Just a couple of photos today:

I spent about two hours staging still life shots before I got something I liked.


Marilyn and I picked up a milkweed pod on our evening walk. When we got home I proceeded to drop seends in front of the camera until one turned out.

I've written my first tutorial on the use of Aperture when shooting with a DSLR. The photos aren't very artistic, but they do make a point. http://www.pbase.com/bob_n/a_small_tutorial_
Bob

March 15, 2009

Hello Everyone,

Surprisingly, it's been a very productive week. Isn't it strange that the busier you get the more productive you are. This week featured two very late nights of work, dinner out and hosting a family party, but I somehow managed to get photos posted.


I scrounged around the house and found a partially emtpy wine bottle and some tea candles. I quickly arranged them and took several photos which I composited together to get this. All in all it took about two hours.


For this photograph I took a small glass bowl and pured honey into it while firing off the remote trigger as often as possible. It was lit by a fixed lamp and two flashes all within the confines of my home-made light box. It was a little tricky because I needed relatively high shutter speeds to capture the motion.


On Saturday Marilyn and I went out to dinner to celebrate my upcoming birthday.
I took this after dinner.

I am really tired of photographing flowers, but really wanted to capture the innards of this tulip. My answer was to tear away half of the petals to get a cross section view.

I purposely bought these four pepperr to photograph. This was lit with a single lamp and two reflectors. I am pleased with the result.

Have a good week.

Bob

End of February

February is over and I will not miss it.

This Friday we went from 9C to -12C in 12 hours. The result was that pools of melt water froze very quickly creating beautiful, smooth surfaces. I had to get on my stomach to get this shot on what I gambled was solid ice (it was).


I was asked by the local high school to photograph the regional senior basketball final. It was a great game and our team won! These guys were shooting 3 pointers left, right and center.


Castle Kilbride in Baden, Ontario. Marilyn and I took a drive out to Statford to do a little shopping and on our way back we took a detour to Baden. The museum was closed so I took a few shots and plan to return in the spring. Apparently, it is quite impressive inside.

Have a good week.

Bob

February 21, 2009

Hello Everyone,

Here are the best photos from the last nine days:

It is incredibly difficult to photograph bubbles so instead of water I used Purell. The bubbles stayed in place nicely :-)

Pbase link http://www.pbase.com/bob_n/image/109144685

Spices and coffee. I wanted to get a little colour into the gallery so I grabbed this stuff from the kitchen and set it up in my light box.

Pbase link http://www.pbase.com/bob_n/image/109192814

Canadian scene.

On our way home from a visit to the cottage we spotted this Mennonite boy playing hockey on a pond.

Pbase link http://www.pbase.com/bob_n/image/109265833

At the cottage we discovered a tree had fallen, narrowly missing the main building! Luckily, no serious damage was done.

This is just a snapshot to record the event. I didn't bother trying to make this artistic as I had other things on my mind at the time.

Bob

February 12, 2009


It's been a very long and somewhat stressful week and as a result, I have not been very productive.

The best from this week.




I spent quite a while setting this up and photographing it at different angles. I think there is quite a bit of room for improvement.


The macro lens is getting quite a workout in February. Here is a strawberry up very close.



And not a close up this time.

My light box has been OK. I can't help but think that I need to invest in some lighting.
I am basically using two lamps; one halogen and one florescent. The florescent bulb produces a very green colour cast and forces me to colour correct every photo.

I am looking forward to an extended four day weekend and hope to get quite a bit of photography in.

Bob

February 3, 2009

I am a little late getting this week's post up as we had a busy social calendar and I was having difficulty getting good photos. On the one occasion we expressly set out to take photos, we drove to the beautiful little town of Elora, situated twenty minutes north-east of Waterloo. The town is full of great architecture and a giant old mill sitting at the precipice of a waterfall that runs into the spectacular gorge. Sounds ripe for photo taking doesn't it? Unfortunately, most of the interesting stuff down in the gorge was inaccessible and shrouded in shadows. We had a great hike around town and the gorge but photographically speaking, it was a bust. Here are a few shots from that day http://www.pbase.com/bob_n/elora_walk. What lessons can a draw from the experience? Well, I broke the rule regarding shooting mid-day and should have known better. Secondly, the gorge has only about half an hour a day where light reaches the bottom. Next time I will plan better.
I continue to experiment with still life's and this is the best from the week.

This one was really difficult! Most digital cameras do not like red and tend to blow out that channel very easily. For this image I took five exposures, continually underexposing until the red channel was no longer blown. I then loaded them as layers from Adobe Bridge into Photoshop where I lowered opacity levels until I had the tonality I wanted. Next, I used the “select colour range” tool to mask out the background as best I could and then bring it down to near black

Yet another still life:

This morning as I was having breakfast and noticed that we were having one of those majestic snowfalls. Previously, Rebecca and I had discussed placing flowers in the snow as an experiment and this morning seemed like an opportune time. Here's the result:

And finally, what would a week be without another bird shot.

Have a good week.

Bob

Janaury 24, 2009

Welcome to my blog, January 24, 2009.

Marilyn and I drove out to St. Jacob's and took a walk down the trail that follows the Conestogo river. People had been leaving bird feed by the railway bridge and there were plenty of birds. Unfortunately I wasn't setup for shooting birds as I had my 70-200 on the MKII and not the 300 + 1.4. To top things off it seems the 70-200 is not getting along with the MKII. I guess I will have to calibrate the combo this week and I plan to report back my methodology and success/failure later. Oddly enough, this lens works great on the older camera.

I love architecture and I've been fortunate enough to visit some of the world's great buildings. My all time favourites are St. Paul's Cathedral in London and the Pantheon in Rome. When you walk into one of these buildings you just know they are perfect. I love newer buildings too and the PI institute here in Waterloo is an excellent example of modern architecture (http://www.pbase.com/bob_n/image/36168494).

There are quite a few architecture shots here: http://www.pbase.com/bob_n/architecture_2 with more being added daily.

Old train station and silos converted into shop, St. Jacob's, Ontario (January, 2009).

Old bridge across the Conestogo river (January, 2009).

A closer look at the bridge.

I couple of really nice senior ladies on the path. They told us their friends thought they were crazy to be out in -10C weather. They seemed to be enjoying themselves. I hope we are as adventurous as them at that age.

Bob

January 17, 2009

Hello everyone,

I think it was a reasonably good week for photos although Monday-Thursday were a real challenge.

This is a macro shot of food colouring dropped into a wine glass. It took about 30 shots and many trips upstairs to refill the glass to get one I liked. I'd like to try this again with a bigger container and a few more colours.

I discovered this little guy hiding in the cedars beside our house. He was not the least bit intimidated by the 300MM + 1.4 extender. It was a bitterly cold day with afternoon temperatures at about -16C.

This shot was taken on the same walk as mentioned above. I've taken many shots of this path with this being the best so far. I took two camera bodies on the walk (5D MKII + 300mm F4 + 1.4 Extender and the older 5D + 25-104mm F4 lens. I used the older camera and 24-105 lens on this one.

It took me a while to figure out why I liked this shot. I think it boils down to the lighting the contrasting background.

Another in a long line of still life shots.

Bob

January 11, 2009


We spent Saturday in Toronto at a colleague's wedding and had a very good time. It was great to be part of a warm and heartfelt celebration.

Congratulation to Julian and Michaela!

Today (Sunday) was a terrible day for photos. I went for a 5k walk in the conservation area behind or home without a single decent photo to show for it. The light was extremely flat and more suitable for macro photgraphy than the landscape I typically shoot. Next time when the light is similar I will be sure to bring different lenses.

January 9th, 2009 (actually the 8th).
Cool pattern on Marilyn's windshield.

January 8th, 2009.

After two days of snow the sun showed up for a few hours.

I ran home and snapped this from behind our house.

Once and a while I get something that looks like a painting. I'm starting to understand how I can reproduce this look although not enough that I can write it here yet; perhaps a little later this year.

January 6th, I had a bit of "writers" block so I thought I would represent it.

I started the week with moody dark backgrounds and wanted to experiment a little more.

It's been only a week and I'm finding the POTD a challenge already!

Most of these shots are taken after work and dinner and often late into the evening.

The encouraging comments and reasonably good traffic on my pbase are energizing.

Bob

POTD for January 5th.

This image was made using the blend layers function in Photoshop.
Yesterday, I had to use an aperture of F20 to get most of the flower in focus. Today, I took all of them at F8 and set the focus point to the center, then a little further back and finally a few at the very back. I then used Adobe Bridge to load them all as layers into Photoshop where I applied Edit->Blend Layers->Stack. This method creates an image where much more is in focus than would normally be seen with F8. Notice especially how sharp the image is from the center of the flower to the back petals.

This method was a bit of a hit and miss exercise so unless you are making product shots that require an infinite depth of field, I would recommend just using a higher f-stop.

This is it for flower shots this week.

Bob

Here is my photo for January 4th.

The tiny image on the blog does not do it justice. The image on pbase looks far more dramatic so please take a look here //www.pbase.com/bob_n/image/107797825/original

The Setup

- Camera on tripod

- Tethered to the PC via USB cable

- The usual deep red wrinkle free drape

- A remote release

- Single low-tech light source

- 100mm F2.8 Macro lens

Other details

The aperature was set to F20 as I wanted as much of the flower in focus as possible. Typically, if you want your subject to pop then you would isolate it from a scene by opening up the aperature to say F2.8 or lower, but in this case I needed a much greater depth of field and used the dark background to isolate the subject instead. To remove the red tint of the drape I used a mask in photoshop starting with the Select->Colour Range tool and then created a curves adjustment layer and lowered it down until the background became near-black.

When shooting bright colours, especially flowers, I prefer to under-expose the image slightly to avoid blowing out any of the channels and suffering a loss of detail, then I bring them back up again with curves.

Freezing rain today, hence the flowers purchased from the local grocery store.

Bob

Is my new camera better?

Here's my POTD for January 3rd.
Really beautiful day today; 3C and sunny.


This morning I received a query through my pbase account from someone who was wondering if the Canon 5D MKII was worth the upgrade. Here's my resonse:

Yes, I find the 5D II to be a worthy upgrade to the 5D. The 5D has incredible image quality, but the user experience falls far short of the Mark II:
- The live view for manual focusing is extremely useful
- I had to send in my 5D MK I in three times for cleaning so the self cleaning mechanism is very important to me.
- The 14 bit files are yielding smoother gradients, which is very useful to someone like me who takes quite a few landscape shots.
- I have not calibrated my lenses yet (will do so next week), but I think I can squeeze out just a little more sharpness out of a few of my lenses with it.
- ISO 3200 is very usable as long as you use DPP for processing. For ISO 6400 you have to be very careful to expose correctly otherwise there will be too much noise.
- Focusing has not been a problem for me at all although I am not a sports shooter.
- I think the 5D MK II has ever so slightly better dynamic range.
- Highlight tone priority works great for snow shots.
- The LCD is vastly better

Thus far there have been two problems:
- Even though the sensor cleaner appears to work well, I have quite a bit of dust in the viewfinder. I had hoped they would have fixed this.
- I had a small cluster of hot pixels appear after my first few shots. Running the manual clean for a few seconds with the lens on appeared to resolve it.

I have not seen any evidence of the black dots issue, nor have I been looking for it.

Resolution aside, in everyday use you would be hard pressed to tell photos from both cameras apart although I would give a slight edge in IQ to the 5DII. On the operation side the differences are significant; I have taken both cameras out a few times now and always grab the 5D MKII. I would buy the camera again just for the operational differences.
To me it was a very expensive purchase although I am enjoying it immensely.

I hope my comments have been useful.

Here's my POTD from January 2nd. It was a very blah day and the lighting levels were quite poor. As a result I had to use my fasted lens, the 85MM F1.8. It's a great lens for portraits although it's slow to focus and its minimum focus distance is only about a meter.



Here's one other shot from yeasterday the simply shows off the cropping capabilities of a 21 MP camera. This image, even after cropping was still about 1200 x 1000 pixels in size.


Original 21MP image:

Welcome to my photo of the day blog for 2009.

It is with some apprehension that I approach this POTD challenge. While the 2007 POTD (http://www.pbase.com/bob_n/potd_almost) was a tremendous experience, it took quite a bit more dedication and support than I, my family or friends had anticipated. That said, I was pleased with many of the photos and I learned a tremendous amount about the craft of photography.

Some of my favourites from the 2007 POTD are:

This year I plan to be a bit more experimental, both in the photo taking and image processing. Additionally, I will attempt to provide some technical information about using a DSLR, digital workflow and photography in general. I do plan on posting at least one photo per day in 2009 although not every photo will make it to this blog. To track the each daily photo please look here http://www.pbase.com/bob_n/photo_of_the_day_2009.

Background: I live with my wife and three adult children in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. During the past 20 years I’ve been developing software for the broadcast graphics industry and have had a passion for photography for many years. My education has provided me with a good understanding of optics, electronics and of course, software. I am an avid reader of several photography web sites including http://www.dpreview.com/ , http://www.imaging-resource.com/ http://luminous-landscape.com/ and http://www.megapixel.net/html/index.php .

Here's the first image for 2009

This evening we took down the tree and other decorations.
This little angel has graced the top of many a tree in our home.

Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy the photographs.

Bob