Under the Water Tower

Looking up. Gotta love the geometry that goes into architecture.

Pentax 6x7, 35mm f/4, Provia 100F

Stairway

Another shot of a stairway going up an agricultural storage tank.

Pentax 6x7, 105mm, Portra 160

Under the Water Tower

Looking up at a water tower near Kearney, Nebraska, USA.

Pentax 6x7, 55mm f/4, Provia 100F

Grain Storage

Truck loading up a massive grain storage silo in Kearney, Nebraska, USA.

Pentax 6x7, 55mm f/4, Portra 160NC

Mini Pumpkins

Didn't even know they grew them this small!

Pentax 6x7, 105 2.4, Portra 160NC.

Round the red bend

Metal stairs spiraling around an agricultural liquid storage tank in Nebraska.

Pentax 6x7, 105mm / 2.4, Portra 160NC.

Blue tank

This is another Pentax 6x7 shot (Portra 160NC) -- it did a pretty good job of picking up the texture of this agricultural storage tank (which was storing fertilizier, I believe).  The color has more to do with the reflection of the blue sky.

Water Tower

Still playing with my new (to me) Pentax 6x7 -- this is a shot of a local water tower using the 55mm lens and Provia 100F.  There is something cool about water towers in this part of the country -- sometimes they're almost like a pin in a map to remind you where small towns are.

Playing with Pentax 6x7

Got a chance to play around with a Pentax 6x7 recently -- it makes outstanding images.  

Silo

A rather cool grain silo near Grand Island, Nebraska.  This is an HDR shot -- and was one of the things I tried to stay busy with as I kept my eye on the lackluster storms in the area this past Friday.

Just messing around with long exposures -- this is a shot of the UNK football field at night, without illumination. This was a four minute exposure.

Midway

This was shot over the course of two days at the 2011 Nebraska State Fair. There is something uniquely bizarre and exciting about the atmosphere at a fair midway, especially after dark. This is my first real attempt at shooting time lapse.



Technical details: This was shot with a Canon 20D capturing stills with an intervalometer; nearly 5000 photographs were required to make this video. It was primarily shot with a Tokina 11-16, but one of the shots was shot with a Canon nifty 50 1.8. The time compression is one second of video time = one minute real time. The fun thing about shooting this as stills is that the available resolution is technically near 4K, meaning it'd look as good on the silver screen as it does on Youtube. :)

"I dunno" by grapes
ccmixter.org/files/grapes/16626
is licensed under a Creative Commons license:
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Petapixel Interview

Sweet -- Petapixel, a blog that I follow, recently ran an interview with me. If you've ever wondered about where to go to learn more about shooting storm photos, give it a read!

Photo by Lanette Epps; used with permission

Oloneo HDR

I've been farting around with Oloneo HDR software (full disclosure -- they sent me a complimentary copy; hard to say no to free!) to see how it compares to the other software I use and have used, including Photoshop CS2, CS5, and Photmatix 4. So far, the strengths of Oloneo seem to be in ghost removal (it's been almost perfect at this in most test images I've tried) and in doing a good job of rendering more "photoreaslistic" HDR shots -- i.e., not overcooked. If you've followed me in the past, you know that one of my pet peeves is overdone HDR images that look like something out of a chemically induced Hunter Thompson story. It also has some rather powerful tools (seperate curves for saturation and luminence, for example, with an instantly updating histogram) that make fine tuning an image possible, if you know what you're doing.

Oloneo's weakness currently seems to be that it has no chromatic abberation correction, which is a problem as ultrawide lenses like the ones I use often have a bit of this -- and it gets magnified by HDR photomerges. I tried to get around this by doing the CA removal in Adobe Bridge, saving as TIFF files, and merging the TIFFs, but this resulted in even more (and even weirder) artifacts showing up in the final image. It would seem Oloneo really prefers to ingest RAW files.

Here's a quick comparison I did of an old image that I revisit from time to time whenever I have a new HDR program to play with:

Photoshop CS2 Version:




Photoshop CS5 Version:




Photomatix 4 (then taken into Photoshop for final adjustments):




Oloneo 1.0 (then taken into Photoshop for final adjustments):

Joplin tornado destruction

This is a photo from Joplin, Missouri, May 25, 2011. Joplin was struck by an EF-5 tornado.

Testing a new layout today -- it'll make older posts look a little stupid, but going forward, all images need to be large.

Quite the truck

Hipstamatic shot of a storm chasing truck we found at the National Storm Chasing convention in Denver, Colorado. I think this is one of Tim Samaras's vehicles.

Got a pen?

Found this awesome wall of ballpoint pens inside a trendy retro / antique store in the Old Market of Omaha. This is only about 1/5 of the wall; it went on for quite a long way.

Hipstamatic kitty

Like I said, really digging this hipstamatic app. Cats are pretty much my kryptonite -- so even if they're cliche, I usually find myself wanting to take pics of them. Found this little guy hiding today.

Digging Hipstamatic

I've been playing around with the iPhone app "Hipstamatic". For a $2 program ($7 if you purchase all the available add-ons), this is a heck of a fun way to mess around with what is essentially a cell phone camera.

Bzzzzzzzzzzz

We recently visited a friend who runs a barbershop (The Beard and Mane) in Omaha; his shop is like stepping back in time. Included with a shave and a haircut is a good old fashioned vibrating scalp massage, using a vintage scalp vibrator. Now that's service!

Interesting building near the railyard in Ravenna, NE. Shot with a 1949 Argus C3 on Kodak ProImage 100.

ISS Flyover: Day 2

Thanks to orbital mechanics, I got to have a second go at shooting the ISS on Feb 23. I gave up on the telephoto and went with the superwide.

ISS Flyover

Man, you really need a longer lens for this. Tried doing this with a Canon 70-200 @ 200 with a 1.4x teleconverter. Flew over Kearney, Nebraska on Feb 22 (Feb 23 GMT time).: