Super Geotagged...

One of my interested in photography, is geotagging. It is still VERY much in its infancy, but I found this site called SuperGeotaggec.com. The project is very cool. Grab the geotagged photos, on Flickr, and post them on google maps. You can read a bit more, in the author's origional post. Very cool. I will be doing a future blog post, about geotagging as well, and the trials and tribulations I have had, from it.

In the darkness, the fun has just begun.

I am sure that everyone enjoys certain aspects of photography more than others. Some like weddings, others portraits, others landscapes. One of my favorites, is night time. There is something magical about light capturing your subject. The eyes are drawn to the light. That is the case of my pictures of the Boise Train Depot. Next up, there are the pictures of Boise, itself. The lights become the subject. In the darkness, you do not really SEE the valley, as much as the lights OF the valley. It is amazing. You get up into the foot hills, the wind, blowing fresh, crisp air over you. You scan the valley for visually interesting lights, or groups of lights.

From a technical standpoint, photography is the art of capturing the light that is reflected off your subject. With the example above, about the night shooting, over Boise, you are capturing the light itself. Figuring out HOW to do that, properly, is a trick. I am ATTEMPTING to capture the vista, in camera, how I want it to turn out, with the least amount of tweaking. This particular shot was shot at 75mm, using f/4, ISO 100 and a 10 second exposure time. A lot of the lights pop MORE than what I want, it was the best of the bunch, the most crisp looking. After I did some processing in raw, and over-saturated some of the colors, I thought that the picture took on a life of its own.

My previous post about low-light, was more concerned with the WHERE to shoot from. This one is more about the why. As I learn more about photography, I get better. In the week between the previous night shot of Boise, and the latest night shot. I have read more, learned more, and upgraded my camera to a Canon XSi. I am pretty sure the biggest change between the previous week and this later week, was a MUCH nicer camera, but that is not all. I noticed with my Canon A650 IS, a LOT of the shots were blurry. This last time I went up, instead of having my tripod behind my car, I put my car between the wind, and the tripod. With the 10, 20, and longer exposures, this made all the difference in the world. It are these little things, that all add up to make a photographer great. I have to look around, and figure out what aspects of a shot I am able to master, and then I try to figure out a method to master them. I am sure that someone with years of experience would have noticed the wind right away, and shielding the camera from the wind, would not have required a conscious thought.

So, I have discovered, I like shooting at night. My other favorites I have discovered are macro, and taking shots of patterns. Finally, I DO love my daughter, as a subject. She is a real ham, and does an amazing job in the front of the camera. Oh, and this weekend, my daughter got her FIRST digital camera. A 5MP, Kodak digital camera I picked up used for her. She had been asking for a camera, to be like daddy for a long time. I look forward to our adventures together.

How'd I capture that goose?

I went out last night, and took some pictures of some waterfowl on a local pond. Mainly the geese turned out. I am taking a LOT of "junk" shots to my good shots, still. I had my tripod there, but I still hand shot, trying to get the action better. I think this ultimately hurt me, rather than helped me. There were some pretty birds there, though. I also got to play with my little GPS unit for geotagging. That is COOL. :-) Unfortunately, since the GPS data is saved as a "tag" Elements imported new tags for the pictures. That is kind of a pain. Ok, I will have to do a post, soon about geotagging.

As for the goose. I uploaded the 4 good ones, to my flickr account. I had a gentleman post this in the comments of one of my pictures: "Very clear and full of expression. Sharp point of focus. I have tried to take photos as clean and clear as this but haven't yet succeeded. I can't get my lighting right even with all the extra knobs. Or maybe it's because of the extra knobs????"

I responded with everything I could remember from taking those pictures: "This shot was taken FAIRLY close, using a 300mm lens. (You can see the information in the exif) I barely can figure out the extra knobs, myself. :-) What I did, is set my camera to aperture priority. I wanted as much light in, as possible, and then hoped it would be a fast shutter. There is a local park, that has a the sun shining down it, as you can see in this picture. It was taken a touch before the magic hour of light, but still pretty close, so that gave me the softer light. To hold the camera as steady as possible, I was sitting down, and pulled my arms tight into my body. Oh, I also set my autofocus to the CENTER point, instead of all of the points. It makes the auto-focus lock on to WHAT you want, and seems to be a lot faster. " I am also including a link to my meta data/exif information.

I hope that helps him. This is all about learning. That is the entire point of this blog. Learn and grow as a photographer. What I find kind of funny, is I was planning on going on this date with this lady last night, and we had planned on walking the park. I knew I could get some shots of waterfowl, and hopefully some other wildlife, there. Yesterday, my copy of Popular Photography came in, and had an article about photographing waterfowl. It seemed like AMAZING timing, to me!

And now, a picture of the goose I have been talking about, and my personal favorite of the night, what I call "The Regal Goose".

The Regal Goose

The Curious Goose

Shooting in low-light and night.

Saturday night, we had the sun setting, and clouds on the horizon. I was all excited for a beautiful sunset; boy was *I* disappointed. Well, it wasn’t a total loss. I took some neat pictures of Boise, though, they all kind of suck. The A650 is a GREAT little snapshot camera, but as you get more serious, it has some serious limitations. I would say, THIS is one of them.

As I was returning to my car, I heard a scrabbling sound above me, and looked up. There was a herd of deer up there! I started taking pictures. I fired off a bunch of pictures. I was there long enough, that the herd came down the hill, and went over to the lot I had been shooting pictures of Boise from! It was pretty cool. I fired off 34 pictures, and got 1 that is ok. Most are about snapshot quality. The biggest problem, was shooting in low-light again. I was kind of fighting my camera tonight, on the low-lighting issue. It kept jumping up to ISO800, which is TERRIBLY noisy. Though, the deer were not keeping still much, so running at a lower ISO with a longer shutter, may not have worked well, either.

I started my trip off, looking for the road up to Table Rock. It has been a LOT of years since I last went up there. Even though, I did not find it intially, I did find a cool spot, to shoot from.
After I packed up, I decided to look around to see if I could find where the road to Table Rock was. I DID find it, though, there is now a gate they lock after sundown. On the way back down the hill, I found a great shot of Boise. By this time, it was pretty dark, so Boise was alight, with, uh, light. I took some pictures, and a few turned out pretty cool, though, it could have been better. I tried running at ISO 100, with a long shutter, and that did not work. There was a bit of wind, and I NEVER thought some wind would cause my camera to shake as much as it did.

Pictures... of paintballs.

I went out today, looking for some pictures. My daughter is with her mom, and I didn't have anything PRESSING to do, so I figured I would go out, and see what I could find. Wasn't impressed with what I found, but one place I went, is where we play paintball in town, down by the river. I was hoping for some sort of animal/wildlife/nature shot, but nothing looked great... too brown, to wintery. Anyhow, as I was wondering around, I kept noticing paintballs, and decided to take some shots, featuring paintballs. I think they turned out ok, though, nothing to write home about. Here are a few shots.

Then, we have a kind of interesting picture. Not GREAT, but an interesting picture none the less. This bridge support is covered in paintball splatters, unfortunately. But, the thing I wanted, was the shadow, cast by the tree on it. After playing with it a touch in Photoshop Elements, I have brought out the shadow a bit more, and really, just ramped up the colors and sharpness. I think it is interesting, but would have been better, if it had been a clean support.

Another Day, another picture.

So, it has been a few days. I have been eagerly watching the reviews for the Canon XSi camera rolling in, and can't wait to see them hit more general release. I have heard rumors of an April 6, April 10, April 27th release dates. Who knows, but they ARE showing up in consumers hands, already.

I finally received my new book, The Photoshop Elements 6 Book for Digital Photographers by Scott Kelby and Matt Kloskowski. My initial reaction to the book, is that it is VERY well done. I have Photoshop Elements 6: The Missing Manual which I like, but I REALLY like this new book. I think, from what little I have read in both books, they will compliment each other very well.

I did something fun last night. Went with a friend to watch a band play, at a local bar. A friend of his, is the drummer. Another guy was shooting some pictures, and was using the on-camera flash. Every time it went off, I thought of the line from Scott Kelby's Digital Photography Book 2. "If you have a grudge against someone, shoot them with your camera's pop-up flash and it will even the score. After I saw him using his external flash some more, I gave him an idea I also read from the same book... to use the bounce card, in the flash, to add some catch-light to the band's eyes. And it worked! Since I am still using a Point and Shoot at this point, a lot of my knowledge is theoretical, in that have not actually USED it yet. I was quite pleased with myself, being able to apply some knowlege that I have learned from reading my books. I try to shoot some every week, but this has not been a productive week. My favorite subject, my daughter, did not want to cooperate the other day at the park. I was kind of bummed. But, she had fun at least. I did get a couple of pictures though.



So, I am beginning to think I am in a rut... I take pictures of my daughter (ok, not so much of a rut there) and flowers... I really need to see more. But, here was kind of a cool picture I took at my parent's house. Flower. It was kind of ho-hum, until I jazzed it up a bit, with a filter I downloaded. I really liked the orange fade across the image.

Need to get better at post processing

I have been playing around with Elements for a while now, though, I STILL do not feel... comfortable with it. Sure, cropping is easy. As is red-eye reduction. The auto-fix for lighting is usually spot on. The problem is, are those are all the simple things. I have played around with some settings, and have a kind of cool looking picture of a stack of CDs. As well as a cool Black and white art looking thing of a picture of a tree. The panorama shot, from my first post, was also done in this program, but I had step-by-step instructions to follow, to access it.

Yesterday, I started doing watermarks on my pictures, since ultimately, I would like to sell some into stock photography. That was another thing I had to look up, though, it works almost the same, in paint.net and Elements. So, this leads me into my next topic. What applications do I have installed on my PC?

Right now, I have the following:

Photoshop Elements 6

GIMP

Paint.net

Neat Image Great for reducing noise in pictures

Picasa

Microsoft Picture Manager This may seem odd, but I like to use it to quickly open, and resize files. One gotcha with it, save the file you are editing, but DO NOT save over the original, which it prompts you to do, when you close it. I luckily had a backup of the picture I was working on, when I got hit by this Microsoft "feature".

Most of my tools were free, or came bundled with another product. Neat and Elements being the 2 I have paid for. There are a lot of neat, free tools out there, if you can find them.

The flowers of Spring

Yesterday, as I was heading back to work, from lunch, I noticed this lone flower in my front yard. I had to get a picture of it. I am happy how it turned out. Nice, "tack sharp" focus. Most images are rectangular, so I went with a square frame on this. Instead of JUST composition, which I am a LONG ways from being any good at, I am also looking at framing of the picture itself. Imagine this on a conventional portrait mounting, with the picture itself, dead center, and about 1/3 of the way from the top. Then, a blank space for about 1/3 and in the bottom 3rd putting the name of the print, or a saying or something along those lines.

I have Adobe Elements, though, this was edited in paint.net. I use it for my organizer. I am working on getting the tagging to work as well. I was really good at tagging, my last vacation. Every other picture, has been pretty bad, so far. I have the MAJOR people/places/animals in my pictures, now tagged. Working on getting things a little better, to make the tagging work FOR me. That being said, I keep looking at light room and drooling. From what I understand, tagging from one does not carry over. I am honestly, not 100% sure that is true. I hope it is not.