Wyatt's FP workshop blog

I'm Leaving

2005-10-13T11:28:00.000-04:00

Thanks for being part of the group.

I've enjoyed participating, and learned a lot.

I will be going to New Orleans this weekend for 60-120 days, so I won't be able to keep up with this page, probably. Hopefully, I'll be able to squeeze a few photographic moments out of each day while I'm there.

Foresight/Abstract, attempt #1

2005-09-03T17:45:00.000-04:00

Not sure, but I think I'm soooo darned left-brained that it was really difficult to write down how the cup & saucer made me feel. The concepts it represents were easier - fineness/richness, lasting/sturdiness, sumptuous or exquisite. Those were the things I could imagine the designer trying to accomplish with this design.

So I tried to show the delicacy of the cup by getting a shot that shows the thinness of the cup wall and lip. And I thought the handle and saucer edge with thick metallic leaf displayed the sturdiness. Exquisite design is visible in the rose design on the outside of the cup. Depth is seen due to the highlights and shadows. But the whole is abstracted by selective focus and the in-camera crop.

So, as I said in my title, this is the first attempt. I had no success with the pre-shot sketching idea - I found it more useful to manipulate the object and lighting and sight line until I found something strong enough to appeal to me. All comments are welcome. If you really inspire me, I'll give this cup & saucer another try. Should I put a "sumptuous" liquid in it? Is it abtract enough? I'm really wanting to see your shots, now that I've tried this!

emulating FP

2005-08-29T20:07:00.000-04:00

The top photo here is my emulation of the one shown on page 14 of the book (in case the page numbers are different for older editions, the one with the tips of the fern fronds in-focus, from the side). The other photo is what was there, in a larger sense.

So, I switched the macro on at 200 mm, and went to the end of the limb for some shallow-field selective focus. I like it a lot better than the more documentary shot - this is a nice start to some future discovery & exposition.

unrelated trio exercise

2005-08-20T18:24:00.000-04:00

My 3 objects were: a safety pin, a birdfeeder, and a die-cut. I had them in and out of my home-made softbox, with different backdrops, with & without flash, with and without filter swatches in front of the flash, etc. I used my new camera (Konica-Minolta A-200), so I at least learned more about it.

10 "best" shots in my backyard

2005-08-07T03:18:00.000-04:00

a. I think this is a newly-sprouting clover flower. Slightly post-processed. b. A feather was in my radius! Hooray! (That's me cheering, not the bird...)

c. Another shot of the feather, showing the texture better.
d. This is not as gross as it might seem - it's a piece of a nest that blew into my circle, not a dead animal.
e. My first macro of a clover flower in full bloom.
f. Another flower, I applied gaussian blur to the complete background, and unsharp mask to the yellow areas.
g. This is a bush on one edge of my circle - sloooow shutter speed, rotational motion, gave an outcome that appealed to me. h. The corner of the porch was the other edge of my circle. This was posterized and watercolored for post processing.
i. I used the Hue/Saturation/Lightness command to tweak the six colors under a desaturated regime to give a documentary shot of the deteriorated carpet on the corner.
j. This would be the foundation of the porch. Not that I'd usually take a picture of it, but you should see how uninteresting the rest of the photos are...
Enjoy!

Still playing with over-exposures

2005-07-31T00:56:00.000-04:00

Looking back, I've played with under-exposing plenty of shots, especially sunsets, or when I was zooming around 400mm to increase the shutter speed. But I've not done much intentional over-exposure, until these exercises.

Saturday, we went to our County Fair, and they had some truck drag races in the mud (if there's a formal name for that sport, I missed it). Here are a couple of shots: the first over-exposed by 2 stops, the second set to 1/25 and f8, which was more than +2 stops. I panned with the trucks, using the full zoom; post processing I've cropped, adjusted levels to darken, and tweaked the saturation down.

These shots convey the motion/ action well, and while I'm not ready for a Sports Illustrated assignment, I've got to say that this week's exercises made me realize that over-exposing doesn't have to result in blowing out all of the important highlights.

Which brings me to this shot. The day I posted the memorial arch I also took this shot, and I've returned to it, as it has an attractive quality to me. I took it at f8 for 1/2 second, sweeping slightly along the curve of the bridge. What I like about this shot, is that it gives me the opposite feeling of the actual scene - tension, edginess, mild fear of the unknown. I'm not usually thinking those things, or operating there, but I like this result (as of today).

A properly-exposed shot of the same bridge is shown below (1/25 at f8).

OOF & bokeh

2005-07-29T15:39:00.000-04:00

Here's an OOF subject shot that I succeeded at. Not that it's interesting enough to add to a portfolio, but it works for what I was trying to do.

Not too much detail lost on the memorial arch, but just enough to keep your eyes from trying to pick out the details. Is that the point, maybe?

With more practice, I can try to capture a real subject in this way. I need to get a firm handle on the bokeh performance of my camera, that's for sure. Out of 44 shots I took today at lunch, I tried this OOF technique on about 10, and this is by far the best realization of it. I'll check the metadata and estimate some distances to see if I can figure out a successful pattern.

flowers on the move

2005-07-28T13:17:00.000-04:00

I went to the rose garden in a city park today and tried various movement techniques as I took pictures. Shaking, rotating, panning, etc.

This shot is of 4 large roses that were mostly surrounded by green. I liked the short-shake result the best. It seems to give it a painting-like appearance, Impressionistic I suppose.

I cropped it to a square, slightly darkened it and very slightly boosted saturation. I slowed down the camera settings as much as I could, f8/ISO 50/EC+0.3. Other than that, it's gotta be trial-and-error to find a result you enjoy. (Thank God for digital!)

This next one represents my best results from the rotational movement. What I found here was that I liked the photo better if the center of the rotation was nearer to a "traditional" subject, such as an individual flower. To me, this photo shows a central bloom that all the others play second fiddle to.

Post processing and camera settings were similar to the first shot above.

Other shots that didn't make it here were the multi-color types. I've seen other people's efforts at those and like them very much, but this particular garden has a lot of green between different types of roses, so the horticultural crowd can feast on specific breeds, or whatever. Wildflowers or eclectic gardens would probably work better for the multi-color shots, huh?

broke several minor rules

2005-07-27T22:51:00.000-04:00

Maybe this is a weak example of rule-breaking, but it's one of my best shots from today. It is a centered subject, taken at 12:28 PM on a sunny day, and without looking through the view-finders. Also, the bee's eyes aren't shown.

To compensate for the mid-day sun, I underexposed the shot by 1 stop. I held the camera low in the thistle patch at arm's length (It sure beat laying down in the thistles in the 95 degree heat - imagine the itchy sweaty rest of the day back in the office!), and took 3 shots. This was the best of the bunch, and it's uncropped.

While these rule violations don't seem terribly right-brained/creative, it's still a decently nice shot. Maybe tomorrow I can assault some serious principles. If not for our learning efforts here, I wouldn't have gone for this walk to take photos in the mid-day sun.

Use a tripod!

2005-07-26T11:52:00.000-04:00

I like the concept of this shot, as originally taken. It is a seagull late into an oceanside sunset, backlit by a tidal stream with nice sunset colors reflected. If I'd have had the tripod with me, the shot itself might have been "enough" and I would never have played with it in Photoshop Elements like I did.

But the fact is, it had serious motion-blur issues. I decided one night to play with some of the special effects in Elements, and using "contours" I came up with this. Which I like. And I might use again some time, hopefully to even better effect. Point being, a sharp photograph isn't REQUIRED to produce an image that's pleasing to your eye. (I don't know if it's pleasing to your eye, but I like it, so good enough for now!)

The tripod dichotomy is a toughy - in lateral thinking exercises, maybe especially tough. You want to move the camera, change the horizon, violate some rules, etc. I like some of my tripod shots a lot, and I think I could demonstrate that if I had taken those shots without the tripod, it wouldn't have been as pleasing. That said, I don't use a tripod 95% of the time, or more. Is that wrong?

exposure meter rules supreme?

2005-07-25T21:46:00.000-04:00

This is my first post for the "Freeman Patterson - Photography & the Art of Seeing" study group in DPChallenge. Not having gotten my hands on the book yet, my understanding is we're to work on breaking rules.

This photo is just about the only qualified one out of 400-500 I searched through from earlier this month, looking for a rule breaker. The rule would be "use what the exposure meter dictates." Well, I don't know if that's really a rule, and if it is I technically didn't break it here. I did use the meter to under-expose this shot so the rays of the sun contrasted better with the cloud background. The shot hasn't been post-processed yet.