Why Developers Shouldn't Photograph: 2010

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Western Nebraska/Badlands

Last week The Professor and I found ourselves out in Western Nebraska and South Dakota. My favorite shot was of Carhenge in Alliance, NE that we took at night. There aren't any lights at Carhenge so we had to paint the cars with light over the course of 7 1/2 minutes or so. In this shot you can see movement in the clouds as well as star trails; there are so many things I love about this shot:

ISO 100 | 457 sec. | f/5.6 | 17mm

Along the historic Oregon Trail around Bridgeport, NE is Courthouse Rock and Jail Rock. I stitched the following image together from about 7 different shots:

ISO 100 | 1/80 | f/22.0 | 36mm

We walked around Cedar Butte in the southern part of Badlands National Park to get the following shots:

ISO 100 | 1/400 | f/11.0 | 17mm

What I liked about the above shot was the tree that just showed up out of nowhere. In that area are no trees, just prairie grass and some shrubs. In the following shot I tried to capture the strange rock formations:

ISO 100 | 1/50 | f/11.0 | 17mm

We stuck around the same area in hopes of catching an awesome sunset, and although the sunset was relatively uneventful, I still liked this panorama I captured as the setting sun lit up the rock formations from the left (click on it to enlarge it):

ISO 200 | 1/60 | f/8.0 | 70mm

I will definitely jump at any chance to take pictures in the Badlands again. We were there for only a few hours in one spot, and there is so much to explore. Even in the relatively small area we walked around there were so many amazing opportunities.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Omaha Landmarks

Over the last month I've gone out with The Professor to take pictures of Omaha's landmarks. First we went to the Bob Kerrey Pedestrian Bridge at sunrise but the sunrise didn't happen, but I still grabbed this perspective of the bridge that I liked:

ISO 200 | 1/15 | f/11.0 | 28mm

After that we headed downtown and, although it has been photographed all too often, I figured I'd grab one for myself. I like the way the tree branches in the foreground framed the skyscrapers in the background:

ISO 100 | 1/50 | f/11.0 | 28mm

Omaha's Rosenblatt Stadium will be torn down this year after having hosted the NCAA College World Series since 1950, so again I figured I'd grab some shots of my own:

ISO 100 | 1/50 | f/22.0 | 28mm

ISO 100 | 1/8 | f/3.5 | 28mm

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Bugs

Summer in Nebraska means no shortage of bugs. I found two wolf spiders in my backyard that were rather large. Getting within inches to photograph them was quite the stressful experience with a studio setup using softboxes, but The Professor and I managed to get it done with a minimum of girly screams:

ISO 200 | 1/100 | f/20.0 | 100mm

ISO 100 | 1/200 | f/11.0 | 100mm

This black swallowtail caterpillar was shot in my neighbor's backyard in natural light:

ISO 200 | 1/50 | f/5.6 | 100mm

I found this bee pollinating around the cilantro in our garden, shot with natural light:

ISO 100 | 1/200 | f/5.6 | 100mm

'Till next time or I find more bugs...

Friday, July 23, 2010

Catching Up

Okay so I haven't posted since March. Sorry about that. Moving on... :o)

I'll start off with another crane shot from March where the pattern kept catching my eye, taken with my Canon 70-300mm telephoto zoom:

ISO 400 | 1/400 | f5.6 | 300mm

My daughter is a big fan of horses, so this one made it into a frame on her bedroom wall,taken with the same 70-300mm lens:

ISO 100 | 1/1000 | f/4.0 | 70mm

I splurged and got a macro lens in April, so I had to give it a try on some spiders. You learn real quick that getting enough light is a huge issue with macro photography, so when shooting indoors a flash (or flashes) are a must. Especially when you want a smaller aperture and larger depth-of-field to get your entire subject in focus without using fancy post-processing techniques.

ISO 100 | 1/160 | f/22 | 100mm

ISO 100 | 1/125 | f/13 | 100mm

On May 20th the Fontenelle Nature Associate Photography Club, of which The Professor was the president until recently, held a meeting where some captive/rescued raptors were brought in. The following is of a Peregrine Falcon taken with my Canon 100mm f/2.8L IS USM Macro lens. The position of the falcon's head and how it makes a backwards "C" shape with his beak and neck feather pattern is why I like this one. The light in the background right above his head is a bit distracting, but I can live with that for now:

ISO 800 | 1/30 | f/2.8 | 100mm

The Henry Doorly Zoo here in Omaha just opened an awesome Madagascar exhibit this year, so on June 13th we had to go check it out and I took my 70-300mm. There isn't exactly much of a challenge getting pictures of captive animals at the zoo, but you can still get some fun ones. There is an outdoor exhibit for the Lemurs, and this guy had that defining pose with the S-shaped tail that looked pretty cool:

ISO 200 | 1/100 | f/5.6 | 235mm

June was a record-breaking month in Nebraska for rainfall, and we had some spectacular storms. On June 22nd there was an awesome lightning storm where I captured the following two shots using my 28-135mm lens with the aid of a tripod and a remote shutter switch:

ISO 400 | 12 sec. | f/16 | 28mm

ISO 200 | 8 sec. | f/11 | 28mm

On July 2nd I went out with The Professor for some Platte River sunrise pictures, and although we were disappointed with no fog, I still think this one was decent:

ISO 100 | 1/400 | f/11 | 28mm

On July 3rd was a fireworks show in our neighborhood by a guy that arranges about a half-hour show every year. This gave me a great opportunity to practice taking fireworks photos. It seems the basic idea is pretty simple, but the hard part is getting other elements in your photo to make it interesting. I chose the following photo because it had some cool fireworks in the distance although the main bursts in the foreground weren't too spectacular:

ISO 100 | 5 sec. | f/11 | 35mm

On July 8th I captured some cool sunset pictures. The following image is 12 separate images merged into one with the aid of Photoshop. ISO, aperture and focal length were all the same, but the shutter speed was a little different among all of the individual photos. I'd recommend clicking on the image to view it larger and get a better sense of scale:

ISO 100 | 1/30-1/80 | f/10 | 28mm

Well that's it for now. I'll try and post a little more often if, for no other reason, so I don't have to go through so many photos and make a huge post all at once.

Sunday, March 28, 2010

Sandhill Cranes

I tagged along with The Professor (site and blog) and a few others on a trip near Kearney, NE this weekend to try and capture the Sandhill Crane migration. We took the day off of work and went on Friday to avoid the crowds, which for the most part paid off. We left Papillion at about 3:30am, getting to our sunrise spot near Kearney at about 6am. We got there in plenty of time to scope out the area and ensure there were actually cranes where we hoped there would be.

The first part of the day was the best, from sunrise to late morning when the birds were very active and performing their courting "dances." The dances are pretty amusing where they jump up in the air and spread their wings. Occasionally they also toss a corn stalk up in the air and dance with it; I managed to catch one doing that, albeit from quite a distance (see the last picture below.)

The cranes seemed easily spooked this year, which made it very hard to get near and grab some close-up shots. This trip definitely taught me how important it is to just click the shutter as much as possible and expect that most of your shots won't be worth much. For instance, I took 1,016 shots and liked about a dozen of them; I really liked only about 6. For us nerds out there, that's about a 1% success rate. Oddly enough that is all is takes to keep me interested. I've heard the same thing about golf: you can hit bad balls all day long, but it's that one perfect shot that keeps you coming back time and again. So far I'm hooked.

Here are my favorite shots of the day, all shot on my Canon 20D with 70-300mm IS USM lens:

ISO 400 | 1/500 | f/5.6 | 300mm

ISO 400 | 1/1000 | f/5.6 | 300mm

ISO 400 | 1/800 | f/5.6 | 300mm

ISO 100 | 1/400 | f/5.6 | 300mm

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Take 2

The Professor showed me a few tips and tricks in processing my RAW images to get them looking a little better. He also mentioned some things to help with composition.

So after a quick lesson in Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop I tweaked a few of my images which are displayed below, side-by-side with their previous versions as originally posted. You don't really notice how drastic the difference is until they sit next to each other, but I think you'll agree the updated versions look much nicer. And just for the record, snow is hard to get right.

As a technical note, I shoot in RAW file format and use Adobe Bridge for initial sorting and Camera Raw processing before opening in Photoshop CS4 for a few final tweaks and output. I try and do as much processing in the Adobe Camera Raw plug-in to really bring out the colors and detail from the image as it was captured by the camera's sensor.

I've also included a new deer image that kept catching my eye as I was sorting through my photos, so I processed that one in my "digital darkroom" and shared that one as well. Enjoy!

Sunday, February 21, 2010

Deer

I went out yesterday morning with my friend and photography mentor (we'll just call him The Professor; his site is here) to try and get some pictures of deer. Not only was I excited to shoot some deer (not like that, calm down PETA), but I was also excited to try out my new lens, a Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM.

This turned out to be a great lens with its 300mm focal length (effectively a 480mm on my 20D with the 1.6x crop factor) since we couldn't get very close to the deer. Its image stabilization was also extremely effective. You can tell instantly when it kicks in a fraction of a second after you press the shutter button down halfway and the focus locks on. And with the lens fully extended, I couldn't imagine going handheld without the IS feature.

Once The Professor and I got to our location we were pleased to see no one else was there... until this hunter-looking dude shows up in his pickup complete with hunting dog in tow. With our hopes of finding calm deer in their natural habitat successfully crushed, we head out on our way. We tried to head in an opposite direction from Hunter and his dog Spot, but after over an hour trudging through the snow we were still empty handed. So after cursing the duo for the thirteenth or fourteenth time, we then see them coming back our direction. We bite our tongues and oddly enough strike up a civil conversation that ended up something like, "the deer are all to the north. There's probably 30 or so up there." How ironic. Sorry about the harsh words, Spot.

After heading north for 15 minutes or so we hit the mother-load and find a nice little herd of doe (the deer, the female deer.) There must have been 50 of them in all and below are some of the better shots. The Professor says he didn't get that many good shots, but I think that's just because he is much more particular about the shots he gets. At this point I'm happy with something in focus and properly exposed...

All of these are taken on my Canon 20D with the aforementioned 70-300mm lens:

ISO 200 | 1/250 | f/11.0 | 115mm

ISO 200 | 1/250 | f/11.0 | 300mm

ISO 200 | 1/200 | f/11.0 | 300mm

ISO 200 | 1/500 | f/11.0 | 300mm

ISO 200 | 1/1250 | f/5.6 | 300mm

ISO 200 | 1/250 | f/11.0 | 300mm

Sunday, February 7, 2010

Frost

We had a nice bout of horror frost (hoarfrost) here in Nebraska on January 15th, but that was a Friday and I had to work. We did go out on Saturday to shoot and although the frost wasn't as spectacular, we still got some nice shots.

Here are a few of the better ones with ISO, shutter speed, f-stop and focal length listed below each picture (all taken on Canon 20D with EF 28-135mm IS USM):