Let’s Go To The Ex!

For A week or so now, I’ve been anxiously awaiting the opening of the C.N.E. because of the awesome night photography opportunities that it presents. When I heard that opening day was going to be $1.75 I must say I got a little giddy, pair that with finding free parking, and you could say that self containment was slightly difficult to locate. I didn’t get to spend nearly enough time there, but I was able to get some great shots.

Sometimes, just having the camera out sparks a bit of curiosity from strangers, leading to a good old fashioned photo op. This great couple was walking by, while I was taking a long exposure of the Midway and asked what I was taking pictures of “anything” I replied. “How about us?”

I do need to apologize to the high five jumpers as your pictures didn’t work out. Sorry about that.

Stage Lighting Photoshoot

We’ve been in need of some new team pictures at work for quite some time now, and with the recent addition of new stage lighting, I decided it was time to tackle the project. (it is, after all, my job)
I created backgrounds that were meant to reflect our roles and our personalities and projected them onto the screen to use as a backdrop. The stage lighting created somewhat difficult lighting so I needed to do a fair bit of reflecting from the bottom to even things out a bit. I would have loved to have another 4 of 5 hours to get it perfect. here are the results.

They say a photographer needs to be comfortable on the other side of the lens in order to grow as a photographer, apparently, I’ve got some growing to do. Self portrait shooting is very difficult, after 25 shots or so, I finally pulled it off though…sort of.

you can photograph lightning

It’s actually quite easy, and last night I finally got the chance to do it.

The basics of photographing lightning include a DSLR camera, and a tripod. Most people recommend having a cable release for your shutter, but I didn’t use one because of the length of my shutter speed.

Here are the steps.

1) Find lightning.
2) Set up camera on tripod.
3) Point camera in direction of lightning. (trickier than it sounds)
4) Don’t get hit by lightning
4) Choose aperture that will allow for appropriate depth of field (I used f/8)
5) Set exposure to B or BULB (the bulb setting allows you to keep the shutter open for as long as you like, this is the part that requires fiddling depending on the amount of available light. It is also the reason that you would want to use a release cable as you don’t want the camera to shake.
6) Experiment, and enjoy the results

After I showed Michelle some of the pics I got, she told me to ‘get my butt back out there’ I said ‘you do it it’s easy’ so after asking how, she did it! This is the one that she got. It’s pretty freakin’ awesome!

The toughest part about photographing lightning is actually pointing your camera in the right direction at the right time. Michelle and I likened it to switching slot machines at a casino. There were a lot of really cool shots in the sky last night, but most of them resulted in someone else walking away with the jackpot. Oh to own that wide angle lens.

Light Painting

We have these floating globes in our pool. They have little solar panels built into them so that when it gets dark, they light up and change colours every few seconds. I ‘ve been wanting to photograph them for a little while now. Last night I took the time to capture them on 30sec exposure

The Last image is a blending of all of the others that I threw together in Photoshop.

Blackberry Macro

I read an article that told me about a mounting ring that will allow me to turn my 50mm lens around, thus turning it into a macro lens. After going on a bit of a hunt and doing some research, I found out that this is in fact true, but these rings aren’t very popular in Canada, even difficult to come by. I was told of a bunch of other options, such as filter kits, extension tubes, etc. And then it dawned on me, why don’t I just turn the lens around and hold it in place. I know, not the world’s best solution, and one major missing component is any control over focus or depth of field, but the picture didn’t turn out all too bad. I will continue the experiment.