Anyone who has taken enough pictures knows two things. Some of the shots you assume will be great turn out pretty blah. On the flip side, some of the shots you didn’t expect much from, or maybe didn’t even take on purpose, will end up being your favorites. Take lots of pictures, worry about it later. So it is with this one.
Camera & Lens
Canon PowerShot S90 (Canon) & 6.0-22.5 mm
Shutter:
1 s
Creation Date:
2010:02:17 06:20:36
Aperture:
f/4.9
Artist:
N/A
ISO:
400
Exposure Mode:
N/A
Focal Length:
22.5 mm
Taken in a Safeway parking lot. Taken at night, without any real attempt to stabilize the camera, hand holding my S90, at only ISO400. I could have set the camera on the wall. I could have cranked up the ISO (although I didn’t want it any noisier than this). That isn’t the point. It took it, I bought some groceries, and looking at it later, I liked it. Shooting up into the trees means that the cars and other distractions are gone. The floodlights from the lot wash out all the detail (and me playing with the contrast burns some more) leaving just shapes and sky. I didn’t intend it to be exactly this shot – I didn’t really intend it to be anything. I’m just happy with what it is.
I thought my first attempt at Time Lapse came out fairly well. All I did at the time was set it up and hit go. Yeah… there were a few more steps, but that was the forethought. Pretty jazzed about those results, I tried a few more things, without luck. One note: if you expect a spider to do anything, even after you poke a few strategically-placed holes in his web, maybe reconsider. Anyway, I liked the little taste of long-exposure nighttime action in the first time lapse, so I set it up at sunset this time. What do you think?
I also did a little more processing on this one. Instead of leaving it at defaults, I did some contrast correction and resized the photos down a bit since they get resized so much in the end anyway.
One last word about taking stills for a time lapse at night. During the day my battery was lasting for hundreds of shots with no problem. In this sequence, I only got just over 200 before it died since the night shots had shutter speeds of 30+ seconds. If I was going to do it again, I’d crank open the aperture a bit more to make the shots a bit shorter and get more life out of the battery.
As you know, I went out to find the P.I. Globe before it ground to a halt. Doing so means a little hike, but it wasn’t all for naught. I got the picture I wanted and I also got a little something else:
Camera & Lens
Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL XT (Canon) & 24.0-105.0 mm
Shutter:
13 s
Creation Date:
2009:03:13 18:44:04
Aperture:
f/6.3
Artist:
Ari Brown
ISO:
100
Exposure Mode:
Shutter priority
Focal Length:
70 mm
At first it seemed like everything was still. I can’t say quiet, as you might notice the blur of a freight train through the bottom of the frame. With a wide field of view, this also happens to cross the approach path for Seatac Airport. I love the morse-code of dots and dashes the planes make through my frame and set the exposure up to 13 seconds to record it. The foreground sculpture is called Eagle and was created by Alexander Calder in 1971. It is the most recognizable piece of the Olympic Sculpture Park (or “the sculpture garden”, as most people would call it) and I was really happy to capture this shot of it with the most recognizable Seattle landmark in the background.
For now, Seattle has two newspapers – the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post Intelligencer. They’re both middling at best, but at least the Seattle PI has a great spinning globe atop it’s office building. It’s been around since 1948 and even moved with the PI to their current location 23 years ago.
Walking down Sairee Beach on Koh Tao, I stumbled across a wedding. These lanterns were bordering the fringe. Whenever I travel outside of the US one of my favorite parts is always the ability to have fun in a way that might put you on the wrong side of some lawsuit at home. These were one thing, but the flying incendiary balloons were much… better? worse? I didn’t ask if they only launch these things when the wind will take them offshore.
You can’t buy fireworks in Seattle. On the reservations, yes, but not in Seattle. When I was in Denver, it turned out they sell fireworks, but if you want the *good* ones, you need an out of state license, registration, and destination. I’m in love with the “someone else’s problem” aspect – they don’t care if they’re legal where you’re going, as long as it isn’t Colorado. Anyway, I was registration-less, so crummy fireworks it was. The little ones are actually great for taking pictures of. They stay mostly in the same place so you know where to point your camera, and you can get really close, so the picture is different from the big sky shots you often see of professional fireworks. Although the scene will be dark, fireworks are bright enough that you don’t need too much equipment, or even a very long exposure. I got these at 1/5 sec handheld. The camera shake works out ok since the fireworks are moving too. Take a lot of pictures – you never know what you’ll get!
All the photos I post here take a very quick trip through Photoshop, usually just long enough to set some levels and resize. This is the first one I actually chose to edit for real. Everything I know about photoshop I picked up from a couplesources and I usually have to refer back to them each time. I find the best candidates for improvement in this way are pictures that have a cool subject but just look flat to start with. I loved the night look that this started with, but I like the final product more.
Updated 2008.12.26 – Since my reader has been kind enough to remind me that it might be more interesting to see what the finished product looks like when you can tell where it started, here is the original photo:
I’ve been taking pictures lately, but all of them are within a few blocks of my house. Snow in Seattle is usually a once or twice a season treat. It’s funny how with another dozen inches and a few days later, it really feels like a whole different kind of hell. For a different take, I thought I’d do some long exposure shots. Very low light photography isn’t that hard, especially with digital since you can see what you’re going to get. You definitely need a tripod and you may or may not need a cable or remote shutter release to ensure you don’t shake things taking the picture. I was looking for the light trails and motion against the stillness on the street, so I closed down the aperture as far as it would go and dropped the ISO speed to my camera’s slowest to get this exposure at 20 seconds. The nice thing is you don’t have to be too careful staying out of the frame – unless you’re wearing a flashlight, you won’t even show up. There is a lot more that can be done with this technique – I’ll post more when the snow melts.
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