Dave Learns Photography

So umm.. yeah.

2011-07-18T13:54:00.000-07:00

I had completely forgotten about this blog until someone commented recently... If you want more current stuff, check out http://delgadophotography.ca/blog/

Travelblog - Day13: Wedding!!!

2009-12-13T20:21:00.000-08:00

Friday began as a pretty normal day, waking up at around 8am, Megan and I went down to the restaurant-on-stilts, which looked like a floating gazebo because the tide was in.

After eating and hanging out it was decided that I would take some shots of the girls getting ready while they waited for the official photographer who was included in with the resort's wedding package to arrive. I got to play with putting my flash on a tripod and placing it in random corners of the room while I took shots that focused on the girls' hair and makeup (the bride and my wife both being hairdressers).

Eventually, after a fiasco with the local hair & makeup girls, it was time for the bride to put on her gown and time for me to pack up my gear and head to the deck where the ceremony would be. I went back to our room, emptied my memory cards and got changed into a more formal pair of shorts. :p

I ran into the bride and bridesmaids on the walkway about to start the ceremony (apparently I'd taken longer than I thought!) when they asked if I'd seen the photographer anywhere. Apparently he'd been spotted here and there but had disappeared shortly after. The bride asked if I'd help shoot the wedding as there was a bit of a language barrier with the photographer and she was worried he wouldn't be there. Thankfully he was, but I also got the chance to go nuts with the wedding photos :)

Travelblog - Day11&12: Geeky stuff and forgotten stuff

2009-12-13T13:22:00.000-08:00

Arriving at the Bangkok trian station at ~8am, we took a cab to the Millenium Hilton where I'd booked another night in anticipation of another sleepless overnight train.

Megan hadn't had time to give me a haircut before we'd left on vacation so we'd picked up a small pair of scissors at a creepy pharmacy in the middle of a street market in Chiang Mai (I say it was creepy because there were various medical tools and what looked like autopsy equipment on display close to the scissors). After a quick beard trim in the bathtub we showered and headed out to Pantip Plaza to see what kind of deals I could get on geeky electronics stuff. I left my camera gear in the hotel so we didn't get any shots.

Pantip Plaza was not at all like anything I'd expected. It was more like a giant, multi-level, indoor street market than a mall. You could find anything from various old & new computer components, to cellphone parts, bags, laptops, guitars, and pirated software, movies, and games. It was all a bit overwhelming so we didn't spend much time there.

Craving North American food, we spotted a KFC in a corner of the mall but were disappointed to find the Colonel didn't specialize in chicken here... more prawn sticks and deep-fried fish cakes than chicken. There were some things that were pretty universal, however:

After a long day of walking around downtown Bangkok, we took a Tuk Tuk back to the hotel in the middle of rush hour. Arriving almost an hour later (it had taken ~15 minutes on the way there), we were tired, hungry, and reeking of exhaust & pollution. Another shower and a quick dinner later we went to bed early.

The next day was a travel day from Bangkok to Koh Chang island, where we'd be attending Bonnie & Andrew's wedding. We met Bonnie at her hotel in Bangkok at 7:45am, we were a bit late due to the crazy Bangkok traffic and unable to get in touch with her because they'd lost their cellphone the day before. That stressfull episode behind us, we joined her family in the 11 person van they'd rented and met up with the 3 other vans full of people that were also attending the wedding.

About an hour south of Bangkok, on our way to the ferry, the bride & groom suddenly realized that they'd forgotten a few important things in the safe at the hotel... namely the rings, their passports, and wallets!

Borrowing my cellphone (which worked because I'd bought a Thai SIM card for it) they sent a quick message to the others while our driver backed up along the shoulder of the highway for a bit before finding an exit and heading back to Bangkok

Success! We got the rings, but now we were 2hrs behind the rest of the convoy so the driver did some crazy (scary) driving to get us to the ferry terminal just 10 minutes too late to catch the ferry.

The ferry itself was, umm.... interesting. but we got to the resort safely a couple hours later

We got to the resort at just before sunset so I did a quick recon of the deck where the ceremony would be happening. I'm VERY glad I got a chance to do this. Here's an HDR shot of the boardwalk that lead to the deck.

Travelblog - Day10: Thai cookery and sleeping in 1st class

2009-12-09T21:26:00.000-08:00

On our last day in Chiang Dao, the hotel gave us a ride into Chiang Mai and dropped us off at the Baan Thai Cooking School.

As part of the 6hr course, we went to the market to fetch some fresh ingredients. Some of the more interesting ingredients were explained. Luckily we didn't use any of these!

These crabs were left in a brine for 2 months and are used for flavour in certain dishes

I believe the pink eggs are a form of Balut, a fertilized egg delicacy

The rest of the day was spent splitting into groups and discovering how simple a lot of these great tasting dishes are. Everything was made from scratch, including making our own curry paste from scratch with a mortar and pestel.

Spring Rolls

Pad Thai

Cashew Chicken

Hot & Sour Prawn Soup

Red Curry Chicken

Mango with Sticky Rice

Most of these were dead simple to make, we need to buy ourselves a wok!

Some things took a bit more effort though...

After the course we went to the train station prepared to brave our 3rd Thai train ride. Having learned our lesson from the ride into Chiang Mai, we had splurged and pre-booked first class tickets for the return trip. It wasn't all that more expensive at about $45 per person, though I later found out we could have taken the 1hr flight for only a couple dollars more.

Mercifully, the 1st class cabins were roomy, comfortable, and clean. The in-room food was just okay, but we were still stuffed from the class earlier in the day so it didn't really matter. The bunk beds were SO comfortable compared to the infested seats we'd had before.

Travelblog - Day8&9: Elephants and Markets

2009-12-09T18:23:00.000-08:00

As part of the package with we had booked, we were taken to the Mae Ping Elephant Camp. It was a pretty amazing experience:

The next day we took the 1-1/2 hour, 40 Baht ($1.20) bus ride into Chiang Mai to check out the markets. While I lugged my heavy camera bag around the entire time, it was very crowded and I was a little worried about taking it out and having it stolen. We did manage to pick up a few things like shirts, bags, and even a power adaptor for my laptop.

Travelblog - Day6&7: To Bangkok by Air, then Chiang Mai by Hell-Train

2009-12-08T22:56:00.000-08:00

Not many pictures to post from this travel day. We took an overpriced 45 minute flight from Siem Reap to Bangkok because we wanted to catch a sleeper train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai. I really really wish we'd booked our tickets ahead of time, however, as the regular sleeper trains were completely sold out and we had to settle for the DRC (Diesel Rail Car) train with marginally comfortable reclining seats instead of beds.

The 13hr experience started with me feeling a bit queasy from the motion of car's poor suspension, followed by even worse nausea as the malodorous food was served. Putting my headphones on and concentrating on a game of Hexic on my Zune. I was just starting to feel better when I felt something on my leg and reflexively brushed it to the ground. To my surprise, whatever was on my leg was cold, prickly, and large. I looked down as the cockroach righted itself on the floor and skittered away to join its friend by my camera bag. The new wave of nausea was held in check by a new feeling of murderous panic as I frantically stomped on every shadow within reach.

A few crunchy stomps later, we had zippered and tied shut all of our bags and I sat there nausea free but now hyper-alert and paranoid. The staff on the train did a quick, unapologetic mop of the aisles, cleaning up the roach corpses before handing out blankets and flicking a switch that plunged the car into darkness for “sleep time”. I was surprised at my own flexibility on multiple occasions as I somehow managed to reach my leg over Megan to my left and kick a cockroach that was making its way across the wall beside her.

The place we stayed at was actually about 80km North of Chiang Mai, in the booneys but very picturesque and best of all, clean. After what felt like THE BEST SHOWER EVER, we spent the day relaxing and eating and catching up on missed sleep. Not much to report, but here are a few shots.

Travelblog - Day5: Same Same, But Different

2009-12-08T22:08:00.000-08:00

On our second full day in Cambodia we got up early to see the sunrise at Angkor Wat. Nothing from the previous day had prepared us for how HUGE this place was. We arrived by Tuk-Tuk just as the sky was starting to turn light blue.

Megan dutifully waited with me as I set up the tripod and waited for the sun to crest the temples. I finally had an opportunity to play with my new flash (Canon Speedlite 430EX II), setting the camera up to properly expose the colours in the sky, then having Megan pose in front of the camera and adjusted the flash strength to keep her from becoming a silhouette as well. I'm SO glad I had a chance to experiment with this technique before I ended up helping to shoot a sunset wedding a week later!

Our driver, we'll call him 7071 (the number stencilled on his vest), said he'd wait for us in the parking lot with the dozens of other tuk tuks and he was true to his word – picking us out from the hundreds of other tourists and meeting us as we left the temple. After sunrise he took us back to the hotel for breakfast and waited for us to have a nap and get ready for more Wat-ing.

When we came back to Angkor it was just past noon, with harsh shadows, ridiculous 35 degree heat, and even more packed than at sunrise.I had a hard time getting good shots but it did give me a chance to play with my IR filter a bit:

The scale of the place is hard to capture, there were so many courtyards and temples inside the outer wall, it was like a city!

After Angkor we went to the other major sites like Bayon which were a little smaller but no less impressive and arguably a little more intricate than Angkor.

It was a little worse for wear, with nature reclaiming the walls in many spots

Also, we saw more monks and worshippers here

The last Wat we visited (I can't remember the name of it right now and am currently 38,000 feet over Siberia as I write this so I can't look it up), was the one with the cool trees growing over the walls of the temple. It was made famous by one of the Tomb Raider movies – which you could buy a pirated copy of from any of the kids aggressively hawking their goods at every temple entrance.

Travelblog - Day4: Wats in Cambodia

2009-12-02T10:26:00.000-08:00

For our first full day in Siem Reap we went the bourgeoisie route and hired an air-conditioned car to drive us from Wat to Wat (temple to temple) for about $20. We could have rented pedal bikes to do the seemingly suicidal ride to the park gates for a lot less, but the 35+ degree heat, crazy traffic, and terrible air quality would have left us dehydrated and completely uninterested in Cambodia's history.

Our first stop was the Cambodia Land Mine Museum, I've linked to this in the past - great read!: http://www.badassoftheweek.com/aki-ra.html

Since I don't yet own a really wide lens, this shot was stitched together from 6 portraits. The museum is packed with display cases full of defused mines, rockets, grenades, and various types of ordnance.

Here's an HDR merge of the entrance to the museum. The bombs were as tall as Megan!

After the museum we started hitting the smaller Wats. Less well known than Angkor Wat or Bayon, I almost think I preferred the smaller temples to the giant ones as they were easier to take in and not quite as packed with other tourists.

Here's another HDR merge of taken in the middle of Banteay Srei. It was surprisingly small, but the intricate detail has been beautifully preserved

Despite several warnings not to give money to beggars, I couldn't stand the horrible, pained wailing noises this woman was making - especially having come directly from the museum. I caved and gave her a few thousand Riel, only to be instantly flash-mobbed by young kids pushing their bracelets, tshirts, and various trinkets on me. This was a recurring thing at all the temples, you had to brace yourself for the throng of very insistent peddlers waiting for you at every temple entrance.

It was pretty amazing how many different types of stone they used.

Some of the stops on the "small temple tour" weren't quite as small as others

The courtyards inside of these temples were quite impressive and sometimes a little sketchy, especially the narrow staircases with loose stones.

An example of some of the steep, random steps at the temples

I'm pretty sure there's no sacrificing in Buddhism, but this stone thingy looks ominous...

A local woman looking contemplative as we stopped for lunch

...And back to shooting temples and doorways. I can't believe how many photos of doorways we took!

A lot of foreign countries have contributed money to help maintain these sites, you can see their efforts almost everywhere. I'm surprised we were allowed to climb on as much as we did.

After a while the features of one Wat started to blend in with the next. There were a lot of recurring themes, like lions, 5 headed snakes, etc. It was easy to become overwhelmed with it all. Its good to remember that these things are ~1200 years old, however.

There were many places where nature had pretty much reclaimed what it had lost. I thought this one was pretty impressive, as I did my best to avoid a woman who kept putting a t-shirt she was trying to sell me in front of the camera.

More updates next time I get decent WiFi! There's still a few more shots from Day 4, check the blog post for updates!

Travelblog - Day3: On our way to Siem Reap, Cambodia

2009-11-28T02:12:00.000-08:00

[Meg] Bright & early rising this morning. Well, not so bright, it was a couple hours before dawn ... even too early for me. Once we checked out of the hotel, we headed to the train station. Little observation, all the cab/tuk tuk drivers that we mentioned we were going to Cambodia to all laughed at us a little. Hmmm.

A little info for anyone who wants to take the train through Thailand. If you love trains like me, with the rocking motion and clickety clack clack, then it is worth paying $1.50 for a 5 hour train ride in the most uncomfortable seats I have ever been on. If you are like Dave though, he decided we would just fly back to Bangkok when we left Siem Reap! That was okay with me ... once was enough!

Doesn't Dave look so impressed!

We had a bit of a sketch time getting through the Cambodian border, because our hotel had sent a car to pick us up, so they had our names before the border. Unfortunately, you end up paying about $10 more that way, but we thought that since the border scam guys had our sign with our names on it, then would our driver still have one on the other side? So, we paid the extra bit of cash (grrr), but not as much as they were trying to get us to pay. Go Dave's growing bartering skills! Then they randomly guide you through the border and get on a transfer bus to the bus station where our driver was waiting. Very random.

Random butterfly from the train ride while we were stopped at a station.

The rest of the day was a bit lame as I proceeded to get quite ill feeling because of lack of sleep, too much heat, lack of food (Pringles don't count as breakfast apparently) and then putting too much fried food in my belly after waiting over 9 hours. Bleh. So I went and put a pillow over my head and slept from 4:30pm until 6ish the next morning. Felt great afterwards! Not a clue what Dave got up to though.

Travelblog - Day2: Bangkok Grand Palace and Wat Pho

2009-11-28T01:39:00.000-08:00

Day 2:
Another early start, probably due to some severe jet lag. We were up by 7:30ish after having gone to sleep at 1am. We had an AMAZING breakfast at the Millennium Hilton in Bangkok. I got a free night's accommodation there after cashing in some points accumulated during my 3wk business trip to Houston earlier this year. It was a buffet-style deal but very well done with lots of fresh tropical fruit and some nice, crisp bacon Mmmm :D

After the ginormous breakfast we took a cab downtown to see the Grand Palace. Here are a few shots from the day. I apologize for the lack of editing but I'm on my netbook, forgot to install a couple of programs before I left, and have HUNDREDS of photos to sort through!

Megan hanging out w/ a giant monkey/demon warrior

we had to wear long pants because showing your ankles is considered rude... They didn't say anything about not imitating the artwork

[Megan]After a couple hours in the hot sun, I decided I should actually have a pair of sunglasses and stop stealing Dave's, so we went outside the palace and wandered down the street to one of the many, many, many markets. Dave & I proceeded to actually do our first bit of bartering for a very nice pair of "RayBans". Pretty sure they are "RayBons", but meh, whatever! They look pretty!

[Megan] Once our bartering was complete, we heading into Wat Pho where there is a massive Buddha and yes, he is reclining! I left Dave on his own to wait for the other tourists to get out of the way so he could get a good shot. Here's his vertical panorama (in Dave's voice!)

[Megan] Rest of the day was relaxing then headed out to meet Bonnie & Andrew (the reason we are in Thailand; they are getting married on Dec.4) for dinner and had a very interesting cab ride with a cabbie that didn't speak a lot of English. We ended up stopping at a police station for directions then got on the phone with a translator who google mapped the address of Bonnie's hotel and gave us directions again!

Day 2 done. Getting up at 4:45am for a 5:55am train to the border of Cambodia. Tired now!

Travelblog - Day1: Nanaimo to Bangkok

2009-11-24T03:05:00.000-08:00

The trip has begun!!

Day 1:
An early start in Nanaimo, getting up at just before 5:00am to finish packing and pick up Megan's mom, we caught the 6:30am sailing from Departure bay, took the express bus downtown, then the new Canada Line skytrain to the airport.

At this point we had a few hours to kill, most of which was spent facebooking and emailing:

Megan geeking out on my laptop at YVR

The flight from Vancouver to Beijing was a long one (just over 11hrs); it took us up over Alaska, across the Bering Sea, over Siberia, down Russia's east coast, and into China. I have to admit it was a lot more comfortable than i was expecting. We each got our own private LCD screen, with a few channels to choose from (there's only so many times you can watch Kung Fu Panda, however). The food was decent, and there was enough leg and shoulder room that I didn't feel cramped.

Megan and I both still have a bit of a cough, Megan's much worse than mine, which prompted the passengers on the aisle beside us to put on their white face masks 9hrs into the flight. it was a little creepy! Not nearly as creepy as the infrared cameras scanning peoples' body temperatures for fevers when we went through the disease control / quarantine checkpoint at the Beijing airport though!

Megan looking tired and unimpressed as I took the shots necessary to stitch this pano together.

some more cool architecture at the airport

cool pyramid-shaped green tea bag at a cafe at the airport

some pretty looking Orchids, yeah they were fake

After this was a few more hours of waiting, followed by a cramped, 4hr flight from Beijing to Bangkok. We finally went to bed at our hotel at ~1am local time, almost 30hrs from when we left Nanaimo. SO TIRED!

Been a while! Packing for Thailand and playing with off-camera flash.

2009-11-20T21:00:00.000-08:00

So its been quite a while (almost a month!)... but I've been keeping busy despite any outward appearances.

Being the eve of our epic Thailand/Cambodia trip, I've started organizing and packing my photo gear and suprised myself as to how much i'd accumulated in such a short time!

This, of course, excludes the small SD870IS I took the picture with. But you get the idea, its a lot of stuff!
In case anyone cares, here's the complete list:

Canon T1i Body
Canon BG-E5 Battery Grip
- 2x 1500mAh battery magazine
- 6x AA Alkaline battery magazine
Canon 18-55mm kit lens w/ hood
Canon 55-250mm f/4-5.6 w/ hood
Canon 50mm f/1.8 w/ hood
Canon Speedlite 430EX II flash
Blazzeo wireless flash transmitter
Canon RC-1 wireless shutter remote
Hoya 58mm CPL
Hoya 58mm R72 Infrared
Hoya 52mm UV
52-58mm step-up ring
Gorillapod SLR
Nexxtech aluminum tripod / bag
Cables (usb & AV)
SD Cards (16GB, 4GB, 2x2GB)
lens cleaner & microcloth
Kata 3N1-20 bag

Also, I've been playing with off-camera flash for the first time. I just got a cheap wireless transmitter for my 430EX II in the mail!

(f/36, iso 100, 1/200sec, flash was above and to the left with awhite paper reflector below)

(same camera settings as above, with the flash directly on the right, zoomed in, 1/2 power)

(f/22, iso 200, 1/250sec, flash was above and to the left)

So many new lighting opportunities! I'm sure I looked retarded crouching in my office with one hand way up in the air holding the flashgun while the other hand held the camera up to my face.

Back to shooting things that don't move...

2009-10-25T17:39:00.000-07:00

I have to admit I got a bit of a thrill from doing the photo shoot. It was a lot of fun! But also nerve wracking and completely out of my control. Plus the editing! I'm STILL finding things to adjust a week later!

Anyway, it was sunny-ish yesterday so I went out with the IR filter again. There's a tree that catches my eye every time I drive past it, but I have no idea what kind it is.

May I present to you the White Tree of... Rosehill:

This is the untouched JPEG directly from the camera. It turns out that I've been doing Infrared shots all wrong. Instead of having a completely RED photo which I then have to recover using software, I've found a way to produce colour IR shots directly from the camera!

Its all about setting a custom white balance. Instead of choosing one of the presets like "Auto", "Sunny", "Cloudy", or "Tungsten", you create a custom white balance setting by taking a close-up picture of a sun-lit leaf or grass. You then go into the camera's menu and tell it to create a custom white balance based on the photo you just took. Now every time I take an IR shot, I just set the WB to Custom and I get great results without extra processing!

That being said, processing IR is still fun, though I'm not sure which I like better:

Processing consisted of darkening the road and adding an inverse layer. I can't wait to get some IR shots of the jungle in Thailand!

Serenity L'Oreal Rock/Folk Photo Shoot 2009

2009-10-21T22:33:00.000-07:00

My first ever photo shoot! The girls at my wife's salon (Serenity) wanted to enter a photo contest for L'Oreal Professionel colour, doing each other's hair / make-up / clothing and being models. I was recruited as the photographer so here are the results

Wow, I gotta say I learned a lot in the process:

I don't know anything about posing models. Thank you Cheri, Shelly, and all the girls for stepping in and worrying about that while I tried to figure out the camera stuff!
I'm glad I shoot in RAW as I was able to fix a lot of mistakes!
I still suck at low-light photography and need to learn how to use my flash properly
I love my 55-250mm telephoto & distant backgrounds for nice smooth bokeh!
For every hour I spent shooting, I spent at least 5 editing, plus a few more uploading and blogging about it, talk about "tip of the iceberg"!
Thank you bloggger widgets for the Blogspot-friendly lightbox script!

Photo gallery after the jump... if you're reading this from facebook or an RSS reader, visit the actual post to see the gallery with larger pics!

Gallery:

Click on an image to enlarge, use your Left/Right arrow keys (or N & P) to go to the Next or Previous photo.

(please ask permission to re-use these images)

The leaves are turning.... White? (Infrared Photography)

2009-10-15T23:25:00.000-07:00

I'd been putting off posting posting these in the hopes that I'd get some better shots to work with but it seems that Fall is upon us and I've missed my window of opportunity. So here it is. Let's talk about infrared photography.

One of the first things I got for my camera was a Hoya R72 Infrared filter. It blocks all visible light and only allows light with wavelengths above 720nm to hit the camera sensor. This means you get a touch of the visible red spectrum, and a lot of infrared light, or heat.

The picture above, for example, was taken in a well-lit room. I turned the stove elements on max, set my focus without the filter on, switched the lens to manual focus, then put the infrared filter on the lens. By the time I finished that process, the elements were starting to glow a faint red to my eyes, when I took this shot, everything but the infrared radiation (heat) disappeared and what was left had a heavy red cast to it.

Now lets take a look at an actual outdoors shot with the filter on. Here's a JPEG straight from the camera, completely untouched:

This was taken with the aperture wide open at f/4 for 3.2 seconds at ISO 500. It's a little over-exposed but I've found that this is a good thing with IR shots. You can already see the beginnings of the Wood Effect on the leaves of the maple in the foreground, they are a lot lighter than they should be.

I normally shoot in RAW+JPEG mode, so I took the RAW file into ~~Adobe Camera RAW~~ Use Canon Digital Photo Professional instead! and adjusted the colour temperature down to 2000K, as cool (blue) as it will go. The more infrared light your subject reflects, the more purple-ish it will go. Things which reflect very little IR light will stay red and sometimes get darker, usually the sky will go very dark as well but it was fairly overcast on the day this shot was taken.

So now we have an interesting false-colour infrared photo which can be left as-is but still looks very "fake".

Converting it to black and white brings the shot back into the realm of reality and makes the effects of the IR light more shocking (imho).

I'm surprised at how different trees reflect different amounts of IR light. Big, leafy, deciduous trees seem to work best, though apples seem to react quite well too:

Also, of course, there are different post-processing tricks you can try, like colour replacements and inverted colour layers:

Update: This one was edited using Canon Digital Photo Professional (DPP) which came with the camera. It actually does a much better job of adjusting the WB than ACR did, you just click on the part that you want to be white and it does the rest. Much better noise reduction and sharpening too.

Update: Again this one was edited using DPP, I replaced the image that was here earlier because this one is much better. The blurryness was caused by the tree moving in the wind during the long exposure.

Other times, it's kinda cool to leave take advantage of the red cast to make faux-sunsets:

More of these to come as I find new uses for the filter! :)

Update: While I was reading about proper Infrared Workflows, I also accidentally discovered that you can "fake" the look in photoshop:

The workflow for this is very simple (using Elements 7):
- create duplicate layer
- convert to b&w (infrared effect)
- change blend mode to "Lighten"

I've outgrown my bag...

2009-10-14T17:46:00.000-07:00

So with the addition of a flash, several lens hoods, and other miscellaneous bits & pieces in the mail, I completely ran out of space for my gear in the little Lowepro Slingshot 100 AW.

Time to upgrade! :D

I've sold the lowepro on Craigslist and ordered a KATA 3N1-20 from eBay after playing with one at London Drugs:

I have my fingers crossed that it will also hold my netbook!

dave attempts portraits and bokeh

2009-10-12T18:46:00.000-07:00

So my wife convinced me to go on a 2.5hr hike with her this morning by promising that we could stop to take pictures whenever I wanted. Also, she'd packed some leftover turkey sandwiches from thanksgiving dinner, which lead to memories of how much I'd stuffed myself last night so I decided the walk might do me some good.

My mission for today was to try to consistently create some nice, smooth bokeh. The word bokeh in photography is derived from the Japanese worde boke meaning blur or haze. Bokeh describes the quality of the blurry, out-of-focus area of a photo and the way light blooms into distinct spots in the background.

Until today I've only really had success when shooting close-up subjects or macro shots. I hadn't really figured out how to produce the pleasing out-of-focus background effect on larger, distant subjects.

After some quick googling, I went out today making sure I kept the aperture wide open, the lens fully zoomed, and my ISO fairly low. I think I've figured it out, here are some shots of Megan, my wife, with varying degrees of depth of field.

I like the back-lighting in this one and the way her hair catches the light. The focus is not as sharp as I hoped it'd be but the softness kind goes with the backlighting so I kept it.

The background was a lot closer in this one so it was not nearly as out of focus as the one above. I did manage to get the depth of field right, however, and the bush in the foreground is nicely out of focus while Megan stands out nicely from the soft background.

Here's another one, taken at the same time as the one above, but this time I zoomed in much closer, which caused the background to seem further away. I really wish I'd brought my flash with me to soften some of the shadows on the right.

Maybe I should consider investing in a small reflector, but I don't know how much portrait work I'll be doing and I still feel a little self conscious about using things like that in public...

Well, that wraps up my first foray into outdoor portraits, and my first conscious attempt to control the bokeh in my shots. I really like the effect.

UPDATE: While editing some of the other shots from today, I came across one that was kind of... 'meh'. I accidentally hit the "convert to black & white" button and liked the effect, so here's another portrait:

Check out the differences in the textures.

UPDATE 2: Here's another one that was rescued from the "ignore pile" with some colour temperature tweaks and some cropping:

editing and posting from the netbook

2009-10-09T17:06:00.001-07:00

So this post is mostly just a test to see how posting via email works. I'm writing this from my netbook (see earlier post) and posting images that were edited solely on this machine. I've only seen them on an 11.6" screen so it'll be a treat to see them full size on my 24" monitor.

I figure I'll do most of my posts this way when I'm travelling. I'll build up a cache offline, then send what I have when I find a WiFi hotspot.

Anyway. Time to get to the photos.

The first one is of a squirrel we saw in Montreal. I tweaked the colours and changed the cropping from the original.

Next is Jessie's dog, Merlin. He was apparently very lonely while his people were away in Europe so we went to visit. I missed focusing on his face (much faster than he looks!) but I liked the action so I played around with the colors and added some fake vignetting. I kind of like it now, I was just going to delete it when I saw it on the camera.

An old broken down tractor. Again the colours were all washed out on the original shot. I tweaked the saturation and contrast. I hope this looks okay on a full size monitor.

I have to say I'm pretty surprised at how well this little netbook handles editing large 30+ MB RAW files from the camera. I thought it'd choke for sure but It hasn't had any issues so far.

EDIT: Wow those came out really dark and contrasty! I swear they looked much more natural on the little screen. I guess the LED backlighting really pumps up the gamma. I wonder if there's a colour profile for the screen that I can load. It's a Gateway EC1803h.

shooting the moon pt.2

2009-10-09T03:37:00.000-07:00

Ugh, I thought I was done with this moon thing. Thanks to this thread on a forum I frequent, I stayed up super late tonight to try to catch a shot of a fracking explosion on the moon!!

On the bright side, I got my best moon shot yet, on the other side... well I don't see anything. Do you?

car accident shots

2009-10-08T14:41:00.000-07:00

I went out looking for inspiration today and ~~was morbidly fortunate~~ by chance stumbled upon an impressive car accident near my house. Thankfully the people involved in the crash had already been taken away, to the hospital presumably, so all that was left were several emergency vehicles blocking the road and the two wrecked cars.

I took a lot of snapshots from across the street, documenting the crash, but when I came home I found that the pictures I really liked were the ones that included police and firefighters in the frame. It seemed to ad more emotion to the shots somehow. This is something I'd discussed earlier with my wife, Megan, who said that she liked pictures of people better than pictures of things. I think I know where she's coming from now and will try to keep an eye out for interesting people to include in my shots.

I like this one cropped wide to bring more attention to the subjects. I lost the bumper of the grey car up in the air behind the police officer, but I still like it better this way.

Here's another wide one, with both cars in the frame this time. I'm still trying to figure out the logistics of what happened. There's a little bit of blue paint on the gray car's rear bumper so I'm guessing it spun a couple of times, hit the telephone pole, and ended up in the yard on the left. Who know's though... It must have been scary!

Here's a closeup of the other car, its rear up in the air. I like the depth of field here, with the firefighter slightly out of focus. I wish I'd noticed him when I was composing the shot.

The front of the blue car. Pretty mangled. It's actually not as bad as the front of the gray car. Unfortunately I couldn't get a good in-focus shot of it because of the shadows in the yard and the bushes in the foreground.

I felt kind of awkward / self-conscious and rushed taking these pictures from across the street. I need to get more comfortable with that. Anyway, my apologies if this offends anyone who recognizes the cars.

shooting the moon: pt1.5

2009-10-07T23:00:00.000-07:00

Here's a mini update... Maybe it's not as interesting as the last one from the previous post, but the focus is much sharper, and because of some atmospheric effect, I had a larger target to work with:

Definitely seeing a progression now. I actually knew what settings I wanted when I set up the tripod.

As I flicked the power switch on, I also turned off the image stabilization on the lens without thinking about it (because the camera was on a tripod).
I moved the settings dial to Manual (because it gives me the most control)
locked it at ISO 200 (to keep the noise down)
set the shutter speed at 1/30th of a second (lucky guess, I could actually see the moon moving as I was focusing so I didn't want it to be too long)
started with the aperture wide open at 5.6 but choked it down to 7.1 because it was a little bright

A note to myself for the future: it is a lot easier to set the fine focus when I set it to Live-View, zoom in 10x on the LCD, and manually set the focus that way. Just make sure to use a 10 second timer so the tripod stops shaking completely after I let go.

shooting the moon

2009-10-03T18:12:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago a friend of mine (Antony) challenged me to take a photo of the moon with my telephoto lens. I thought, "How hard could it be? It's right there.".... Well let me tell you, its harder than it looks.

Several badly overexposed, underexposed, and blurry shots later, the best I could come up with was this:

The narrow band between the light side and dark side was fairly clear, but the right side is very over-exposed and doesn't look anything like it did that night. This is the untouched (other than cropping) JPG produced by the camera, so I took the original RAW file to see what I could recover.

Well, by adjusting the brightness & contrast in Adobe Camera RAW, it looks like there was quite a bit of information hiding under there:

Encouraged by the editing success, and apparently suffering from insomnia, I went out again last night at ~ 1:30am but was disappointed by fast moving clouds randomly obscuring the moon then letting it peek through a gap every couple of minutes.

Being persistent, and very much awake now thanks to the chilly Octoberness of the night, I kept shooting. This is the best of the bunch. Again shot in RAW, but not much had to be altered this time because I got lucky and finally found a good aperture & shutter speed combination. I had the camera in full Manual mode, with the ISO locked at 800 to keep down the noise.

The camera picked up a little bit more colour than I was actually seeing, but I kind of like it! :)

Anyone care to post their moon shots? I want to go out again, but need some inspiration :)

Another toy - lets pretend it's photography related

2009-09-29T23:00:00.000-07:00

Yes, I'm a geek! Editing, blogging, mass storage, and entertainment on the go... these are some of the things that are important to me on mine & Megan's pending trip to Thailand this November.

In order to exculpate rationalize my purchase, I'm going to go through the reasons why I think getting a Netbook was a good idea.

Anyone's who's talked to me for more than 10 minutes knows that I love technology. I have a home network with several computers and media devices, and getting close to the double digits in Terabytes of storage. Anyone scoffing at my, ahem, need for another computer in the house should keep this in mind.
While I was upsold to a more expensive non Intel Atom based model, the plus side is that it seems to run Photoshop Elements 7 without a hiccup. See my editing comment above.
WiFi is ubiquitous wherever you go. Pretty much every hotel, even in many 3rd world countries, will have free or paid wireless internet. Being the geek that I am, I want to take advantage of this to a further extent than my Blackberry allows. *this means I can keep you up to date too - cause I know you care! all 3 of you!*
While I got a pretty good deal on my 16GB memory card for my camera. I want to be able to offload my photos to make space for some fancy 1080p video of my vacation. I looked into "photo tank" devices which are basically portable hard drives with SD slots and a transfer button. but for the price, a Netbook seemed like a much better option.
While my camera's 3", 640x480 pixel display is pretty impressive by camera standards, it has nothing on the 11.6", 1366x768 pixel monitor on the netbook. It'll be nice to be able to go through the day's shots without squinting. Granted, both the netbook and the camera have HDMI outputs, but I doubt there'll be LCD TVs in our rooms.

So yeah. that's enough techie stuff for now. I'll leave you with this totally random shot of the neighbourhood cat who's befriended us and taken a liking to our chili pepper plant...

Yeah I dunno why either.

50mm & Natural Light

2009-09-27T18:54:00.000-07:00

Ever since I got my 50mm f/1.8 'Nifty Fifty' lens, I've been trying to be more aware of natural light.

I had assumed, somewhat mistakenly, that being such a fast lens (lets in lots of light), the 50mm would be a great low-light lens for simple flash-less snapshots. At the time, I hadn't yet made the connection between large apertures (small f numbers) and decreased depth-of-field. Being as noobish as I was, I set the camera to Av (Aperture priority) and forced it to take every shot at f/1.8 - because that's what the number on the lens said it was capable of. I soon found that every shot I took revealed great colours and brightness from the sky, but my subjects were hopelessly blurry and out of focus.

Much frustration and a few forum posts later, I found this depth of field calculator which revealed that at f/1.8 with my subject 5ft away, I had less than 6cm of 'depth' in which the subject would be in focus, everything else would be blurred. So if I was 100% accurate with my focusing, I could theoretically get everything from the tip of your nose to maybe your ear in focus, then the rest would start to blur. This is assuming I had the camera on a tripod, as I'm still learning to limit the amount of camera shake I introduce into my shots.

Another thing about the 50mm is that it doesn't have Image Stabilization, unlike my other two lenses. This means I either need to be super steady with my shots (exhale, elbows in, squeeze the shutter), which is somewhat sucessful, or brace against something (a little better), or use a tripod (inconvenient). In the end. There are two things that keep the Nifty Fifty from being a great substitute for the 18-55mm IS kit lens for low-light snapshots.

50mm is too long for taking pictures at a dinner table at a pub. Especially with the 1.6X crop factor, it turns into an 80mm lens. This means I have to step back quite a bit to get anything more than your face in frame. Not exactly convenient for spur-of-the-moment snapshots, but it does lead to more interesting composition, as I actually have to think about what I'm shooting
The Image Stabilization on the 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS kit lens means that, despite being a bit slower (lets in less light, higher minimum f stop), still lets me take shots at slower shutter speeds with less blur due to camera shake.

So for now, until I get better at the low light stuff, I'm going to mainly use it during the day where I get better results:

This first one is with the 50mm. I like colours, but again, I didn't get the entire flower in focus.

This one was with the 55-250mm f/4-5.6, but I like the back-lighting from the sun.

new toy!

2009-09-22T22:35:00.001-07:00

I just picked up a used Canon Speedlite 380EX for next to nothing. The ability to bounce the flash off the ceiling or walls is making a big difference.

It's an older piece of camera gear, having been designed for the 35mm film Canon ELAN series, but a little Googling revealed that the EX flashes work with any Canon EOS camera, film OR digital.

The only thing I was concerned about was the fact that my camera has a focal length multiplier of 1.6x and the flash has no manual controls... Would the flash think my 50mm lens was actually 80mm? Thankfully no. It happily reported my 'Nifty Fifty' as 50mm. My 18-55mm kit lens also lights up the appropriate LED as I zoom in and out.

The other thing I noticed is the AF light, instead of the annoying/distracting flickering flash you get when you use the onboard flash, you get a cool series of red lines on your subject.

So here are a couple of test snapshots:

Bouncing the flash off of the ceiling for "butterfly lighting" on this Mayan mask

Tilting the camera sideways and bouncing the flash off of the left wall in a completely dark room (minus the monitor glow) lit the entire room in a nicely difused glow

So yeah, I'm gonna play with my new toy for a bit and read as much as I can about flash photography as possible. Anyone have any tips for me? In the past I've always avoided using the flash as much as possible, but the few youtube videos I've seen on portrait photography make it sound like lighting is important! ;)

EDIT: I just noticed something... when I aim the flash forward, I get nice a nice, low ISO of 200 or less. If I aim the flash up to bounce off a ceiling the ISO skyrockets up to 1200 or 1600. I have no idea why. My shots still seem to work fine when i force it to use ISO 400 or 200. Why would the metering be thrown off like that?

Pointing & Shooting at the baseline

2009-09-22T01:25:00.000-07:00

Soo, the moment of truth... what should I write about as my first non-introduction post.

How about I establish a baseline. Here are some of my favourite pics taken with my point & shoot Canon SD870 IS. I've become very comfortable with this little camera, it's the third Canon Elph I've owned, and I really have no complaints with it. The menus are intuitive, and using it really is a simple as pointing and shooting.

So here goes... This is what my pics look like with fully-automated tools and little forethought. This is, after all, a photography blog so you came here to look at pictures, right?

Mal Pais, Costa Rica - 2008 Honeymoon / Vacation

- Should have used a flash to counteract the backlighting
(though it probably wouldn't have been strong enough)

Near Playa Samara, Costa Rica - 2008 Honeymoon / Vacation

- Missed having the main subject at the focal point in this macro shot

- I blame the shutter lag, but mostly macro focus was guesswork

Playa Grande, Costa Rica - 2008 Honeymoon / Vacation

- I'm generally happy with this shot, the sky is a little noisy

Playa Grande, Costa Rica - 2008 Honeymoon / Vacation

- Playing with the color replace feature on the camera

- nothing that couldn't be done in photoshop, but it was nice to have it right there

- not sure why there was vignetting

Santa Teresa, Costa Rica - 2008 Honeymoon / Vacation

- shooting through glass while holding a flashlight

- a polarizer would have been handy

- as would an off-camera flash

Well that covers my first 2 weeks with the SD870, (I upgraded from the SD450 for my wedding/honeymoon trip), lets see how well I did a year later:

San Salvador, El Salvador - 2009

- My niece, she knew exactly how cute she was

- I miss having the leveling lines through the view finder

- It would have been nice to open up the aperture and blur the background a bit more

La Libertad, El Salvador - 2009

- One of many sunset shots at this private beach

- I was fighting ISO noise the entire time

(though at the time it was simply "graininess")

Tazumal Ruins @ Chalchuapa, El Salvador - 2009

- I like how the sky went deep blue even without a polarizing filter

- I think the ruins are a bit under-exposed, I don't remember them being so dark

Royal DeCameron Resort, El Salvador - 2009

- Taken from the back of a pickup truck as we drove past

- I love the color, but its a blurry mess up close :(

Sunset at the Royal DeCameron Resort, El Salvador - 2009

- more ISO noise, but I like the colours

So anyways, there it is - lots of stuff too look at! This is my baseline, These are shots I've taken using my trusty Point & Shoot camera that I consider good. Now I want to see how much better I can do.

Next time I'll post my first few DSLR pics.

First Post - Intentions

2009-09-20T23:54:00.000-07:00

Alright, so here goes another attempt at a blog. I think this one won't be as abortive as my previous goes at sharing my thoughts online because this one has a selfish purpose. Its for me! I want to be able to look at old posts and see how my skills progress over time. But I need YOUR help to do it.

I'm looking for any kind of feedback you're willing to give me. From "That one sucks!", to "Good composition, nice Bokeh!", to "You should have stood 3ft to the left on that one.".

So, ~~in the spirit of keeping things random~~ because I want to test test the image linking feature, here's something random from my recent trip to Montreal:

For any other photo nerds out there, here are the relevant specs for this shot:
- Canon EOS Rebel T1i
- full 250mm zoom on my 55-250mm telephoto lens
- f/5.6 (wide open at that focal length)
- ISO 400
- 1/250" shutter speed