card in hand and fired up lightroom.  Not much adjustment here, just some colour enhancement on the magenta scale to bring out the purples.  I like that this shows the base of the vase as well.

Here's the shot:

ISO200, f22, 1/2000 using my 60mm again.  Oh, and by the way.  I used the pocketwizards that I recently picked up at B&H Photo in New York.  My pop up flash that I use to command my SB600s was reflecting in the glass and getting caught in my shots.

Here's the setup:

Project 365 - Day 9 - 8675309yine

Macro shot again today.  Did I mention I love this lens?  Started by trying to get a good shot in harsh light of my drill.  I need more lights.  :-)  Ended up picking up a phone call and I noticed the pattern of the buttons on the cordless.  Took this shot, and converted to black and white and bumped up the contrast.

I tried a shot on my blackberry, but that keyboard is filthy - and the macro just exasperates this.  So needless to say, I didn't choose this shot.

Single speedlight aimed at the phone.  No tricks.  Here's the shot...

Project 365 - Day 8 - Colours

I was reading a magazine I had bought about a year ago and found inspiration for today's shot.  This one is pretty cool.  My first couple of attempts are pretty good, but I feel that I can nail down the process a little better.  Finding the correct setup was the most difficult part, but once I got that going it wasn't bad at all.

The shot is oil on water, shot through a glass dish that has a colour splash underneath.  I aimed a speedlight at the colour under the dish and blocked the flash so it wouldn't spread up to the bottom of the dish (you can see this in the setup pic below).   I had to manually focus on the surface of the water - my camera's auto focus wanted something there to focus on and I had not added the oil yet.  So I floated my trusty tea bag package on the water and focused on that.

After I added the oil, I played with moving the droplets around using a spoon.  Oil is very hard to control on the surface of the water, but I got along pretty well trying to guide it.  If I went too close, the oil drop would join with an adjacent one and just make that one bigger.  Turns out that it's not as visually pleasing.

Also, there is text stamped onto the bottom of the dish, so I had to shoot around that.  Here's the shot.

And here's the setup.  Paint cans hold the dish above the colour print.  My tripod allows the legs to go out horizontal, so I have one leg braced on the cupboard.   The speedlight is under that piece of white paper to the right of the setup aimed directly at the colour.  It's set to -1 stop and fires remotely using my camera as the master.