Photo of the Week - Week 14

Time keeps on slipping by and I realize I'm yet one more week behind in my photo goal ...

This week's photo comes from our recent visit to the Museo Interactive de Ciencias (Interactive Science Museum) - one of the best kid-oriented museums we've ever been to. The site used to be a textile factory and part of it is a museum to that industry; they still have a lot of the machines in there and displays to explain everything.

We were recently there to celebrate Natalie's birthday and I took the opportunity to take a few pictures - a kind of exploratory visit for me, photographically speaking, and I really want to get back there sometime to take some more photos. Here is one of my favorites:

Camera Info
Shutter Speed: 1/50s
ISO: 12,800
Aperture: F2.8
Lens: Tamron 17-50mm
Focal Length: 45mm
Aperture Priority Mode


The mix of light in there - tungsten, sunlight, and other lights - makes for some interesting color combinations. In the picture above the machine closest to me is illuminated by a warm tungsten light, but the background is a totally different light, so you have this warm orange cast light contrasting with the cold blue light in the background.

I had to shoot at a really high ISO and then used Lightroom 4 to clean up the noise. While Lightroom does a great job cleaning up the noise, I would like to shoot a higher aperture and low ISO next time, which means I'll need to bring my tripod along.

Take a look at my Flickr page to see more photos from this excursion.

Photo of the Week - Week 13

I finally got the chance to go to the botanical gardens here in Quito. I've barely started going through my photos, but came up with a couple for this post.

So how do you spice up a kind of blase nature scene? Set up for a longer exposure and then zoom while it exposes.

So here is the scene:

Here's the same scene, but zooming while the shutter is open (explosion of life!):

Camera Info:
Shutter speed: .8s
Aperture: F8.0
Lens: Canon 70-200mm

Here's another example with some flowers:

Photo of the Week - Week 12

This week's topic - refining my workflow between Lightroom and Photoshop.

Since I've started using Lightroom and the new beta version of Photoshop CS6, I've been working on how to integrate them, which I've found to be quite easy.

Here's the final image:

Camera Info
Shutter Speed: 1/15s
Aperture: F6.3
ISO: 100
Lens: Canon EF 50mm II
Focal Length: 50mm
Flash: Single flash, 1/4 power, through softbox

I begin by downloading my images from the memory card and onto my computer using Lightroom.

Once they are in Lightroom, I use that to do most of my polishing and edits - color balance, contrast, sharpening, add a slight vignette. A lot of the time I can get the image where I want it using just Lightroom.

The above image, however, had a hair going right down the middle of her face, which was rather distracting. With my image pretty much the way I wanted it, I simply right-clicked on it and opened it in Photoshop.

One of the tools I really like in Photoshop is content-aware healing. This is great because all I did was use a brush tool to highlight the hair and then, voila! It was gone.

With that done, I saved the image and the newly-edit version appeared in Lightroom. From there I exported it as a JPEG, with the above results.

Photo of the Week - Week 11

One of the hardest things in portrait photography (for me) is to get natural expressions. As I've mentioned before, portrait photography, particularly in the studio, is one of the most UNnatural things people can do. This means that it's hard to get people to relax and be natural; one of the reasons I like environmental portraits better - easier to get people to relax and be natural.

Perhaps one of the easiest ways to get people to relax is to get them to laugh. This helps lighten the atmosphere and people will naturally relax. Easier with kids than adults and much easier said than done ...

Clara is just a natural - she's grown up with me chasing her with a camera stuck to my face and she does great in front of the camera.

I've shot a few engagement sessions, but this is one of my favorites. Engaged couples are great to shoot because after a bit they just forget you're there and are oblivious to anyone but each other. Makes life easy for a photographer!

Even adults will relax and you can get some good natural portraits. When I do my portrait sessions I block aside at least an hour. The first bit is mainly for us to get used to me having a camera stuck to my face, we'll shoot some test shots, we do a lot of interactive, I'll show them the pictures after each shot, let the kids take a picture of mom and dad, etc. This helps build rapport between me and the people I'm photographing and everyone relaxes, enjoys the photo shoot more, and we get better images.

Photo of the Week - Week 10

I'm running a bit behind in my postings, but wanted to catch up this week with one of my all-time favorite photos.

Just before leaving Greece after having lived there for three years, we spent a week at a villa on the island of Kea. I spent three days dealing with packers and boxes while the rest of the family went ahead with my in-laws. Needless to say, when I got there, I was ready to do as little as possible and just enjoy the water, the beach, and the spectacular sunsets in the evening.

For me, this shot captures all of that. The lines made by the tiles draw me to the chair, the sunset, and I can almost feel myself relaxing, remembering what it was like to sit there and watch the sun set across the ocean.

Can I go back yet?

Photo of the Week - Week 9

So the theme for this week and next is "use the camera you've got." For different reasons I do not always carry my camera gear around with me, but my iPod Touch is much more portable. This post and the next will be on a couple of experiences using my iPod to take pictures.

While I won't be doing any portrait sessions or getting big prints from any of the images it is convenient and can help (partially) satisfy the photo itch.

This is a photo I would have liked to have had my "real" camera for. There is a great hacienda on the outskirts of Quito - Hacienda Rumiloma - which we have escaped to a couple of times. This was one of the times when you could actually see the mountains on the (very) far side of the other valley.

Both of these images would be difficult because of the high dynamic range - darker shadows, such as the arch and the fountain statue, and an evening sky that is relatively light. Despite the limitations in the sensor for exposure, there is no limitation on composition - just because I'm using my iPod doesn't mean I can't compose my images the way I would like.

Living some place means we can have the opportunity to revisit the same places at different times. I looked at this opportunity as a sort of test run - I could look for compositions I liked so that at some future point I can go back with my full kit to take a higher quality image.

When we lived in Greece, I got to know an artist who lived there in Athens. She got a cell phone with a pretty good quality camera (this is before the advent of the iPhone) so that she always had something with her to take a photo of an inspiring scene that she would later use to paint from. Kind of the same idea for me, but to return to the location to photograph it later.

Looking for details ...

As a follow-on to my last post, I wanted to post a few pictures from our recent trip to the equator - again. It's a place that I've been to several times and, frankly, is not very interesting, photographically, for me. When we decided to go there, I decided that I needed to look for detail photographs, something other than the typical shots of the big tower with the globe on top. As I did this, I found I was more excited about being there and enjoyed looking for "non-typical" shots.

Below are a few from our recent excursion ...



Shutter Speed: 1/40
ISO: 100
Aperture: F6.3
Focal Length: 50mm
Lens: Tamron 17-50mm
Mode: Aperture Priority
Exposure Compensation: -2/3



Shutter Speed:5s
ISO: 100
Aperture: F6.3
Focal Length: 44mm
Lens: Tamron 17-50mm
Mode: Aperture Priority
Exposure Compensation: -1/3



Shutter Speed: 1/200s
ISO: 100
Aperture: F6.3
Focal Length: 31mm
Lens: Tamron 17-50mm
Mode: Aperture Priority
Exposure Compensation: -1/3

Photo of the Week - Week 8

As we've traveled and lived in different places, one of the challenges is to try and photograph sometime that has been photographed thousands of times, but to do it in a unique way.

Give it some thought

The scenic overlooks are there for a reason, but what can we do different with the lighting, exposure, framing and composition? What is your narrative for your image? What story are you trying to tell?

Scout your area - Pay attention

Once you are on location, take a look around. What do you see? What is the light doing? What is unique?

When I've got my kids with me, I task them to help Daddy find pictures, which serves a few different functions. First, they are occupied with a task - but make sure you do take some photos of what they point out. Pixels are free. If they feel you are paying attention to what they find, they'll continue to be enthusiastic and they will develop their own photographic eye. Second, kids tend to notice a lot of things we adults overlook or ignore. They have a different perspective on life. And they are a lot shorter, so their viewpoint is physically different.

Sometimes you have to wander off the beaten path a little. What are the tourists NOT taking pictures of? What is behind the group or off to the side?

Change your perspective

How does your three-year old see the world? Crouch down and see. What would this statue look like if you were lying on your back looking up at it?

This takes a bit of gumption - some people may inevitably look at you as the crazy foreign tourist laying on his back. Well, do you want the shot or not? I'm hoping that as my children grown up seeing me do this, it'll mitigate their embarrassment as teenagers ...

Revisit the location

One of the benefits of living somewhere, anywhere, is that you have the opportunity to see the same places under different conditions. In our case, we've been to some tourist locations around the world multiple times- each visitor that comes has got to see the Parthenon or the Equator. As I've trekked out to some places for the fifth or sixth time in the last 18 months, there is always something different.

Photo of the Week - Week 7

This week's post - cropping. The photo is from last summer, but it's one of the few instances where I have a couple of different versions of it and it makes the point well.

Here's the original photo:



Here's the cropped version:



Shutter Speed: 1/800s
Aperture: F4.0
ISO: 100
Lens: Canon EF 70-200mm F4/L
Aperture Priority Mode
Exposure Compensation: +1/3

While neither is a prize-winning photograph, I think they illustrates how cropping can be used to improve the composition and framing of an image we've made. You can't manipulate a bad image into a great one, but cropping can improve the framing and, to an extent, the composition of an image.

The original image, one of a series of rapid-fire shots (trying to shoot a bird in flight and get the wings in the right position), was not a well-thought out composition; I was just trying to get an image of the bird in flight. I knew I wanted the bird on the left side of the reflection and sun and the wings up or down, hence the rapid fire shots. As a result, the composition is kind of blase, the bird not really centered, and the whole image, really, lacking in balance.

The cropped image has symmetry and feels more balanced. In the image below I've added some lines to illustrate this:



While the sun and bird are on the right-hand side of the image (though the bird is almost centered), the bird is in flight, with implied motion into the left side of the image. He's still got someplace to go.

Again, neither is a really stunning image, but I think this example illustrates well how a bit of cropping can help improve an image.

Photo of the Week - Week 6

We were recently able to take another trip to the LDS Temple in Guayaquil. These are always beautifully constructed buildings; we would be staying at the lodging on the Temple grounds, so I was anxious to get some pictures at night.

Shutter Speed: 1s
Aperture: F11
Mode: Aperture Priority
Exposure Bias: -1
ISO: 400
Focal Length: 17mm
Lens: Tamron 17-55mm

Processed in Adobe Lightroom 4 beta.

This was the first time I brought real camera gear to Guayaquil, having regretted not doing so on previous trips. While staying in the lodging was a different story (sharing a room with all three girls who were excited AND hopped up on sugar), I was pleased with the images I was able to make of the Temple. Here is a slideshow of all of my Temple pictures: