Mundane Monday Sept 28, 2009

What could be more cliche than an apple on a cutting board? A picture of a camera perhaps. Overall not an exciting photo. I thought I would take a strobist approach to reshoot the apple.

Looks better. It has a little more pizzazz with the black background and the top light. You could do this with a flashlight and a point and shoot if you got a little creative.

By the way the girls enjoyed the apple.

Mundane Monday Sept 21, 2009

Next to our door is a great big 6 ft tall clump of Canadian Goldenrod. It's beautiful. It's maligned. It does grow with ragweed which is allergenic in most people, but goldenrod is often identified as the ragweed itself. Two separate plants here, folks.
What's our typical first picture of a flower? Something like this?

Doesn't do a lot for me, the poor goldenrod has been beat down by the rain. It's real smart looking at full height. The rule of thumb is always move in. Let's try getting closer.

Better, but there's that blue wheel from something in the yard. That's gotta go. There is also a web in the flower. Is anybody home? I think we need to dive in a little deeper and try for one more shot.

Here we go, popped a flash, slightly underexposed (-0.3) and zoomed in. I let the camera do the heavy lifting in PROGRAM mode and then I make minor adjustments in aperature for depth of field, exposure to bring out the details and in this case, popped the contrast in post production.
I'm kind of liking the mundane Canadian Goldenrod on the day before the Autumn Equinox. The leaves will be changing soon so charge up the camera batteries and be ready.

Shoot for the moon!

My company just bought a new Nikon 90. I got to bring it home over the weekend and on Friday night just an hour before the full moon (12:01 AM Sat) I was out in the back yard with a hand-held D90 and 18-105mm VR kit lens. Here's the result:

Looks pretty good, for winging the settings. Here they are:

What do we know? Some cameras have great high ISO characteristics and we should use them. Shooting the moon is hard, because the exposure is all about the balance of the dark sky and the bright moon. Only 26 more days till the next full moon, so get ready to shoot the moon.

Make the sky dramatic

This is probably the hardest tip to remember and it works for silhouettes too. Dial the exposure compensation down on the camera. On most cameras you either have a button marked +/- or a menu item. Just dial down the exposure anywhere from a .5 to a 2.0 stops (that's f/stops for you techies). In this example I dialed down the exposure 1.7 stops.
Why do this? The camera is using it's built in light meter and there's so much bright area with very dark underneath that camera can't figure it out. It also doesn't "see" color the way the human eye does. So in the picture above, this is really what I saw and in the "normal exposure compensation" below, this is what the camera sees.
There's one more plus to this. If your pictures are coming out orange with normal compensation, you can dial down the exposure and take a dark image. You can later bring the light levels back up with software and see the image. This doesn't work every time but you might be able to save a few images that special moment.