From a core group of musi­cians, 3 unique per­for­mances emerge. “Worlds Col­lide” at the Lit­tle Fox The­ater this past Sun­day evening was a jour­ney through the minds of the Mur­ray Low Trio, the Aaron Ling­ton Quin­tet and John Wor­ley with Bari Bari. We often expe­ri­ence these musi­cians while fol­low­ing our friend John Wor­ley’s gigs but he was more the side man for this show, pro­vid­ing us the expo­sure we rarely make the effort to see. And the icing on the cake was the oppor­tu­ni­ty to pho­to­graph every­thing from the bal­cony of the the­ater.

Click­ing any of the pic­tures below will take you to the full pho­to gallery.

In order to improve my skill sets for action pho­tog­ra­phy, I took on the project of shoot­ing birds in flight. Our back­yard feed­er attracts a large amount of col­or­ful finch­es who do not seem to have a great fear of my pres­ence, at least when I am sit­ting still. I take advan­tage of this vir­tu­al­ly free oppor­tu­ni­ty and spend hours sit­ting, observ­ing and pho­tograph­ing these crea­tures.

I have writ­ten my expe­ri­ence up as a tuto­r­i­al (with some of my favorite pic­tures) and post­ed it to the Instructa­bles web site. Instructa­bles is a fun Do-it-your­self site with con­tent entire­ly pro­vid­ed by the mem­bers. It is free to view and, if you would like to con­tribute, free to join.

My tuto­r­i­al is enti­tled “Back­yard Bird Pho­tog­ra­phy” and click­ing here will take you there.

This tuto­r­i­al is also entered in thi­er Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy Con­test, so…, if you are a mem­ber of Instructa­bles and are so inclined, you have my per­mis­sion to vote for me.

Update: The tuto­r­i­al picked up one of 5 first prizes, a week­end pho­tog­ra­phy work­shop put on by Pop­u­lar Pho­tog­ra­phy mag­a­zine. I know I need it and I guess the judges thought so too.

It is time I learned a lot more about on cam­era fil­ters. Fil­ters, by def­i­n­i­tion remove some­thing from that which they are fil­ter­ing. Cam­era fil­ters remove somthing from the light enter­ing your cam­era, maybe a col­or or the amount of light or block­ing light com­ing from spe­cif­ic direc­tions. I felt the need to get me some of these fil­ters and the more I researched, the more prod­ucts avail­able (at many dif­fer­ent prices) and the more infor­ma­tion I found.

One good (online and free) primer that explains fil­ter basics and then goes on to give brief descrip­tions of 2 dozen com­mon fil­ters and how they can com­pli­ment your pho­tog­ra­phy can be found at:
http://www.digicamera.com/features/filterprimer/index.html

One way to nar­row the choic­es is to think about what effects you are aim­ing for or con­sid­er a prob­lem you just can’t seem to over­come with the cam­era as is. I am look­ing to soft­en mov­ing water in bright light and also reduce glare from shiny sur­faces. From my read­ing, a neu­tral den­si­ty (ND) fil­ter should help with the for­mer. It appears to block all col­ors equal­ly hence block­ing just the amount of light enter­ing the cam­era. For the lat­ter, a polar­iz­ing fil­ter, specif­i­cal­ly a cir­cu­lar polar­iz­ing fil­ter sounds about right.

So an ND and a cir­cu­lar polar­iz­ing fil­ter sound like a good start for my needs. Now, to deter­mine which brand and qual­i­ty to pony up for. Peo­ple like Scott Bourne sug­gest bying the best, espe­cial­ly if you have expen­sive lens­es. “Why put a cheap fil­ter on an expen­sive lens?” He and Rick Sam­mon often com­ment about fil­ters on their pod­casts which can be found at http://photofocus.com/.

One last inter­est­ing fact is that no pro­fes­sion­al pho­tog­ra­phers seem to rec­om­mend a plain or UV fil­ter just to pro­tect the front of your lens as any extra glass will degrade your pic­ture. Since I need all the help I can get, there are no UV fil­ters on my cam­eras.

So, I will update this entry when I decide and buy some fil­ters. More to come!

This blog is all about learn­ing pho­tog­ra­phy and I have no prob­lem show­ing “first attempts” even though I feel it is not my best work.

I took a series of about 200 pic­tures from a hill above the Reno Bal­loon Race and cre­at­ed a stop action video of the mass ascen­sion. Click on the pic­ture to go to the video.

Using Pho­to­shop I cre­at­ed an action that adjust­ed lev­els, bright­ened, added con­trast and resized the 200 pic­tures. I then import­ed them into Win­dows Movie Mak­er, con­fig­ured a few things like set­ting each frame to dis­play for 1/8 of a sec­ond and I exper­i­ment­ed with sev­er­al dif­fer­ent qual­i­ty set­tings. The Win­dows pro­gram was very easy to work with and is free as opposed to buy­ing and learn­ing Pre­miere. I have not looked at oth­er video pro­grams.

One improve­ment for this video would be to not move the cam­era between shots. The jumpi­ness is a bit annoy­ing. The expo­sure changes too. I believe I left the mode at aper­ture pri­or­i­ty as the sun was going in and out due to the clouds and it gets a lit­tle dark at the end. Set­ting the expo­sure and using man­u­al might have helped. Not every frame is in focus either, at least in the begin­ning. I noticed that the auto focus changed as the bal­loons moved. After a few frames, I focused and then turned off the AF.

Anoth­er help­ful hint would be to set the cam­era to take the pic­tures at a spe­cif­ic fre­quen­cy. I had rent­ed a D90 and could not eas­i­ly fig­ure this out when I need­ed to. I took the shots man­u­al­ly, count­ing to 10 when not much was hap­pen­ing and more fre­quent when the bal­loons were ris­ing.

And there is no music! Maybe Yakki­ty Sax would fit.

All in all, it was a fun project that can still be improved on. And the lessons learned are most impor­tant!

Update: I neglect­ed to include a use­ful web tuto­r­i­al on stop action ani­ma­tion that was a big help to get­ting start­ed:
http://www.wikihow.com/Create-a-Stop-Motion-Animation

We just returned from 3 days at the Reno Bal­loon Race with near­ly 3000 pic­tures and a few dozen videos. The ques­tion is this: what are the most effi­cient work flow solu­tions for review­ing, edit­ing and post­ing the best pic­tures? I think that will be the sub­ject of my next blog post. In the mean­time, here are a few choice pixs. Click any see to the larg­er ver­sions.

For more hot air bal­loons, my Flickr gallery is here and Lori’s gallery is here.

While search­ing for a light paint­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty last week­end dur­ing the full moon, I noticed that the John­ston House in Half Moon Bay sat dark on it’s hill. The house is nor­mal­ly lit by an intense white light and stands out clear­ly while dri­ving high­way 1 through town. Large and white, I took the oppor­tu­ni­ty to jazz it up a bit with a new spot light I recent­ly pur­chased.

What I learned today: a def­i­n­i­tion of low key light­ing.

From Wikipedia:

Low-key light­ing is a style of light­ing for pho­tog­ra­phy, film or tele­vi­sion. It attempts to cre­ate a chiaroscuro effect. In tra­di­tion­al pho­to­graph­ic light­ing, three-point light­ing uses a key light, a fill light, and a back light for even illu­mi­na­tion. Low-key light­ing requires only one key light, option­al­ly con­trolled with a fill light or a sim­ple reflec­tor.

Low key light accen­tu­ates the con­tours of an object by throw­ing areas into shade while a fill light or reflec­tor may illu­mi­nate the shad­ow areas to con­trol con­trast. The rel­a­tive strength of key-to-fill, known as the light­ing ratio, can be mea­sured using a light meter. Low key light­ing has a high­er light­ing ratio, e.g. 8:1, than high key light­ing, which can approach 1:1.

The term “low key” is used in cin­e­matog­ra­phy to refer to any scene with a high light­ing ratio, espe­cial­ly if there is a pre­dom­i­nance of shad­owy areas. It tends to height­en the sense of alien­ation felt by the view­er, hence is com­mon­ly used in film noir and hor­ror gen­res.

I always under­stood the term in a venac­u­lar kind of way, mean­ing a kind of dark envi­ron­ment (a jazz club imme­di­ate­ly comes to mind), but when I took on a recent project put forth at Uta­ta, this is the first pic­ture I entered.

The project, enti­tled “Iron Pho­togr­pher” to include a flower, some­thing rusty and low key light­ing. I felt the pic­ture met 2 of the 3 cri­te­ria and I under­ex­posed to try to meet the 3rd.

Placed along­side the oth­er sub­mit­ted pic­tures, my pho­to pops out much lighter then the oth­ers. So I thought deep­er about the term and real­ized that “low key” is prob­a­bly a tech­ni­cal term that I have giv­en lit­tle thought to. How often have I seen “key grip” in the cred­its of a movie and not tak­en the time to look up what it means.

The Wikipedia def­i­n­i­tion actu­al­ly and briefly explains nor­mal pho­to­graph­ic light­ing as hav­ing 3 con­sid­er­a­tions, a “key” light being the most impor­tant (the “key” light­ing illu­mi­nat­ing the most impor­tant fea­ture of the sub­ject), a fill light to reduce con­trast and a back light to fur­ther even out the shad­ows. Low key can result when you remove the fill and back light­ing. It also sug­gests the “chiaroscuro effect” which defines a large con­trast between light and dark through­out the entire pic­ture.

An image search on Google shows many low key exam­ples. And my image still appears too light.

I was think­ing that my pho­to has only one light source, the sun, but the prob­lem aris­es as the sun is reflect­ed off the grass in the back­ground, a back­light if you will that dis­tracts from the con­trast with­in the sub­jects, that is if you are aim­ing for “low key”.

So, I assume at this point that the pic­tures fails the 3rd cri­te­ria of low key light­ing as is gen­er­al­ly accept­ed and I need to try again. Maybe this can be sal­vaged using Pho­to­shop to alter the back­ground. Maybe an off cam­era flash, con­trol­ling the ambi­ent light of the back­ground with a fast shut­ter speed would accom­plish the feat.

Maybe the pic­tured failed but, FTW, the rea­son I impose projects on myself is to incite me to shoot and hope­ful­ly learn someth­ng I did not know before.

This is a good time for night pho­tog­ra­phy. The moon is full, the skies are rel­a­tive­ly clear and the tem­per­a­ture is not too cold.

Here are a few web pages with tips for pho­tograph­ing the moon itself.

http://home.hiwaay.net/~krcool/Astro/moon/howtophoto/
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/moonset-moonrise-photography.html
http://digital-photography-school.com/moon-photography-made-simple

And on Fri­day Sep­tem­ber 4, the rare event of the full moon set­ting just as the sun ris­es allows you to shoot a low moon with your choice of fore­ground illu­mi­nat­ed by that ris­ing sun. Get­ting out of bed that ear­ly on Fri­day is good prac­tice for the upcom­ing Reno Bal­loon Races.

Moon­light pro­vides a great oppor­tu­ni­ty to take unusu­al pic­tures of com­mon objects. Get your tri­pod and remote shut­ter cable out, drag along a part­ner and find some­thing to take long expo­sure shots of. Old cars and ancient archi­tec­ture are favorites. Bring along some col­ored lights and a flash and try some light paint­ing.

It’s a hol­i­day week­end and many of you have an extra day to play with, so why not give it a shot?

Last year, Andrew Zuck­er­man pub­lished a book of por­traits and inter­views with 51 icon­ic peo­ple over the age of 65 enti­tled Wis­dom. Vis­it the web site to not only get an over view of this work but also to study an amaz­ing “Mak­ing Of” video that shows the stu­dio set­up required to obtain the con­sis­tent look of the por­traits. From the pho­tog­ra­pher’s point of view, the amount of equip­ment that was hauled around the world and the light­ing setups are worth see­ing.

We are going to see John Wor­ley play at the Hed­ley Club and Tod Dick­ow is sit­ting in. Then I remem­bered that I scored a few good shots of him last month at Gor­don Bier­sch play­ing with Fas­ma­nia. The band plays in the back alley in the evening with a black net stretched across as a ceil­ing. This usu­al­ly presents quite the chal­lenge using the 70–300 f4/5.6 lens, need­ing to crank the ISO to 3200 on my D80. All things con­sid­ered, this shot came out fair­ly good. I like that I caught the Gor­don Bier­sch logo behind him. A larg­er depth of field might have brought the sign into focus but, I need­ed a f5.6 just to get 1/60th of a sec­ond shut­ter speed. If they would only remain per­fect­ly still while play­ing!