I wanted to highlight the part of the shot I liked best since I couldn’t frame around the bits I didn’t like.  I used the same technique from here to remove the color from the rest of the shot.  Simple, geometric.  Railroad lines – I’m always trying to frame those.

End of the Line is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures

Fence Building Time Lapse from Ari Brown on Vimeo.

Time-Lapse Fence Construction is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures

Other times, seeing a scene through a new light reflects something new.  These Through the Viewfinder pictures were all about a new way of seeing.  I like any sort of new framing device.

As it so happens there are a bunch of those big metal telescopes (kinda like this one) across the street from my work, overlooking Elliott Bay.  I was kinda curious if I could shoot through them.  Turns out I can.

That’s Smith Tower, poking out over downtown.  Want to see a few more?  Hit the jump.

Through the telescope, the harbor cranes have a sort of hazy spider look to them.  Getting the alignment right (to keep the image mostly circular) and getting the focus right by pulling the camera in and out takes a few more hands than I have but it worked out eventually.

There are also some fun framing issues.  Since only the center of the image is in focus, you don’t have the opportunity to do some of the things you can do with your camera alone.  I think I was so busy trying to get the superstructure of the ship in focus while getting a bit of the Olympics behind that the original came out all crooked.  Luckily, some things can be fixed later.

I think I’m liking this.  TtT is the new TtV – just you wait.

Through the Telescope is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures

As such, every snowstorm up here is a Snowpocalypse.  Here are a few pictures from the one currently gripping the city.

How it starts:

Full snow accumulation.  Sorry about the blur – taken from my steamy living room:

Probably my favorite picture.  Mental note – things that are safe from the rain are not necessarily safe from blowing snow:

One last photo-note for everyone out there.  When you’re taking pictures in the snow, you want to over-expose.  In film, it really mattered.  With RAW, you can do it later, as I did here, but if you’re shooting JPGs and you want them to come out well, overexpose by at least one stop.  If you don’t do it all the time it might take some fiddling to figure it out, but unless you want dark pictures, you should take the time.

The theory behind it is simple.  Cameras are trying to make the scene average out to 18% gray.  If you fill the frame with something very bright (like snow, sand, or reflected sunlight), the camera will underexpose it to make it less bright.  If you actually want it to look the way it should, you need to have the camera over-expose.

Pictures from Seattle Snowpocalypse 2010 is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures

It’s really not too hard!  Hit the jump for the whole walkthrough!

Alright – first, credit where credit is due.  I learned basically everything here from the (often) wonderful Photojojo, so check them out.  so I started with this panorama from a couple posts back.  It had a few good things going on:

1. It’s a panorama.
2. Both the sky and the foreground have little going on.  I’ll say right here that the sky is most important – there was a dock in the foreground that I wish wasn’t there, but you can get around it.
3. They had a horizon line which was about even on both the right and left.

There were a few small problems though, and first thing is sorting them out:

1. Things weren’t perfectly level.  There are plenty of ways to do it, but what you’re shooting for are features that are the same height where they touch the right and left edges of your image.  One way to sort this out is to use the grid (View -> Show -> Grid in Photoshop) to see how far off you are, and then Edit -> Free Transform or Edit -> Transform -> Rotate to make it so the right and left sides are even.  After that crop your rectangle.
2. Things were darker on one side than the other.  This can be sort of subtle in the original panorama, but since in our new planet the edges are going to touch, you need to sort this out.  There are also plenty of techniques to do this but what I did was us an curves adjustment layer to lighten up the dark bits, then use a gradient set to lighten over the top to apply it to the left side more than the right.  This doesn’t have to be exact.  It should be, but hey – I didn’t get it right, so good enough!  On to the actual steps:

Once you have your panorama with even edges, left and right brightness roughly the same, and a plain fore and background, you’re ready to go!

1. Turn it into a square.  Do Image -> Image Size and uncheck the Constrain Proportions box.  Now you can resize (and stretch) your rectangle into a square.  Make your height equal to whatever your width is and hit ok.
2. Flip it over.  This is kinda weird, but unless you want an inside out planet, you need to start with things upside down.  Hit Image -> Image Rotation -> 180º.
3. Make the magic happen.  Select Filter -> Distort -> Polar Coordinates, then select Rectangular to Polar and hit ok.
   
4. Magic, eh?  Last little tweaking step.  Most images have a part that is more interesting than others.  I like to throw that at the top.  In this case, I liked the buildings as they stand out from the trees.  I used Edit -> Free Transform and rotated, then cropped the image to the way you see it here.

Pretty good, eh?  I really like how this looks with a gray sky and water in the foreground but it would be interesting to see what other subjects could be used.  Maybe something with a big chunk of blacktop in the front?  a bunch of desert sand?  I’ve been watching for the right place to shoot something I could use for this for probably 6 months.  Keep your eyes peeled too.

Make Your Own Planet is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures

I was pretty pleased, reviewing on the camera.  Pleased enough that I forgot about the downsides.  Doing things in the dark is just difficult.  I generally like shooting things a bit farther away, because it’s really hard to tell what is and isn’t in focus.  If you have more distance between your camera and the beginning of your subject, it’s easier to get enough depth of field to get them all sharper.  I did bring along a flashlight to check focus up close, but… it becomes a pain.  I also stepped in a lot of goose shit.  That’s just how it is.  This being Greenlake, I wasn’t even worried about getting mugged for my backpack full of camera lenses.  All was good, right?

Well… yes until I got home and saw a line of blue across all my shots:

All.  The.  Way.  Across.

You don’t see it in the panorama above because they have all been laboriously removed in Photoshop.  After I found the problem, I immediately shot a few more pictures with other lenses, batteries, whatever – I wasn’t happy about this.  They’re all the same, including with the lens cap on.  Any aperture, ISO speed, whatever.  I did some research.

If you want to get technical, this is called a stuck pixel or maybe a whole row of them.  It is slightly different from a hot pixel, which would be white all the time.  All that matters is it is going to ruin my pictures.  The internet is rife with folk remedies about taking off your lens, setting your camera to manual cleaning mode (where the mirror flips up) for a few minutes and then turning it off and reattaching your lens.  Maybe it works for some people, but it didn’t do anything for me.

Since hot or stuck pixels (at least a couple of them) are nothing new, there are some other options out there.  Some cameras have options to use a dark frame (basically a picture taken with the lens cap on which should contain light only on the problem pixels) to cancel out the noise in the good frames.  The theory is that since the bad pixels are always in the same place, you can map them and work around them.  I’ve yet to find any software that works correctly with my camera and since I’m a few weeks past the grace period on Canon’s warranty, I’m still unsure what happens next.  I see a lot of healing brush in my future!

Night Panorama – The Revenge of the Stuck Pixel is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures

Green Sea Turtles are endangered but fairly prevalent in Hawaii.  The islands are also the only place on earth that these guys actually come out of the water to bask in the sun.  Getting pictures underwater is a bit harder though.  Most of the time the are found in the super murky shallows eating algae off the rocks.  I finally managed to catch this one in deeper water in Shark’s Cove on the north shore of Oahu.

Underwater photography is a whole different bag of tricks – just like taking pictures of food, I only dabble.  First off, you need a camera.  Although some point and shoots these days are at least nominally waterproof, I prefer a specialized housing.  Canon wins by a country mile here, because they have for many years produced really nice waterproof housings for many of their point and shoot cameras that are, as these things go, pretty darn cheap.  Getting your camera underwater is just the first issue.  The second is you have to be able to actually use it.  Luckily here, your best bet is just throwing it in automatic mode – using the buttons through the housing is possible, but so cumbersome that you won’t want to do much.  Next you need good visibility.  I’ve taken pictures of turtles underwater before but most of them look like this:

The problem is that turtles and many other critters like it shallow, where sand and other muck is often in the water.  The farther you get from the shallows, usually the better.  Color fades fast at depth as well, so unless you get perfectly clear water, bright sunlight, and shallow depth, you have to play with the image after capture to try and make it look good.  People who are serious about this kind of thing buy monstrous rigs with huge flashes.  They generally scuba dive (so you can get very close to something and actually hold still, which you can’t do very well holding your breath) and well… before you take your first picture you’re out $10,000.  Not the kind of barrier to entry I’m interested in.  For now, get yourself a snorkel and mask, a cheap underwater camera and a place with good visibility and try your hand at it.

Swimming With The Turtles is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures

A year or two ago, I realized you could make watermelon juice (of if you wanna get fancy and Mexican, watermelon Agua Fresca) with just a blender.  Even if you have a juicer, this is much faster, easier, and you end up with a built-in pitcher.  Oddly enough, watermelon juice in the store is really expensive – something like $2.50/pint.  This recipe makes about a quart for about $1.50 in about 5 minutes.  What’s not to like?

To make the juice, just cube 1/4 watermelon and throw it in the blender – it should just fill the thing.  The beautiful part is it really doesn’t matter too much if it is seeded or seedless as everything is getting pulverized.  Add to that about 1 Tbsp lime juice (or lemon, or nothing if you don’t have it) and 2 tsp sweetener.  I like agave nectar, but you could use honey or sugar or nothing – it’s easy like that.  Throw the blender in high gear and let it run.  Odds are it’s not going to do much for a minute, so remove the middle circle bit of the lid and use the handle of a wooden spoon to smash things together until it gets a grip, at which point thing will quickly turn juicy.  Be careful not to jam that thing down too far though – splinters in juice aren’t wonderful.

After the blender has run for 3 or 4 minutes, you have a choice.  You can drink it as-is, or you can strain it through a sieve or cheesecloth to remove the bigger pulpy bits.  I don’t care much either way, but you might.  Refrigerate whatever is left – it tastes great cold.  Just make sure to stir it back up before serving.

I had a good time taking a picture of the blender to get this shot.  My wife saw it sitting there and realized it would make a good shot – she was right.  Since it was too big for my light tent, I took a piece of white posterboard out of the light tent and propped it on a table to simulate the same shape.  I used my flash off-camera to blow out the background, but I had to use a pretty long exposure to get the watermelon to expose.  I could have done better with a reflector to open up the right side a bit, but I was ready to make juice, so this is what you get.

Watermelon Agua Fresca, Sin Juicer is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures

This shot isn’t new, but it’s also from my 100 mm macro.  It comes courtesy of the shots I did at the zoo way back when.  What it does share, however, is the super shallow depth of field.

I love keeping things simple.  If you’re blessed with a subject isolated from a background, you’re all set.  If you’re (more likely) taking pictures of something with a distracting background, shooting for shallow DoF takes care of the problem for you.

If you don’t have a macro lens, you can still get shallow DoF, at least to a point.  Here are the steps:

1.  Open it up.  Whatever your available aperture settings (f-stop) are, make sure you’re using the widest (smallest number) possible.  This is often not a problem as unless you’re shooting under a lot of light, most cameras will do this automatically.  For the cheaters out there, the “Portrait” setting found on most cameras is going to pick settings to minimize depth of field for the same reasons as I describe above.  Use it as a quick way to get these settings.

2.  Get as close as possible to your subject.  Each camera and lens has a minimum focusing distance, and unfortunately this can be much farther than you want, but get as close as you can and still focus.

3.  Position yourself so that things in the picture other than the subject are as far away as possible – just get as much separation as you can.

That’s it – with any luck, you should end up with a sharp subject and buttery smooth bliss in the background.

Sad Sad Elephant is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures

Starting with Photoshop CS4, Adobe changed all that.  There was a panorama tool built right in, and it had a magic setting called “Auto”.  With CS5 it got even better.  No matter what you throw at it, it blends, warps, and just works magic.  The pictures always look good.  Always.  Here is my latest:

Like before, I’m posting my panoramas at twice the width of most of my pictures so you can see a little of the magic in there!

This is a shot from the end of highway 270 on the north shore of the big island of Hawaii.  Stretching out to the east is the Waipio Valley.  From this side, near Hawi, you can drive only so far, and then you can hike.  The beach below is only 20 or 30 minutes, but you can go a couple days farther if you’re stupid brave enough.  It’s a beautiful place with lazy cows, fields of waist-high grass and the odd taro patch.  It might not be obvious but this shot is a bit odd.  I’m standing on a hill, shooting down and panning the camera diagonally – sort of inland + underneath me.  In the past, this just wouldn’t work.  You’d have to map every point in the panorama by hand, and at the end of the day you’d have a distorted picture that would probably lead to a lot of rending of hair and kicking of computers.  With Photoshop CS5, you just hit go and wait.  I’d like to say I miss the old days when things were hard, but I don’t – at all.  Not only does this let you just take pictures and do what you want to do, but it means you can shoot hand-held and with lesser equipment and still have something serviceable come out the other side.  Adobe, this time, I love you.

How Photoshop Won The Panorama War is a post from: Ari Takes Pictures