I think we missed all the camera club meetings in September, but we made it yesterday. I submitted two images. This one placed 1st of 6 in Projected Pictorial - Basic:
(And yes, the car is on the wrong side of the road. I flipped the image because I felt it looked better with the car on the right than on the left. We'll just pretend it's in Japan.)
I was taking some trash out and saw this guy sitting on the wall. So I tossed the trash, and zipped back inside to grab the camera.
There wasn't a lot of light and I didn't know how long it would stay put so I used a large smattering of settings hoping that one would come out well enough. That's the best shot. Most of the others are too grainy from using too high of a sensitivity.
Anyone know what kind of bug that is? Mom, I'm looking your way.
I recently purchased a 50-200mm telephoto lens as well as Bryan Peterson's Understanding Photography Field Guide. I've been learning a lot. I've been trying to apply the things I've been learning, so here are some pictures and commentary about what I've been up to. (Also, in case you are unaware you can click on each of these to see a larger version.)
When we were down near Monterey for our anniversary I took a whole bunch of pictures and posted a few to that post, but I wanted to do something a little more interesting with them. I went digging back through them and came back to one I posted previously mainly unedited. Here is my new version. I haven't entered it in competition yet, but I think I'll be titling it something like "Fading Memories."
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Last weekend Jess had a campfire / pack meeting for Cub Scouts that we went to. I took a whole bunch of pictures, but only had one that I particularly liked. I used a tripod and took a 30-second exposure. The moon is completely overexposed, but I still like the idea.
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The camera club meets the first, third, and fifth Mondays of each month (if there is a 5th). The fifth Monday meetings are variable. This month we've been assigned categories to shoot pictures for. You aren't allowed to use old pictures; you had to have taken the picture during the 2 weeks prior to the meeting. Two of the categories are "White" and "Reflection." I came up with these shots:
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This morning Jess had training for Cub Scouts so I got up as well and went out to take pictures. Unfortunately, the sky was heavily overcast all morning so I didn't get any of the highly desirable, lower-angled, warm sunlight I was hoping for. I first drove up towards Del Valle where the aforementioned campfire had been. I had seen some S-curves in the road that I was hoping I could get some nice pictures along.
This one is a 4-second exposure.
As I was messing around with my settings a bicycler came riding up the hill, so I did my best to quickly set up something decent (I'm taking fully manual exposures to help me learn how each of the settings affects the exposure). I was able to get this shot.
After Del Valle, I drove back into town and stopped at Centennial Park where there's a totem pole. I know this image would look better if I had some good sunlight; with the overcast sky it's just kind of flat feeling.
There's a little rose garden near a bagel shop where we like to grab a snack and read on the grass. There's a statue there of three kids holding hands and twirling around in a circle. Sadly there's not any good backdrop in the area (naturally occurring anyway, I'm not to the point of carrying around fabric to create impromptu backdrops). So I framed this up with a cement wall. The wall got overexposed, but that's better than a car driving by, and I was able to just tone it down to a grey anyway which isn't too bad.
I tried to take some pictures of the roses in the garden. Peterson recommends overcast days for flower close-ups because you can get nice uniform lighting. This doesn't work very well, however, when the wind is blowing like crazy making the flower dance around. I tried some "artistic" shots of the blurry flower, but I didn't like how any of them came out. However, there is a fountain there as well and the overcast sky (along with my neutral density filter and polarizing filter) allowed me to have great control over my exposure. I started with some long exposures, like this 3-second one (using the filters).
Then I cranked the shutter speed all the way up to 1/3200 of a second and removed the filters. I got some really fun stop-motion shots of the moving water.
And this one:
Those have been my photographic adventures for today. I'll definitely be entering many of these into the camera club competitions. I'm having a ton of fun. I need to start learning how to take good portraits at some point, but Jess does not like the idea of modeling for me.
This photo placed 2nd of 4 in Projected Journalism - Basic a couple of weeks ago:
This photo placed 1st of 7 in Projected Pictorial - Basic tonight:
I finally got around to buying some more camera equipment. We have a tripod now! Nothing fancy; it was actually only $15 from B&H, but had great reviews (along the lines of great for the price, great for amateur photographers, etc). It actually is quite a decent piece of equipment for $15. I also bought a neutral density filter and a polarizer.
The neutral density filter is, essentially, a piece of uniformly darkened glass to reduce the amount of light coming into the camera. This allows you to have more control over your exposure when working in very bright lighting (like direct sunlight) when you would otherwise be forced into a very fast shutter speed.
The polarizer is, well, a polarizer. Like polarized sunglasses. It reduces the amount of light entering the camera by only allowing light with a specific polarization through. This lets you do things like minimize/remove reflections off of glass and water. It also tends to result in more vibrant skies.
Anyway, so those arrived on Friday and I wanted to play with them a little. So I thought it might be fun to go to a highway overpass to take some longer-exposure pictures where, though sunny, the cars mostly disappear. It was also blazing hot in the mid-to-upper 90s and Jess wasn't too excited at the prospect. I told her it would be interesting because I bet it wouldn't take long for the police to show up and bother us.
So we drove out to the overpass and I set up the camera and took some sample shots. After 10 minutes I was done and starting to pack up. It was then, while I was breaking down the tripod, that the police officer pulled up to ask us what we were doing. Luckily he was nice about it (probably partly due to clearly seeing that we weren't up to any trouble), and suggested we find another place to take pictures. Apparently they had received calls from concerned motorists. I guess someone on an overpass with a camera is just too strange for people to fathom and therefore it must be something suspicious.
Anyway, here are the pictures I took to give a basic idea of what we can do with these new fun tools.
Here's the base picture. ISO 100, f/22 aperture (quite small), 1/25 of a second shutter:
When we add the polarizer we see that the sky is richer. ISO 100, f/22, but the shutter time lengthened to 1/10 of a second (which is noticeable in the further blurring of the cars):
Next we add the neutral density filter (and the polarizer) to really cut down the light. Again ISO 100 and f/22 aperture. But now the shutter time is 1 full second. Notice how the cars are almost completely gone from the scene except as they become more distant (where they don't move very far per unit time in relation to the image).
