Pom!

Tonight, after two weeks of exhaustion, I got out my camera. Two weekends ago the bug the family had came back with a bit of a vengeance and we ended up at the ER with my little dude. He vomited for seven straight days before we finally shook the bug.

This last weekend was my daughter's fifth birthday, so we had a party with her kindergarten classmates, and one with our family. I took some pictures then as well, but those are just for us :)

So, the subject today was a case of bright red pomegranates that finally came back into stock at our local Costco. We are big pom fans in our house, so this was a joyous occasion.

The first shot is the cutoff stem, which tend to be full of these curled little fibers that remind me of the Sarlacc in Return of the Jedi :)



Second, I was just playing around with contrasting subjects, and my wife pointed out that our composter was full of little garden slugs. How could I resist giving one a chance to sample such an exotic treat?



I named him Sluggy Slug. Good boy, Sluggy Slug.

Here there be dragons!

Today was a family trip back to Dorothy Lake, which I last visited in September of last year. Last time I was shooting landscapes, but today I was hunting dragons!

Where there are mosquitos, there are dragonflies, and that's what I ended up shooting on day 181. Here are my favourites of the day, all shot with the 70-200 and 1.4x extender:







The majority of the trip involved splashing around with a four year old in the lake however, so I'm exhausted!

RGB

So I was a bit rush for shooting on day 133, and I've been moved to a new office at work that is not downtown, so my opportunities there have pretty much vanished.

I was screwing around with my reflection setup, and decided to try not blowing out the background completely. The reflection and refraction of the light made some interesting gradients, and I decided to add more glass, water, and a splash of primary colours.



This is pretty much just an experiment but I kind of like it! I also lit the setup from above and below the glass platform instead of on the sides as well, so there was a change in reflection from that as well.

These sorts of shots are helpful to me. I learned a fair bit, and I got a good result in a fairly short time. Also I learned that hand blown crystal glasses are not always the same height even if they came out of the same box. Who knew?

Project 365-ish?

I didn't manage a good shot yesterday. I did shoot, but there was nothing worth keeping. On most nights, I wouldn't let that go and I'd try a few other shots, but I was dealing with the combination of a sick child not sleeping, surgery for my infant son coming up on Thursday, a deadline to finish my Cancer Society canvassing, and throwing my back out. Not a fun day. Today went a little smoother.

Today's shot was inspired by a shot taken for a DPS weekend photography challenge, which had the 'High Contrast Black and White' theme. The shot I liked and wanted to emulate is this one which is a simple shot of black face cards.

I went a little different with my shot, introducing a little colour and changing up the cards themselves. I went with the "Dead Man's Hand", Aces and Eights:



I allowed a little shadow to show, and cranked the black levels. These cards are old, scratched and yellowed a bit so an increase to the contrast was also needed to push the cards themselves to pure white. I like the effect, with almost a 'halo' of shadow. The red also adds a little more zip.

I like both shots, so I'm happy with this. I'll attempt to keep up my shooting for the rest of the week, but depending on my little guys' surgery goes, I may slip a little more on the '365' part of my Project 365.

Just smoke, no mirrors...

Hello my friends, and welcome to episode 98 of 'Stupid Dave Tricks!'

Tonight, your intrepid host set up a couple of flashes with red and blue gels, his lightbox (as a background), and started burning some incense. All of this for more smoke shots, but with a colourful twist!





These shots are basically all about the setup. The background is white, but illuminated with a blue-gelled flash to the subject left. This flash was set to very low power, 1/32nd. On the right, a red-gelled strobe illuminates the smoke at high power, 1/4th, and it is snooted to prevent too much light bleed on the background.

Fun shots, but like a lot of these setup shots, I took a *lot* of exposures to get a few that I liked. Focus issues are part of the problem, but the random nature of the smoke also means that you are going to do a little spray-and-pray and hope for good results. I like both shots and I have at least two more that I'd consider keepers, so overall it was a good night.

On the downside, if any cops come over and sniff the air, I am so getting busted.

Strawberry Milk

I'm continuing to play around with high-speed shots and speedlites, and I did some more reading about really freezing motion. For day 91, I set up another shot, and did some more experimentation.

Today, I am going to post the picture first, and then explain what I did differently:



One of the things I have found hard about shots like this is that the max flash sync speed on most DSLRs is about 1/200th of a second. Basically you can't shoot any faster than that without getting a black or partially obliterated exposure due to the shutter being in the exposure when the flash fires. Since your average flash is only generating light for bursts as quickly as 1/8000th of a second, it's somewhat frustrating. You can use something called high-speed sync but you lose a lot of light doing so. It works, but it's imperfect.

Having done more reading, I wanted to try an alternate method of exposing high-speed, which is to use a long exposure on the shutter in a dark room, and remotely triggering the flash. This should, essentially, give you the equivalent of a very, very short exposure, and that is how this shot was taken.

Ideally, you would trigger your flash with something like a StopShot system, but I don't have one. In this case, the flash was fired by the test button and hand-timed. I can't complain, I managed this on the third or fourth try at which point I was tired of cleaning up milk splashes!

I think the effect works, and this is absolutely something I am going to continue to play. I also want to finish uploading my galleries on the business website, so far I have landscapes and portraits complete.

Time to start promoting the business soon!

That's some strong tea...

Looking for another 'trick' shot, and I mostly hit the target today with the exception of a small focus problem.

The shot for today (Day 90, whoo!) involves smoke shot with a speedlite, inverted to look like steam, colourized and composited on a second shot. Not super complicated, but a neat effect.

Here is the shot:



You can see the focus issue in the smoke/steam. It was shot in the dark, so manual focus was required, and since the smoke would move and spread around it was very hard to focus on. This portion of the shot was tricky, and I took seven sets of exposures and this was about the best for shape and focus.

The other hard part of this is that it's composited on a solid, pure white background, so any noise or colour variation in the composited images is obvious. A fair bit of cleanup with a feathered white brush was required, especially around the smoke, but I think the fact that it *is* smoke meant I could be a little loose with it and it wouldn't look awful.

All in all, another shot that I am pretty proud of. I really didn't think I would be pulling shots like this off after only 90 days of a-shot-a-day.

The Pinto (mato)

So here we are on day 78, it's after 10:30 and I haven't even had a chance to consider what I am going to shoot, let alone compose and shoot it. Also, I'm bone tired due to my little guy's teething.

I was home late after taking my daughter to see my best friend's teenager perform in her school's production of Seussical, which was a very well done little show, but it meant a very late night, and my model at work fell through for a shoot I wanted to do at lunchtime, so panic set in and I started throwing together all sorts of little objects and knick-knacks to see what might look interesting.

I settled on this:



Hey, at least this one isn't taken on glass, so I consider that a small improvement over the last few days, but really I have to admit that this just looked funny to me somehow, especially the little pepper with it's antennae. Not a clue why, not sure what made me compose it like this, but I like it.

Of course, that could just be the exhaustion talking.

Swing on the Spiral

For day 66, I am still working on some post production stuff from yesterday's shoot, so this post will be a bit brief.

I've been working on my light sources lately, and I've got my lightbox stuff down pretty well, so it was time to stretch my legs a bit and play with it. I picked up a creative colour gel set a while back so I threw them on the strobes to make a pretty simple object look a bit more interesting.

Here's the result:



The subject is a tightly coiled roll of velcro fabric, and there is a blue gel on the left strobe and a red one on the right strobe. This was shot at f/10 (ISO 100, 1/200th) but the DOF is still super tight since this was very close to the front element of the lens. In this case, I like that the spiral fades out to blur a bit at the edges, it seems to balance out the sharp plane of focus.

A fun little shot, I think.

Red light district.

Day 61 and my hand still kinda throbs. Silly little snake, people aren't food!

The snakes were instrumental in today's shot though. I was playing around with directly shooting light sources, and I was snapping a few shots of spiral CFLs. They looked kind of fun, but they lack intensity.

I was shooting a red bulb, when I realized that I have another source of red light, the heat lamps on my reptile cages. I flipped on of the reflectors over, took a few captures before I could dial in a manual exposure I liked.

Here is the keeper of the bunch:



Okay, I have to say it. I titled this one, "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave..." Since my name actually *is* Dave, I really don't have a choice, do I?

Final exposure settings were 1/60th, f/6.3 at ISO 200. I had dialed in ISO 200 earlier in the day and forgot to switch it back, but the noise level at ISO 200 on the XSi is still basically nil. I did bring this up about a 1/6th of a stop in post processing as well, just to fine-tune it.

I don't recall if I mentioned it earlier or not, but I have another family/child shoot on Saturday, so I'll keep building my portfolio in anticipation of launching my small business soon. I'm less nervous about this one, and I take that as a good sign.

It's not just for icing...

Day 52 and I did another reshoot of a concept I had earlier. I like doing this since it helps me see where I've improved both technically and artistically.

Today I tried a reshoot of the idea I had in this shot.

Here is the result today:



I would say that this is an improvement :)

The only thing I couldn't quite nail is the slight shadow band across the middle, which as far as I an tell is caused by the acrylic box that this was shot in. I thought I had enough light on my background, but perhaps not.

A Splash of Colour

Day 50, and this has to be a quick post before I make dinner.

I finally found a flat-sided acrylic container to do more water shots with, and I had the idea to freeze some ice cubes with food colouring in them.

Add the two together, and this is the result:



f/25, ISO 100, 1/200th shutter. 580EX II on-camera at 1/2 power. I should have tried to lower the flash power and blow out the background more with a larger aperture, but I wanted to really freeze the action. Freeze. Ice. *snicker*

Really like this shot though. One of my best I think.

Brick and Iron

Day 48 and the furnace is still running. So sorry, but no new furnace parts to photograph today.

Got a chance for a bit of a walk-around today, and I went back to a spot that I noticed a few days before. I would have shot it then, but I left my SD card at home that day.

So, this is a shot where I was trying to capture some interesting lines and a few spots of colour. Not sure how I did, but here it is:



These stairs are the rear fire escape of the old Odeon Theatre in downtown Winnipeg. The entire structure is cobwebbed with these, and I'm pretty sure if there was a fire, you'd die just trying to figure how the hell to get off the fire escapes. This crop was selected to highlight the rusted red doors, otherwise there just wouldn't be any tone at all.

I'm on the fence about this shot. I like the subject, but I'm not sure what more I could do to make it pop more.

ISO 100, f/8, 1/50th shutter. Shot with the kit lens at 55mm.

I (Heart) Chocolate

Day 42, and it's almost Valentine's day. Thus, the stores are packed with candy and knicknacks in a million shades of red. Naturally, a young man's thoughts wander to the various ways he can attempt not to disappoint his wife this year.

A secret Valentine project has begun, but I dare not speak of it here, since my good lady wife reads this blog. Instead, I shall throw out another Valentine's inspired photo, courtesy of the candy that was purchased for my Daughter's pre-school class:



Is there anything that says Valentine's Day more than a heart made of hearts that are made of chocolate and are also suckers? I do not think so.

ISO 100, f/20, 1/200th shutter in the lightbox. 580EX II to the right at 1/4 power, and the LP-120 on the left at 1/2 power, fired with the Pocket Wizards.

Luck and the amateur photographer...

Day 36 and I got lucky.

My initial thought was to mix oil in coloured water and shoot it in a glass to see what sort of patterns I could get. The results were AWFUL. Curved glass just reflects too much, and I could never quite get the focus right. Ugly pics, pretty much a write-off.

Well, knowing I have had some good luck shooting top down, I took one or two shots. I got lucky.



I just love the patterns in this, and it looks like the surface of a star to me. I just really, really like this shot.

There has been some post processing on this. The flash was not set up to take the image top down, so it threw some harsh red light on the lower right, although the rest of the background was pure white, so I cleaned that up in GIMP.

I shot this with the 60mm, since the 24-70 and I didn't get a chance to walk around today. The next three days are going to be big ones for me, and I hope that I can share some reasonably decent portrait work with you!

The rich part of town...

For day 35, a friend and I went down to Wellington Crescent during lunch to see what we could see. In the summer, I'll be returning there to shoot some of the grand old churches, but today was about frost, snow and things that are red.

I kept three pictures out of about 15 I took, and three of the four subjects I shot had keepers. My average is getting better.

Shot number one:



This old tree is in front of an old red brick building. You don't see a lot of brick in Winnipeg as the extreme hot/cold swings we get are very hard on them. In the wealthier parts of town though, brick rules. This building has had some modern HVAC bolted on to it and the exhaust blows right over this tree causing dense frost crystals to form.

Shot two is the result of the same exhaust:



I think I like this better than the branch shot, the depth of field adds an element, and the wonky leaning fence is kind of charming as well. It lacks in colour, but I think the sparkle of the frost would be lost in a monochrome conversion.

Finally, across the street is this view:



I'm an absolute sucker for repeating patterns and shapes, so these doors really caught my eye. I tried a few crops removing the road and/or the fire hydrant, but I like the way the road leads the eye across the shot. Your opinion may vary, please let me know if you think so.

All in all the 24-70 performed fairly well, but it's a beast of a lens to lug around.