Do-Over

Chase Jarvis says that the best camera is the one you have with you. He has a point, in that no other camera can capture what you see in the moment you see it. Sometimes, though, the camera you have with you just isn’t capable enough to do what you need, and you have to use something else.

When I arrived at the bus stop yesterday afternoon after work, I was greeted by this moment of Zen. I tried to use my phone’s camera to get a shot, but could not; there was no way to generate enough contrast in the graffiti, and my phone focused on the building behind the bus shelter. I knew I had to come back before it was cleaned off, and my wife was kind enough to hold dinner while I did so. (Have I mentioned that I married the most wonderful woman in the world?)

On the drive back I realized that the only way to generate enough contrast would be to backlight the graffiti with a strobe. Setting up was easy; all I had to do then was wait for a bus to come by, and get my picture.

Heed the wisdom of Joe McNally: “Carry a camera. As famed photog Jay Maisel says, it’s hard to take pictures without one.” At the same time, carry a camera you know how to use well and can control to achieve your vision.

Heavenly HDR

If you are feeling like Cadmus after sowing the dragon’s teeth, ask a group of photographers: “So, how do you like HDR?” Few techniques are more contentious than tone mapping, which is the correct name for what most people call “HDR,” as you throw away most of the dynamic range in the final product. Like many photographers, I was bitten by the tone-mapping bug once upon a time and used it when I did not need to, but on one occasion it helped me achieve my vision with ease.

These are windows in the choir loft at Immaculate Conception Catholic Church in Bongard, IL. My wife used to be the organist at Immaculate Conception, and for four years I had the pleasure of contemplating these windows every Sunday morning. The medallions in the center of each window are painted, and do not transmit as much light as the rest, so I decided to use tone mapping to even out the difference. In fact, I overdid it, using 20+ exposures at 1/3 stop intervals, but when I was done all I had to do was tweak saturation to get the images I wanted.

I dislike cartoonish, overdone tone mapping, but I will not despise the technique itself; for some jobs it’s the right tool.

Seizing the Sunset

Haven’t had much time for non-family photography lately. I usually slow down, photographically speaking, in the winter; I don’t want to lug my gear out in the cold, don’t want to deal with proper condensation prevention, don’t want to fumble with my gloves, etc. Perhaps the inertia needs a little shaking-up, so today I present an example of what happens when you resist the urge to let a beautiful scene pass by.

To quote Galen Rowell via Thom Hogan:

You only get one sunrise and one sunset a day and you only get so many days on the planet. A good photographer does the math and doesn’t waste either.

I took this picture while in attendance at the fall festival at the church where my wife works. I had brought my gear along, anticipating opportunity, but it would have been horribly rude to spend the entire dinner hour sitting out by the tracks waiting for the best shot to come along. I had made up my mind to ignore the world outside when I looked through the window and saw that the sunset was something special. My wife graciously gave me a brief furlough, and I returned with this.

Straining to get the shot can spoil your ability to sit back and enjoy a beautiful sunset, but this time it didn’t, and I’m glad of it.

Frosty Fun

It finally snowed (and stuck around) here, and my son John wanted to build a snowman. So we did.

John was not in a mood to pose; I grabbed this as fast as I could before he ran away. Mostly available light, although I threw in a speedlight + umbrella on the right to fill the shadows. I chose my Nikon D70 for its higher flash sync speed of 1/500 second, which is great for controlling ambient outdoors while allowing enough aperture to use the speedlight on 1/4 or 1/8 power. 1/500 is not a hard limit, though; a little electrical tape in the right places lets you can sync up to the camera’s highest shutter speed, although at 1/2000 and higher you can lose some of the flash pulse.

Curia

Retroblogged from my LiveJournal post for 25 May 2011.

The great photographer Ansel Adams is one of my heroes/inspirations/teachers, as he has been (and no doubt will continue to be) to many others. I often find myself taking pictures with the intention of making monochrome versions of them, adapting for digital the tools and techniques Ansel presents in The Negative. Thus it was that I found myself in downtown Urbana with a good view of the courthouse, and realized that the situation was amenable to such treatment.

The early afternoon light here is harsh but tempered a bit by haze. The courthouse is a terra-cotta color, so if we emphasize the red channel, we can both tame the shadows a bit and separate the courthouse from the sky; the equivalent operation on film would be using a red filter with a panchromatic emulsion. Ansel used this effect more dramatically in his famous 1927 photograph Monolith, The Face of Half Dome. Emphasizing the red channel had the undesirable side effect of blanking the traffic lights; since the lights were green for E-W traffic on Main Street, I made a second version with green emphasized, used layers in the GIMP and masked in the bottom traffic light in the three fixtures for eastbound traffic.

This is not a literal rendering of the relative values of the scene; it is an interpretation of them reflecting what the scene made me feel at the time.

The Last of Christmas

Holy Cross Catholic Church in Champaign is my parish, and I’m right proud of it. We have a strong and welcoming community with a gorgeous church and a talented organist, all guided by one of the Diocese of Peoria’s finest priests. We like to decorate big for Christmas, and things just get bigger when the Magi arrive.

Sadly, by the time I was able to take these pictures, the top half of the left-hand tree was no longer lit. I was not about to muck with the tree, so I turned to The GIMP when I got back to my workstation:

1. Select the areas of interest in the right-hand tree and columns.
2. Copy it and flip it horizontally.
3. Paste as a new layer.
4. Use the perspective transformation to make the corresponding geometry match in each layer.
5. Smooth the outlines and transitions with a layer mask.

I’m proud of what I did, anyway.

This is my favorite of the images I took. When you place your creche under the church’s main crucifix, you’re almost hitting the congregation over the head with the link between Christmas and Good Friday; with this combination of lamb, poinsettias, and tree, I attempt the same connection but in a much more subtle fashion.

I find devotional photography a stimulating challenge, because with it I can pray and make images at the same time. I didn’t do as much of it last year as I would have liked; God willing, this year will be more fruitful.

Quiet Moment

Nothing complicated today; just a peaceful little scene from a nice Friday lunch I got to spend with my family at the park.

Nuking Breakfast

I have previously blogged about food photography when the photographer is at the mercy of the available light. The same principles apply when you control the light sources: high soft backlight with fill in the opposite direction makes food look good. There are more adventurous ways to light comestibles; however, when you need something to fall back on, you can’t go wrong with the basic method.

My father has good friends in Germany who sent us a set of Meissen coffee cups as a wedding gift. Four years later, we finally drank some coffee out of them; such an occasion ought not go by without some kind of memento. A small TV tray covered with the nearest available tablecloth, umbrella back left, and umbrella front right were obvious and easy, while composition of the still life and choice of lens were less immediately obvious. I knew I wanted perspective compressed across the frame, so I grabbed my longest lens and set my tripod accordingly. With the frame defined, I attempted three or four arrangements of food, china, and silverware. This is the best arrangement, although I kicked myself later for not tucking the fork in a little closer to the plate. That notwithstanding, I’m proud of this image; it’s very close to my original mental conception.

Cooking Up Light

I enjoy cooking. It’s relaxing, rewarding when you get it right, and there are unique and enjoyable opportunities for photography (more about that later). John wanted to be able to cook just like Daddy, so we got a play kitchen last Christmas; unfortunately, we chose it more for price than durability. After only a year it was quite beat-up, so when my aunts graciously provided some money for Christmas presents, a better play kitchen was an obvious choice. My aunts want pictures, of course, which gives me a chance to have fun with light.

I was going to be working in close in the playroom, which dictated a wide-angle lens; in this case, my D90’s kit lens. I was all set just to use a single umbrella; fortunately, I realized that would be utterly boring and stopped to think about the existing light in the room. The playroom has two recessed fixtures in the ceiling for PAR30L flood lights. Putting a bare flash in roughly the same position as one of the lights would yield the key, while a big soft source on-axis, or nearly so, would allow me to control the shadows to taste.

I set up my lights, invited my model in, and set to work. For most of the session I let him play as he wanted; this shot was obtained by half-pressing the shutter release, asking him to face the camera, and grabbing a good frame as fast as possible.

Back to the Future

“90% of everything is crap.” When I consider my photographic output, I think the proverb is generous; 99% of the photographs I’ve taken are crap. All photographers take many more pictures than they keep, and even fewer of those get published. On his first assignment for National Geographic, Joe McNally shot about 1200 rolls of film (or 40,000+ exposures), only to edit down to 80 frames for publication. That’s an awful lot of rejects, and it gives me pause when I consider the amount of old cruft and failed experiments I’m keeping in my file. I’d free up a lot of bits if I just deleted it all; on the other hand, I’d miss opportunities to use new skills when I acquire them.

This picture was taken in 2009, when I didn’t know much about combining multiple exposures in post. I tried to make it work and then let it sit for two years, until I had more patience. (I didn’t yet have a graphics tablet, though, which would have made the whole process ten times easier.) A little tweaking and cropping to a favorable aspect ratio produced something that, I think, captures the tranquility and sense of mystery the cloudy moonlit scene conveyed to me almost three years ago.