Photography

Some mornings I should just plan to be late for work. This morning was probably one of them. While driving in, I kept getting distracted by how beautiful everything looked. No, I wasn’t high, it’s just that the light was so gorgeous that the most mundane, and even ugly, objects looked beautiful. Perhaps I should explain. When you’re interested in photography, you quickly learn that it’s all about light. The amount, the color, the quality, the reaction of your film to it – it’s all about light. The ISO number for your film is all about light, go from ISO 50 to ISO 100 and you half the amount of light you need to make an image (aka, you can use a faster shutter or smaller aperture). Open your lens up one stop, e.g., from f/11 to f/8 and you’ve just doubled the amount of light reaching the film (f-stops go up by the square root of 2, but they related to the ration of lens diameter to focal length so the area of the lens doubles). Change the speed of the shutter and you affect how much light reaches the film. By working all of the doubles and halves, you can attempt to achieve the effect you want given the limits of the light you have. For example, when I shoot water, I often want a slow shutter speed which necessitates a small lens aperture. But sometimes when there is too much light, even the smallest aperture won’t get you a slow enough shutter. ...

I had a chance last week to read a few books, all of which I would recommend in some fashion or another: National Geographic’s “The Ultimate Field Guide to Photography This is a very good, basic field guide to photography. It covers a huge range of subjects and, not surprisingly, has some beautiful photographs. The book covers both film and digital photography, editing, archiving, composition, and has a great inspirational chapter describing Robert Clark’s photographic travelogue using only the camera in a cell phone. My only complaint about the book is that it covers too many topics, but not much in depth. It’s a great book for a beginner, but there wasn’t too much I hadn’t seen already. ...

For the past few years, I’ve put together a calendar using pictures I took in Yellowstone. In 2004 (for the 2005 calendar), I was very excited about the project and used only photos I took that year. Last year, I had to raid prior years (it wasn’t the best Yellowstone trip for pictures). This year I think I can pull enough decent pictures from our 2006 trip. The pictures I’m going to use for the 2007 calendar are posted here. I need to crop a couple of the bird pictures, but the rest should be okay. ...

I haven’t posted any pictures from the new camera yet – mostly because they’ve been throw away shots where I’ve tried to get a sense of the new camera. But here are a handful. Only the picture of Luke (the snake) is full sized (3872 x 2592), the rest have been reduced. Oh, and the red bellied woodpecker was taken using my 300mm lens with the doubler and the 1.5x magnifying factor of the digital. He was probably 30 feet up in the tree, so I’m not too unhappy with the shot – now I need to get a shot of the pair of pileated woodpeckers that hang out in the back yard. ...

Okay, I’m taking the plunge. A Nikon D80 with 18-135mm lens and 8 GB worth of SDHC cards arrived on my doorstep yesterday. The D80 body was a Christmas present from K’s parents! I used extra birthday money to get the memory and the lens kit. I’ve got a number of reasons for going digital. There’s finally enough resolution in an affordable camera. The D80 is a 10.2 megapixel camera. That’s about 1/2 as much as I can pull off of a slide using a 4k dpi scanner, but about twice what I usually do scan – good compromise. The SLR body will use (almost) all of my current lenses. I tend to take more nature photography images than other types, the D80 gives you a 1.5X increase in focal length as compared to my film cameras. Last night I tested it with a doubler and a 300mm lens. That took me out to 600mm of glass, plus the 1.5X factor – 900mm equivalent in something I can hike with! The ISO adjustment means that even the 2 f-stop loss of light from using the doubler is manageable. ...

The snake’s been in the cage for a few months, but I’ve held off posting pictures until I finished the last little bit – the frames around the window. But as pointed out in this comment, it would be good to get some pictures with Luke in his cage. So, hopefully I’ll finish up the frames this week, while I’m away from the office, but in the meantime, here are some pictures: ...

food coma – from 4 hours ago feeding Oh, and one very sad dog – feeling left out because he doesn’t get to play with the squirrels. Darwin, say “cheese

Took the day off and spent most of it working on the snake terrarium. Watching him pace (hmm, that doesn’t seem like the right word for a snake) his cage today made me particularly sad and motivated me to get about 95% finished. He could actually move in now – the only things missing are the decorative frames around the side vents. Overall, I’m pretty happy with the terrarium. There are a number of things that I would do differently next time, but some things will definitely stay the same. For example, I used plexiglass for the front which made the whole thing significantly lighter. The plexiglass was about $20 more expensive but definitely worth it. And here’s the (near) finished terrarium. Next time I post about this, we’ll be completely done and have the snake moved in. ...

The vacation pictures checklist from earlier: Get 22 rolls of slide film back from the developer [Check – received mid June] Put 800 slides into transparancy holders so they are easy to look at on the light box [Check – took two nights] Go through 800 slides to determine which are worth scanning [Check – took another two days] Scan 120 or so “good slides [Check – finished tonight after three nights of scanning] Color correct the images in the GIMP [done] Remove dust from scans because my slide scanner doesn’t have an infrared channel [done] Upload the results and put ’em online [finished today] Everything is done! Pictures online finally. For the record, I’m not thrilled with them. My biggest complaint is that there aren’t really any good animal shots. This is different from prior years. I blame oversleeping.

Okay, now I’m just embarassed. I just heard about high dynamic range (HDR) photography from a NY Times article. I plead that it’s mostly just a trick and, hey, I primarily shoot slide film anyway. So for others who haven’t heard of HDR photography, it’s a technical work around for one of the more difficult photographic problems – the problem of the dynamic range of film vs that of the eye. In a nutshell, the human eye has an enormous dynamic range. It can distinguish between two different very bright shades while simultaneously distinguishing between two very dark shades. It’s dynamic range, IIRC, is somewhere around 10. On the other hand, slide film and prints from print film have a dynamic range of 5, maybe 6. That doesn’t sound like much difference, except that this is a logarithmic scale. ...