Motion

One of the hardest things to try and compensate for and work around for me is motion. One way to try and combat it is to use a faster shutter speed, but sometimes it isn't worth it for what you give up in light. I took this shot in the evening. Light was just starting to fade, so I couldn't really go to too high a shutter speed. first one turned out like this.


This was at 1/25 shutter speed, ISO 100 and he was strumming, so I knew i had to do two things. First raise the shutter speed, then wait for a slower part of the song or a slight break in the playing to get a clearer shot. I also decided after I cranked the SS to 1/50 to bump the ISO up to 200. When I got the lull in the song this is what the final image turned out like.

Color Palettes

It is always nice when you can get a picture that is pretty much done in one color palette. I got this shot recently and lie how the subject and the doll matched the background so well. The red/orange/yellow group is so vibrant and fun. Think of the coincidences that had to align to bring this shot together. The mother had to decide what top to dress the child in, another child had to leave the Elmo doll at a precise position to have it attract this child's attention, this boy had to stay interested in the Elmo long enough to drag it through the house and backyard until he reached the play set. When you think of it that way, why , this photo is a miracle!

Movement of Water

One of the biggest differences I am noticing between the 4mp Kodak I used for years and the Canon XS is the ability to catch or change the movement of water in an image with relative ease.

As seen with the picture of the diving Guillemot last week, the crispness of shape that can be achieved at a moderate shutter speed (60 - 100). Here is another shot taken from a pool party I recently went to. I caught the splash just as the floater board hit the water and it turned out pretty cool.

Roadsworth Pond Mural

A few weeks ago, Montreal installation artist Peter "Roadsworth" Gibson spent some time with a Verdun youth group working on a mural at a piece of public land destined to become a green space on the corner of Church and Verdun Ave. At over 1'1oo square feet it was the largest project he has done to date.



I had to stand back 30 feet to get a full shot. This is just cropped a bit to get rid of the shrubbery on the bottom. The next two are details of the mural, first the right side, then the left and a shot including the street for scale. That is a three story building and note the recycling cart at bottom right for reference .

Bicycle Basket

I have walked past this chained up bike for the past couple of months and always wanted to play around and snap some shots, but never had my camera on me when walking that direction. This morning I was headed out to take Nalin for some sidewalk action because my left knee was a little tender after a waterfront jaunt yesterday.

I grabbed my Canon and decided to get some shots of the bike and a new art installation on Verdun Ave. I turned the corner and got half way down the block and couldn't see the bike. Bummer. When I got closer I could see that there was a home nursing car pulled into the driveway right in front, obscuring it. When I go there I had about four feet between the car and the front tire of the bike. Thank god I had the 18 - 55 mm lens on and not the telephoto.



I flipped the menu on and pumped the image quality up to L+RAW so I would have more options in editing. I took about eight or nine shots looking straight on and looking over the corner of the basket.

In Lightroom, I added clarity, and ran recovery up to +70 to give definition to all the lines. Next I went +60 on the vibrance and cranked up the saturation to 70. I added just a touch of black to make the fence rungs pop. Lastly, I added a little temp and +21 to the tint.

Ideally I would have got this shot on an overcast morning and avoided glare and shadows. I will try a couple more times before the summer is out. Overall, I like the shots and am starting to get a better idea of what I want in an image.

Another Child Portrait

Got another opportunity to get some shots of kids at a BBQ this past weekend. It is really starting to become clear that most kids are so exposed to digital cameras that they don't shrink back from them anymore. Some even see the camera come out and they run over and start posing. Not that this was the case here.

This little girl is two and a half, was an amazing host, showing me her backyard and new puppy. I think that I have had a lot more exposure to young children over the last three or four years and I have a much more relaxed vibe around them that they can pick up on.

This was a color shot that I turned black & white because it was a little bit overcast and the wind had come up. Wispy fine hair can be hell on auto focus, but the lines become crisp again after some recovery and clarity were added in Lightroom with B&W. And because I think it looks better.

This photo needs no explanation or introduction. Let it wash over you. Repeat if necessary.

This is a nice candid shot of my buddy Rich's daughter. It was 47C with the humidity and she was determined to find a way to make this outdoor shower work even after Rich and I had tried in vain for 5 minutes. This was the exact moment where faucets and valves had been tried and she was letting the force take over.

Garden Bells

Found another set of these rustic garden bells to photograph. This set was at an apartment on the plateau that my buddy is renting for his vacation. The distressed, rubbed off cream paint was revealing the brass underneath. Very pleasing to the eye.



I have seen three sets in the last couple of months and want to start keeping a lookout for some. But, old ones, not a new set made to look old. The old one feel heavier and more mojoed. I think they may have been cast iron and the motifs on them are a little less intricate.

Crazy Clouds

We have been under a heat wave here in Montreal for the past 6 days. A heat wave is defined as any periods of consecutive days where the temperature reached 32 degrees Celcius ( 89.6 Fahrenheit) not including the Humididex. The temp with the humidity climbed to 47 Celsius yesterday. I caught this shot at the end of the day around 7:15 pm as the dark clouds were starting to roll in over Notre-Dame-de-Grace Park on Sherbrooke. My buddy Rich and the kids were in the splash park, while I caught some shots from behind the ball field.

I tried one bracketed set that I put through Photomatix and came out OK. I really need to get a bunch of bracketed shots and spend more time playing in there to figure out how to pop the orange and yellows in the clouds, or dial down the green in the chapel roof.



But I also got a nice stand alone shot that I played with in Lightroom and really like. I think it speaks to the anger of the approaching sky eating up the sunshine. I am becoming very interested in taking very vibrant shots to play with and manipulate. This is one of my favorites so far.

A Ducks Arse

I had a busy day yesterday and didn't have time to post, so I am doing a backtrack today. I went to the Biodome with my pal Rich and his crew. Made the mistake of walking into the rain forest section with my Canon in the backpack beside my two bottle of ice water after having exited an air conditioned car. The camera fogged up until we got to the northern forest section and the temperature reduced.It was working good again by the time we got to the Gulf of St. Lawrence section. Lots of great duck and bird shots. This little fella is called a Black Guillemot and is a shoreline bird that specialized in taking long shallow dives through the water for small fish. I caught the best side of him as he was diving.

Red Smog Sun

Last night we had a pretty weird moon here in the MTL. There was a high smog advisory in effect and after 7pm when the sun started to head for the horizon and got behind the layer of haze, it turned red.

I had originally planned to go out to get some sunset shots atop a small hill by my house that gives you a good vantage point to shoot St. Joseph's Oratory and the west side of Mount Royal, but then saw the almost cloud cover like haze and said to myself 'wait for a better evening'. After I got the dog leashed up I remembered reading a post on Digital Photography School about how it is about making time to shoot every day, even if it is just 10 or twenty minutes and grabbed the Canon and slid it in my backpack.

Once i got up by the Auditorium, I could see the red of the sun and took a couple of test shot to adjust the levels to the point it would take one where the edges of the sun were clearly defined and the color came out a bit. Then I headed right down to the waters edge and set the camera up for a series of bracketed shots. Here is what the middle straight up image looked like.


After I got home I took the three photos and ran them through Photomatix and came to realize that I still had the camera set to run on large file jpegs and not large + raw. Bummer. It would have turned out much better, but I'll know for next time. Check every setting and never assume the camera is reading your mind. here is what the finished product looked like.

June Storm Clouds

I snapped this one off of my front porch one dark morning in June. The angularity of the power lines and the rolling puff of the clouds balance each other out in this photo. I just love a dark ugly cloud.

Experimenting

So I have been really digging seeing people post pictures done with the Hipstomatic app for the Iphone. The Lomo style pictures are like fruity drinks for your eyes. I tried a couple of times to replicate the look following a incredibly convoluted step by step process in Photoshop, but I have not used Photoshop often enough or don't have the same version as the explanation and got lost in a scary cornfield.

So what I decided to do was take a cast off photo of my nieces and nephews mulling around waiting for a group shot to be taken and play with it. Here is the original



Nothing special . I was tuning the settings for the group shot and this was a little bright. Then I cropped it to center on the girl in the stripped dress. I left the exposure alone, pulled the Recovery way up and added a little Black. Next I brought the Brightness down a bit and maxed the Contrast. I pulled the Vibrance up 30% and the Saturation 20%. Lastly I tweaked the Temp thirty percent towards the blue end of the spectrum and the Tint twenty percent on the green side. A little Vignette work and this is the finished product.


As with everything I have been doing in this blog, it's not great, maybe not even good, but it is a starting point. The more I learn to control what I am doing in Lightroom, the sooner I will figure out how to take the photos to make them look like what I envisioned.

Black & White Portraits

I really like doing bright overhead sun portraits in Black & White. The sun accentuates the graininess of the B&W shot and gives you some great shadows. And sometimes color images can really be brought to life by turning them B&W in the editing stage. Here is one example. This is a mundane profile shot of my brother Troy.
This doesn't say a whole heck of a lot to me, but it is clear so I keep it.


First I cropped it down to a head shot, then clicked the Gray Scale button in Lightroom. As far as editing, all i did was crank the recovery to define his profile, then I dropped the exposure down one full step darker and added 15% to the Blacks. Once that was done, I decided to crop in further to really highlight the texture the B&W had given his face. This is one end result I am very happy with.

Cropping To Change Subject.

Most of the time when you take a photo, it is a defined subject that you found interesting, and wanted to capture. Sometimes you capture something about that subject that makes it a great picture. Most times it is just a straight up rendering of the subject.
Sometimes there is a secondary subject in the picture that is more interesting and can be highlighted with a crop or editing the photo to black & white. As long as the original shot is in focus, you can find something to bring out in any image. Today's post is one of those times. While vacationing in St. Andrews, my nieces and nephews found a crab washed ashore by the tide. I took a shot of one of them holding it.



Pretty straight forward picture of someone holding a dead crab. While checking the clarity in Lightroom, I noticed how dirty Nathan's fingernails were and that the sand and water drops looked cool. So after a quick crop and color transformation this is the finished shot that I like a lot better.

Purple Iris

In the previous post I incorrectly identified the flower as a Orchid. It is actually an Iris. As is this one. I have always enjoyed taking shots of flowers. They are the easiest subject matter. They won't squirm, move or blink. This Purple Iris was just coming out of the shower when I snapped the shot. Lucky me!

Garden Party

This shot is from my mother's garden. I believe this is a white Orchid, but I may be wrong. I took this around eight in the morning while the rain was still on everything from the night before.

This was taken in Auto mode from 3.1 meters with a 75 - 250 mm telephoto.

And We're Back!

It's nice to be back among the plugged in. Don't get me wrong , that ten or twelve day period of cyber stasis is refreshing. But there is business at hand - including this blog. Now to put the nose back to the grindstone.

We had a great trip, even if the weather wasn't always co-operating. Lots of the overcast thing. I managed to take some photos for this page in between family pictures. Many were taken in walkabouts in my parents gardens and in the woods behind their house.
Some were portraits that had a little something extra and were turned into something else.

Today's shot is a picture I took of my brother Scott. While editing I realized that my parents patio was reflected in his sunglasses and decided to make a crop of it. As always, click to enlarge.