Cellphones!

I went to UNL the other day and made it my mission to try to snap people using cellphones. Why? There is no why! (BTW --I was on the lookout for camera phone use, Darren -- but to be honest, outside of Times Square, I don't think I've ever seen people using camera phones in public!) I snagged some football pictures and some random candids too, but I'll put those in another post. Click any of the photos below to enlarge them.














































The last one turned out to be an Ipod. Oops! :)

It's A' Me!

I was testing out how slow I could handhold the new lens using interior lighting and mirror and ended up with this ego-centric self portrait. :)

Thundersnow

Good Lord, is it ever SNOWING outside! Flakes are the size of dollar coins and it's coming down at a ridiculous rate. To top it off, the sky has been rumbling with thunder -- only the second time I've experiend thundersnow.

Alleywalk

Today's photo is from an alley in Lincoln behind a parking garage (click to enlarge). It's been a while since I tilted a photo for no good reason. ;) A long time ago at work, we had a consultant from Poynter come and give a talk on all things newspaper. One of the things he pointed out is that, in the photojournalistic setting, camera tilt should only be used in instances where camera tilt actually makes visual sense or adds something to the telling of the story. I think for photojournalism, this really rings true. Often, a tilted camera is just an indication that the photographer needs a wider angle lens, as they're trying to squeeze more elements into the photo by turning it diagonal; I know this was true for me back when 28mm was the widest that I could go.

The Capitol at Sunset

The capitol building of Lincoln, Nebraska, at sunset. This was taken from atop a parking garage. (The building at left is a bank office building.) Click to enlarge.

Sunset over Lincoln

A couple photos of the sun setting over Lincoln, Nebraska. I'm kinda proud of myself: I managed to make my new lens (the 70-200 2.8) have a tiny bit of flare in the first image. :) Considering it's pointing directly at the sun, that tells you a lot about the lens' flare control. Click to enlarge.

Nerdgasm

Are you a geek? Here's one way to tell: if you think the below video is undeniably awesome and you would like to immediately copy this idea, then you, my friend, are a geek:







I wish I had some idea how in the world they were accomplishing this. The laser projector part seems pretty straight forward, but the laser pen interface has me stumped. I suppose they must have some kind of camera rigged up to a computer to track the green dot as input, which then instructs the projector to render along with the dot.

Simulating the DOF trickery of a tilt & shift with Photoshop

I ran across a very interesting tutorial today:



How to create fake miniature environments



Essentially, this tutorial is simulating an effect that can be created by using a tilt & shift lens. (Or an effect that can be created by using a normal lens with a wide aperature to take a photograph of a very small area, or a 50mm lens the size of Tokyo taking a picture of Tokyo, or a telephoto lens several miles long)



I find this tutorial interesting because our brains immediately believe that the thing that is being looked at must be very small. Why? Because many years of photography have trained us to believe that an extremely shallow depth of field can never occur over large, distant planes. This kind of depth of field can only be found in very close macro shots of very tiny objects. We have, in essence, developed a sort of visual literacy when it comes to depth of field. Yes, of course, our eyes experience depth of field, but our eyes are roughly like 18mm lenses, and as such the depth of field is fairly large. The literacy has changed a bit, too, since we've shifted from large format photography (which had much narrower DOFs) to 35mm. Likely, the image below if shown to someone from the 11th century would not appear to be "miniaturized", it would simply appear fuzzy at the top and the bottom, assuming they could comprehend the idea of a photograph at all.



Here's my fun experiment, a shot of San Francisco at sunset from the Coit Tower (click to enlarge):

Lincoln Skyline Abstract

This is another abstract shot with the 70-200 2.8. It's the Lincoln skyline. don't believe me? Just turn your head sideways! :) Click to enlarge.

Streetlight

Today's photo is an abstract of the reflection of a streetlight in downtown Lincoln, Nebraska, in my continuing adventures of playing with my new 70-200 lens. Click to enlarge. :)

Kenko Pro 300 1.4X TC test

Picked up an el-cheapo Kenko Pro 300 1.4X teleconverter the other day. Well, not so much picked up as received via Ebay from some vendor in Hong Kong. :) For as inexpensive as it is, most tests show that this teleconverter is equal to the $300+ Canon teleconverter in terms of image quality, though it's not weathersealed. (Not a big deal -- my 20D isn't weathersealed, so weathersealing is wasted on me, anyway.)



In keeping with tradition, I went down to the back-alley parking lot of my apartment and shot some pictures of a squirrel munching away at the feed that our superintendent likes to set out. This was tested with a Canon 70-200 2.8L IS and the 1.4X TC @ F4. (Basically, wide open, but the TC reduces the available light to F4) On a 20D, that's effectively about 450mm... quite a bit of reach at F4 for a lens that only weighs a few pounds! Click to enlarge:





The above is cropped in slightly from the original.






This is a 100% crop of the image to give an idea of the detail. It has been unsharp masked, so this isn't raw lens performance, but it gives you an idea what's possible with this lens and the 1.4X TC.

Josh

Here's an old picture of Josh from a camping trip we went on a few years back. This was taken at a place called "Indian Caves" in southeastern Nebraska -- quite a cool place to camp, at least for a state entirely devoid of mountains and the like. :) In the spring, they have old-timey stuff like blacksmithing and soap making. Click to enlarge.

Some more fire pics

The last batch of fire photos went over well, so here a few more from the night. :) These were all shot with my 10-22 EF-S lens, which is, by far, the favorite lens in my bag. Click to enlarge any of the photographs below:

The End of 926 South 10th Street

So, I'm going outside at 3AM to pop something in the mailbox, when I look up at the capitol building and say to myself: "Self, why is there a great big deck of fog blowing past the capitol?". After a moment of groggy contemplation, it occurs to me that that's probably not steam, it's smoke. Smoke from a... structure fire! Holy cow, a structure fire within walking distance!



No, the capitol building wasn't on fire (phew!) I hopped in my car with my camera gear, and drove down to 10th street, where an apartment building was pretty well engulfed. Slinging my tripod over my shoulder, I walked down to the fire. Neat thing about owning a big camera: everyone assumes you're shooting for media. :) (In this case, I ended up shooting for media, as we're running one of the shots in the newspaper here at work.) Fortunately, everyone got out of the building safely.



The most startling moment was when the house, which had been slowly filling with water, suddenly blew the front door right off it's hinges, nearly into the street. A tidal wave of water maybe 2 feet high came pouring out of the place, washing over the street. Wish I had shots of it, but I was busy running away, since I thought the entire building was coming down.





For what it's worth, any doubts I had about spending the extra money on the 2.8IS lens instead of the 4.0IS lens went out the window last night. The few telephoto shots that I took would have been nearly impossible at f/4, as I was already backed to the wall at 800 or 1600 ISO at 1/30th of a second or below. Here are some photos -- click any of them to enlarge in a new window.

Holy Moly!

This is a bit offtopic for my blog, but I found this video browsing around Youtube today:






And you thought skydiving was scary! This has to be one of the most spectacularly terrifying things I've ever seen anyone do, and this is coming from a guy who likes to get close to tornadoes.



You can read more about wingsuits -- the kind of garb this guy was using to "fly" over the mountain -- over at Wikipedia. Yikes.

Just Because

This is called "I'm packing my photo gear into my car trunk at my apartment, when suddenly, just for the fun of it, I unpack and assemble my camera and shoot this. And then wonder why"

Lines

This is an old black and white abstract photograph of a Kearney, Nebraska alley from back in 2001. This was shot on TMAX & developed by hand.

Josh in the Badlands

An oldie but goodie from 2001. Taken in the Badlands of South Dakota with my trusty Canon EOS-3, Sigma 70-200 2.8, and Fuji Velvia. Click for a 1280px version in a new window.

Another shrine HDR

The last couple of shrine photos were rather well received, so here's another HDR shot as the sun went down. It's a bit warmer (light color wise) now, as the sun is a bit lower. This is looking north. If you look reeeal close, you can see Lanette snapping away in the background. :) Click to enlarge to 1280px.



Part of me wishes I could get access to photograph this place after dark. The north-facing glass would make for an incredibly interesting rotating star-trail above the beams, and the cars on I-80 would create an interesting glow.

Another HDR / non HDR comparison

One of these photos is a downsampled HDR -- the other is one of the 11 photos used to assemble the HDR. Can you tell which is which? ;) Click to enlarge.

Alley Chair

I have no idea who calls this their chair; I found it sitting by itself in the back of an alley after the sun had gone down. Click to enlarge.



This is another one of those shots that just would not have been possible sans tripod before I got my new IS lens.

Listening

The last of the UNL candids series. :) Click to enlarge.

Lanette (Winter)

Some of you who've been following this site for a while may remember this picture of Lanette from a bit ago (click to supersize 1280px wide in a new window):






Me n' Lanette went out on a photo shoot this past Friday. I wanted to get out to this location again (a glass Catholic shrine between Lincoln and Omaha) and shoot a winter version of this shot -- we got there just in the nick of time. The guy who was running the visitor center was ridiculously nice, and allowed us to stay for sunset, despite the fact that it was already 15 minutes past closing. Anyhow, here's Lanette, the winter version (click to supersize in a new window):






This was shot with a Canon EOS 20D camera with a Canon EF-S 10-22mm lens. Tripoded, 5 shots were combined in Photomatix to create this image. All tone mapping was turned to minium. The image was then saved as a TIFF, opened up in Photoshop CS2, and toned.



If you want to do HDR portraiture yourself, there are four things that are important:



1. You must have a camera capable of bracketing photos (i.e., the camera must be able to take several photos in rapid succession, each photo having a different exposure).



2. You must have a tripod.



3. You must have a model that can stand very still.



4. You must have a HDR assembler/tone mapper like Photoshop CS2 or Photomatix. (This was done with Photomatix, but I prefer CS2 generally. This was one of the few applications where Photoamtix did a slightly better job.)



Essentially, you must set up your shot, have your model pose, have him or her stand very still, and then fire off all the shots. After you have all your shots, you assemble them to create an HDR, from which you can tone-map to create a pleasing image that renders on todays monitors. I have a tutorial for doing this posted here.



Props to Lanette for once again being an incredible model!

Step Lively

On THursday, I wanted to test the flare control on the new lens by shooting the sunset from atop a parking garage here in town. While I was waiting, I looked down -- and had an idea. :) I'm kinda glad I got the f/2.8 now, as the light was low enough that I'd never have stopped even the minor body movement so late in the evening with a f/4 lens. Click any image below to enlarge.

Melt

The temps are finally climbing out of the freezing mark here in Lincoln, and it seems like the whole world is melting. :) I found this pipe running meltwater downtown near the skywalk yesterday. Click to enlarge.

Gaggle

A gaggle at UNL a few days ago; click to enlarge. I'm nearly at the end of the stuff I shot -- but that's no prob, since I have the next two days off, and can hopefully do a little photo hunting. :) I hope some snow is still around; I've got a followup photo I've been meaning to do at that shrine off I-80 between Lincoln and Omaha.

NTV

I wasn't the only one at UNL looking for candid shots. :) Who watches the watchers? Why me, of course!

A few guys

From the candids a few days ago at UNL. Just to prove that I don't only shoot women. ;) Click to enlarge.

Girls on Phones

I was just telling someone yesterday how fun it is to take pictures of people using cellphone, especially women -- their facial expressions mirror the expressions they'd use if they were talking to someone face-to-face, and they usually aren't paying enough attention to realize that some guy with a huge camera is taking their picture. Great candid material, in other words. I took these while testing out the panning IS / AI servo of the lens the other day at UNL. Click to enlarge. :)

Mac Addict

Today's shot is of a woman using a Mac inside the food court of the Student Union at UNL. Shot from outside -- this worked surprisingly well. Click to enlarge.