Seigafuse.Net » mike

You are taking pictures of a spoon?

mike — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 16:12:47 +0000

That is what my son said when he saw my setup for the shot below. In my defense I was doing this for an assignment where the object was to have people try to guess what the picture was of. Also, the setup was involved since I wanted different colors on the surface than through the holes. All in all I was happy with the results, even though my son was laughing at me

Grunge or No Grunge

mike — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 02:39:19 +0000

I thought I’d give textures a try to see if I like them. I do like the effect on this shot, I’m sure they wont work as well with all shots.

First the original shot:

I like the original and the colored bokeh.

Now the same shot with a grunge texture added as another layer with opacity lowered:

I like the texture in the negative space around the guitar, although I’m not sure if I like the effect on the bokeh…

Christmas Bokeh

mike — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 00:25:52 +0000

Christmas is always a good time for bokeh since there are always a lot of lights around to use for fun bokeh shots. It is even more fun when you create a custom aperture mask and create customized bokeh like below.

Light Painting and Strobist Fun

mike — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 01:40:00 +0000

I went out with members from the camera club to shoot some abandoned buildings at night doing light painting and using strobes. We all had a good time and came away with some decent shots. Two of mine are shown below.

Concept Shooting

mike — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 12:56:08 +0000

I did a bit of “concept” shooting this past week. This means I have a theme or topic to shoot and then plan and create a photo to fit or represent that theme. This week over at the Digital Photography School the theme for the weekly contest is Bridges. While I am sure there will be plenty of great entries with terrific shots of the golden gate or other stunning bridges, I chose the other meaning of bridge; namely connect or reduce the distance between. In particular I wanted to create a shot that portrayed the saying that “music is the bridge between heaven and earth”. My first attempt below turned out very well.

I used a wider aperture to create the bokeh (blurred out background) using Christmas lights to create the colorful bokeh. I had considered using an aperture mask to shape the bokeh lights to musical notes, but thought it a bit too much (gimicky).

But, I had simply used ambient light and with that lighting and the brown walls I had some color balance issues. Also, I wasted a lot of space on the upper half of the shot and thought what about the colored bokeh stretching up to “heaven” and maybe a bright light at the top to represent heaven? So I redid the shoot using off camera flashes and the Christmas lights arranged to extend up to the light representing heaven. I had my white balance set to flash and the black color of my guitar came through correctly this time. I also changed the orientation to allow more room for extending up to heaven. The shot I ended up below with is my entry for this week’s contest. Hopefullly the judges/moderators will like it as much as I do

Blue Marsh Lake

mike — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 19:08:47 +0000

I took an early morning drive to Blue Marsh Lake hoping to catch some meteors at the tail end of the Perseid meteor showers, but by the time the weather cooperated the shower was past peak. I did manage to get a nice shot of the stars and some clouds over the lake though. I used tungsten white balance since that makes the blue of the sky more dramatic on predawn shoots like this.

I stuck around for the sunrise and those same clouds came out pretty dramatic with the use of my Cokin GND.

All in all a good early morning shoot despite the lack of sleep

Testing out the Pentax Option W90

mike — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 19:15:57 +0000

I recently purchased the Pentax Optio W90 as a great little walking around camera. It is dustproof, drop proof and water proof so it should be good to survive hikes, swims and climates I would not take my DSLR into. It also has all of the features one would expect in a modern point and shoot camera, such as face and smile detection and HD video. It also has a very nifty digital microscope mode and three LEDs on the front to help with super macro shots. Other scene modes round out a very complete feature set (pet mode, landscape, night scene and night portrait modes, etc). This is not a full review of the camera, there are plenty of those already around on the Internet; this is just a summary with some shots taken in my first few days with the camera.

A self-portrait taken with the camera at arms length while underwater in the pool.

My son doing a cannonball into the pool.

A beetle dining on a Hibiscus flower.

Some mushrooms growing out of some mulch.

Saturday Sunrise Series Farm Edition

mike — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 12:26:09 +0000

I went out very early today to see if I could get some pictures of today’s lunar eclipse, but unfortunately the moon dipped below my horizon too soon. I was out early enough to see the ISS fly overhead, but I didn’t have my camera setup. I took some pictures at the reservoir, but wasn’t getting anything special so I picked up and left. I was almost home when I saw the sun through some haze/fog and headed for the Oley farm fields. I am pretty happy with the results. I used a Cokin P121 (ND8) graduated neutral density filter on these to that I could get a well exposed foreground without an overexposed sky. I mainly used cloudy white balance, using tungsten on one (look for the one that is blue ). I pushed the contrast on some of these but other than that these are not processed.

Strobist Sunset Shoot

mike — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 02:30:16 +0000

My son was kind enough to pose for some shots at sunset while out with his new longboard. I used a single strobe on a Cactus V2S wireless trigger to add a little drama to the lighting.

On this one I also used a Graduated Neutral Density Filter to darken the sky, which made the clouds more dramatic

And finally on this one I used the strobe, GND and processed it with a couple of layers and blending to add even more drama.

Saturday Sunrise Series, French Creek Edition

mike — Sat, 15 May 2010 12:42:15 +0000

Continuing my frequent Saturday morning sunrise series (when the weather cooperates and I can get myself up that early). I actually wanted to go to Hopewell Furnace, but the gates were closed and locked so I went a little further down the road to French Creek State Park and took some pictures of the sun rising over Hopewell Lake.

The last one with the boats is an HDR processed from a single RAW file saved 4 times (0 to +3 EV), processing was done using Photomatix.