Macro photography

I waited for nearly four weeks for this Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D to arrive. I purchased it over eBay for $91USD. With shipping, it came out to $116USD. Custom duties costed me $18CAD -- what a rip-off.

Anyhow, here is a first attempt at macro photography. I had a hard time taking these two photographs because I kept on hitting parts of the plant and that caused the flower to move incessantly. When you work at this macro level at f/1.8, a millimeter or two can make a huge difference so I closed the aperture down by a few f-stops, to f/4 or f/8 I believe. I forgot to jot down the settings and because I used simple extension tubes, there is no electronic contact between the lens and the camera body. Yes, I used an extension tube because the 50mm is so so for macro. I did however remember having used my speedlight set on manual mode with its power output reduced to 1/64. The speedlight was mounted on the hot shoe with the diffuser dome on to soften and spread more light everywhere.

With the aperture set at f/4 or f/8 and using a speedlight on low power, I was able to light up my subject and leave the noise in the background in the dark.

My extension tube is made up of three sections (9mm, 16mm, 30mm). This first shot was taken with a 55mm extension. The second shot was taken with a 25mm extension. These two photos are not spectacular shots, artistically speaking, but notice how much detail you can see of the stigma and anthers at this level. Sweet, I think.

ADDENDUM

Here I am adding an addendum to the original post. At home, I cut up a kiwi and before eating it I thought I'd frame it up macro-style. The depth-of-field is really really small, maybe 8mm deep?? This shot of the kiwi was set at f/22, the smallest aperture on the 50mm.

Under my kitchen fluorescent lights, I could not see anything through the viewfinder. Total blackness so again taking this shot was just as difficult as taking the two shots above without a tripod.

To compensate for the pinhole aperture, the speedlight output power had to be increased from 1/64 to 1/4.

The kiwi is in my tummy now.

Happy Holidays!

I shot this Christmas tree ornament at a brand new Irish pub in Toronto Monday night. I do not recall the name of the pub but I will post it here when I do. Anyways, Happy Holidays!

Shooting Planes

Last Friday I was close to the second location, Dixie and Derry rd. I was not planning to take pictures of planes, but because I was in the area I decided to give it a try. I got this picture. I was waiting for a big guy to arrive, but no luck. I think we should go there one afternoon and take pictures of different airplanes, specially small ones.

Santa Claus Parade - Mississauga

The Santa Claus Parade in Streetsville, Mississauga was very small compared to the Toronto parade. I did not think there would be anything spectacular to shoot but I felt compeled to document the event in some small way. Again however, one mistake I made was not showing up early enough to pick a nice spot for shooting. I briskly walked down the street to find some open space while the parade was unfolding.

Here was the best shot I had of the big Santa and Mrs. Claus. It's too bad the light pole was behind the float when they passed by. I should have noticed the pole and move further down the street before shooting it.

Just before I came down to see the parade, I had brunch with Carey at the Muddy Moose restaurant and he talked about the 'image' vs. the 'subject'. You got to consider the whole picture, including the background. You do have to choose a proper background to frame the subject in.

Shooting planes

Just so you know what you can take at Pearson, this is the size of an Air Canada plane (probably DC-10) shot from the first location I mentioned in the 747 Landing blog post, just at the intersection of Britannia Rd and Convair Dr. Setting was at 240mm, f/5.6, 1/320 sec.

I think the second location would give must better results.

747 landing

I wish I was there to take a picture of this 747 landing ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIQUo5Si_WA&feature=related

A better bounce card

I like tuning in YouTube to watch some videos from time to time. Here is one I ran across a couple of months ago. After watching it a couple of times, I decided to go to Micheals' and grab the foam sheet Peter Gregg mentions in his video instruction and made myself 'a better bounce card'.

A sense of purpose

Cesar said shooting the birds, landscape, sunrise and sunset down on lakeshore does get boring. I agree. It goes with anything you do. It could be biking, hiking, skiing, etc. If there is not much variety, the concept gets stale. If I snowboard down the hills of Blue Mountain a quazillion times, the same adrenaline surge I get will wear itself down over time, so you need to challenge yourself and push yourself to achieve a higher level of passion for the sport.

In photography, I think we need to define our goals and interests, whether photography is your job or your hobby. It is a hobby for me, and I have defined a purpose for myself. I have bought a number of lenses for specific reasons and I will try to master the skills to capture the perfect shot in those specific shooting situations to convey a certain expression of a subject, be it for: portrait, candid, macro, wildlife, landscape, architecture. I am trying to define and create my own art, not just a photo, and yes, it sounds like there is a lot of them but that keeps me entertained.

Cesar's goal is to build a portfolio of all the conservation areas he has visited and will visit in the future.

RAW format

It is said that the serious photographer shoots RAW only. That makes sense. The amount of dynamic range we lose from a JPEG format is huge -- compare 8 bits per pixel in JPEG vs 12 or 14 bits per pixels in RAW format. I assume the serious photographer has a lot of time on his/her hand to tweak the RAW data to produce the right JPEG.

I am not writing about the RAW vs JPEG format because I do not have much experience with RAW and there are enough articles out there with all kinds of tests to show that there is really no difference for the untrained eye. Being that it contains more data, RAW should produce images with higher contrast and better defined colour ranges -- imagine shooting the sunset. I would however draw from reading those articles that it would depend on your post-processing software how the final photo would turn out. If you have a crappy software that does not know how to make the best out of the RAW data, smoothening out curves for example, you would get crappy results. If your camera has better built-in image processing than your software, then I'd like to shoot with in in-camera JPEG format. You cannot imagine that being the case though, right? Any professional software should have more capabilities than your camera image processing firmware; would the Gimp fit in this category?

What I am interested in is, your real world experience. Do you shoot in RAW only format, or RAW+JPEG, or only JPEG? Do you shoot RAW for archiving purposes, given that it does contain a lot of data?

This morning I went to lakeshore (Mississauga). I was trying to catch something good (taking pictures is like going fishing, you are always trying to catch something big). I didn't have any luck in the morning :(

In the afternoon I went back to try a good picture of the sunset, but it was not that spectacular, so I didn’t get anything good, so I try my luck with this guys and I got these pictures handheld at 200mm, ISO 200, 1/100, f6.3

In the first picture the sea eagle was moving really fast and I was just following it with my camera. The second picture was easier because this guy was sleeping, however was windy and it was moving.

Shooting the Santa Claus parade

I just came back from the Santa Claus parade. I tell you, if you want a good shot of a marching band or those clowns and the big guy, you need to arrive at least an hour early or bring a ladder.

Other than being up a crane, one of the best place to shoot the parade is at the corner of University Ave. and Queen St. where the parade turns east. At the corner, you have a front view of the parade as well as a side view of it as it turns the corner. This is assuming you arrive early enough to find the sweet spot. I arrived too late.





From the corner I did not get any shot I liked as there were too many taller heads in front of me. So eventually, I had to move to another location. Light was poorer at the new location but I did manage some ok shots although none good of the big guy -- he was facing the other side of University Ave. when his float passed by.

Framing

All the photos I have taken thus far are displayed in an online album resized from the original JPEG as rendered by the camera. Recently, I took on the interest of framing some photos. Here is one photo of Toronto taken 6 days before Cesar's Toronto at Night photo.

This photo was cropped from the original. The original captured more of the background sky and the foreground lake. I did not think the upper stratosphere in the photo added any jazz to the overall picture so I removed it but left some of it to show where the lower hanging clouds end. Ditto for the lower foreground but I had a bit of an indecision as to how much of the lower foreground to remove for better composition.

I then added a frame around the photo. Besides drawing more attention to the main subject, it gives me a sense of where things start and end. Without it, the photo ends too abrubtly on the edges. The contrast of the photo against a white background of a web page would otherwise be too hard on my eyes. The frame works equally well on a black background.

Nikon Capture NX

I do not know what all the hype is about with this software. The Nikon Capture NX software is sold separately from the camera (except for the new D3 and D300) for about $150, and for that price, I do not see why anyone would buy it to process RAW-format NEF files. I downloaded the 30-day eval and perhaps there is something wrong with my notebook or some settings I use but the software is draggingly slow.

Feature-wise, the software is ok. It has the typical features needed to manipulate photos. I can do the same with a NEF plug-in for the Gimp.

Speed-wise, the software is slow. It takes 15 seconds to load up on my 2GHz P4. It also loads in a NEF image slow. The software is so slow it took a few hours to batch process my 300 NEF files. Nothing seems snappy. It does not feel like a normal Windows software.

I have little good to say about this software, a software I think that should have come with the camera in the first place -- why sell a feature on a camera for which you need to pay extra to make full use of? Frankly, I do not like this sales tactic. Nikon makes enough money on the camera and lenses they can give away Capture NX for free.

Resetting camera

Darn, I forget this too often. I tend to change my camera settings for different lighting conditions, especially for dark environment exposures, cranking the ISO level to 1200 sometimes and forgetting to reset it back to 100 or 200 for daylight shooting. I am not sure how you would try to remember to reset your settings after every shooting session. I guess you would have to go through the pains of shooting grainy pictures until one day the pain is engraved in your memory. The other option may be to insert a reminder note in between the LCD and LCD plastic cover.

Re: Toronto at Night

Well, there is no way to link an image in a comment so I am creating a new post instead.

This is cropped from the Toronto at Night photo below.

Toronto at Night

OK this is my first post to the Photon Farmers blog, I am a beginner and I will probably have more questions than tips for this blog. So here I am trying to learn how to take a good picture at night. So far the picture below is one of my best pictures of Toronto, I am using a canon 30D with a 18-200 mm lens. For this picture I used tripod and I used my favourite custom function, Mirror lockup, along with the self timer to prevent camera shake when the shutter fired. 96.0 mm, ISO 200, 30-second exposure at f8.0.



Then I tried some filters in Photoshop. I read that yellow, magenta and blue filters are very good for night pictures, so here it is, the same picture with a magenta filter.

Image Sharpness on a tripod

Of course we are not talking about daytime photography, but rather the longer exposure nighttime style with a sturdy tripod. We are also not talking about shooting moving targets but rather architecture that stands relatively still.

Camera shake is such a nuisance especially at long focal ranges. I have thrown away so many pictures and then kept some only to study to improve on the quality of pictures I take. In the process, I have learned a few things. Besides increasing the ISO sensitivity level of the Nikon CCD and hence shutter speed, there are a couple of methods one can use to take sharp photos at night.

On the D80, there is a feature called Exposure Delay mode, setting #31 in firmware 1.0.1. By activating this mode, exposure is delayed for 0.40 seconds after the mirror slams up. Thus, by the time the shutter opens, the camera would hopefully have stabilized from the mirror shock. I have used this method along with either a shutter release remote control or a 5-sec shutter delay. When I get a chance, I will post some photos with and without the exposure delay.

The second method, I just learned from a friend over this weekend, is to slow down the shutter speed for a longer period and place a black velvet cloth in front of the lens for a few seconds. In the few seconds that the velvet cloth blocks light from entering the lens, the camera would have stabilized from all the vibration caused by the mirror and even the shutter movement. I think I will try this method.

There is a third method but the D80 does not support it. If the D80 supports Mirror Lock Up I'd use it instead of the Exposure Delay mode as the Exposure Delay is only 0.40 secs. I have written to Nikon about changing the Exposure Delay mode option in the firmware to allow for a longer delay but it is unlikely it will get implemented anytime soon, if it gets implemented at all. I would rather use the Exposure Delay mode if this change gets implemented.

Image Sharpness

I gotta give it to Sigma, to be the first to incorporate the Foveon X3 sensor (www.foveon.com) in their DSLR. I am not too fond of Sigma's cameras themselves; there are already 5 firmware updates to the Sigma's latest SD14 since its debut in late fall of 2006. That only shows how buggy the camera is and it has sure enough not gone through enough professional hands to be a serious contender to the Nikon and Canon counterparts. However, reading the specs of the Foveon X3 sensor, I can imagine it will take only a few more years of experience until Sigma can produce a camera of the same or higher caliber than the current cream of the crop.

The latest Foveon sensor packs 14.1 megapixels in a 24.9mm footprint. The 14.1 megapixels is made up of three layers of 2688x1792 sensor sites (so maybe it would be more correct to say it has only 4.6 megapixels). Each sensor site has 3 pixel sensors stacked on top of each other. Each pixel sensor can capture a distinct portion of the RGB spectrum so each sensor site is able to reproduce fairly accurately the RGB colour as seen by that site. Thus, there is no interpolation of colours as performed in sensors used by every other digital cameras.

What it means is, an image captured by the Foveon X3 sensor is extremely sharp, sharp across the whole sensor at every pixel location. I can hardly wait to see advancement in this technology. They just need to pack more and more sensor sites and the Foveon X3 will dominate the sensor market. I would not be surprised to see Nikon using this technology in the near future. I believe Nikon made a D70f that used the Foveon sensor but the technology was still premature at the time.

DOF

I like playing with Depth of Field. Not only does it give an image some dimension but it draws attention to a specific subject. The photos below are of architecture and flora. Later when I start shooting some portrait photos, DOF will be more interesting.

The first photo below is a set of chairs and wooden bench laid around the centre court of University College, University of Toronto. In this photo, I like the sharpness of the metal chair in stark contrast with the bokeh and background light. The DOF is clearly demonstrated on the wooden bench. The court was fairly dark as Toronto was covered in clouds at 6:30pm EDT so I set my Tokina 80-400mm lens to 80mm at f/7.1 and opened the shutter for 9 secs. As I was not carrying a tripod, I just rested the Tokina at one end of the bench; I might have padded it with the tilley hat I was wearing. The background colour came from incandescent light in the west wing corridors.




In this second photo, I took a shot of a flower in our front yard (what is it called??). This was in late July at 7pm EDT. My eyes are drawn to the anthers, some filaments of interest, stigma, and some parts of the petals in the plane of focus. Nikkor 18-200mm at f/5.6 at 105mm. Shutter opened for 1/100 sec.

Frozen in time

This shot was taken at the Colonel Samuel Smith Park today -- I guess it could have been anywhere. There was very little wind today and yet the rocks were getting a good beating as you can see from this photo. I tried to get a good shot of a big splash and after 10 shots or so, I finally got one.

The sun was already low on the horizon at around 3:21pm so there was good surface definition. It was bright enough though I was able to shoot at 1/800 sec at f/5.6.

You should take a look at the original photo (3872 x 2592).

Sky over Mississauga

I do not have a new photo today but I thought I'd share two shots I took a few weeks ago -- one from the U of T Mississauga parking lot, looking over the pond toward the west at 5:42pm, and another I took as I walked back to the south building from the CCT building just past 6pm.

Some of the most beautiful skies are just around dusk and dawn, when the sun is low enough on the horizon that photons get reflected off the atmosphere in very a interesting range of the spectrum. Clouds are great for the fiery effect.


These shots were taken with a Tokina 80-400mm lens at the long end. Fortunately I did not need VR for these shots.

For these shots and many other landscapes, I walk around with the Nikkor 18-200mm and the Tokina.

Welcome

In 2006, I took my older brother's Nikon D50 to shoot a friend's wedding. The camera was quite simple, equipped with an 18-70mm Nikkor lens and an SB-600 flash. I did not use much of its features but I thoroughly enjoyed it. That brought my curiosity and interest in the Digital SLR world up a notch.

I started looking at the Canon cameras, in particular the Digital Rebel XTi because of its reputation and cool look, but because my older brother has a D50 and I liked every bit of the few features I used at the wedding, my preference was already leaning toward a Nikon gear from the start, so down the Nikon road I walked.

After a few months of waiting and researching, I decided to invest my hobby in a Nikon D80 with the Nikkor 18-200mm lens. This lens was and is so popular that Nikon had and still has a hard time keeping up production with the demand; I had to wait 6 weeks for my order to arrive at my office. So I am quite new in the Digital SLR world and am still exploring the photons with a passion, hence this blog.

I welcome anyone to share their creativity and artistic experience with others here -- post links to your photo album or just write something of general interest or organize a day of photography.

Have fun and shoot away.

-- foton