bull...

May, week three:
While driving around the local countryside I noticed some longhorn cattle. Since this is Virginia, it caught my attention. I quick snapped a few shots, although I was really wishing for a longer lens that would allow me a close-up portrait.

Here I tried fiddling with the complex black and white conversion parameters in PSE-CS3. I don't know if I made the best choices, but it was a good learning experience. I'm a little fascinated with assymetric borders at the moment, as you may notice. I think I need to add "rural" as another goal for my project. Otherwise, the only thing this picture fits is wildlife. Sort of fits landscape, too.

Image details:
Date and location: 5/26/7 at 15:41 EDT, Hwy 22 outside Charlottesville, VA
Equipment: Canon 30D, 17-85mm IS lens, Hoya SMC UV filter
Settings: 83mm, handheld with IS, ISO 100, f/8.0, 1/200 sec, shot in raw
Processing: cataloged in Aperture v1.5.3 -> export as .jpg to PSE-CS3 -> black and white (100, 0, 40, 110, 110, 110) -> levels (20, 1.15, 255) -> contrast +10 -> crop -> resize -> USM (150%, 0.5, 0) -> border + text -> save as .jpg
Photo-a-week goals addressed: #1 (b+w), #17 (wildlife), #18 (rural)

wedge...

May, week two:
I was in NYC for my nephew's fourth birthday party. On my way back, I drove through the city a little bit to try and get a few pics. The Flatiron building was one of several stops I made. While it is an often-photographed building, that doesn't mean I shouldn't have my version of it.

This is one of the first photographs I've processed using Photoshop Extended CS3. I downloaded a 30 day trial, and so far I like it. I had heard a lot from people about the black and white conversion process, and I haven't yet had the chance to play around with it sufficiently. For this, I used one of the pre-sets (high contrast red filter). After adjusting brightness and contrast, I applied a little bit more sharpening than usual and went with an asymmetric border. I put the website address in the bottom-left instead of the bottom right because I didn't want to obscure the view down fifth avenue. It's a cliche photograph, but I like it.

Image details:
Date and location: 5/20/7 at 17:02 EDT, Manhattan
Equipment: Canon 30D, 17-85mm IS lens, Hoya SMC UV filter
Settings: 20mm, handheld with IS, ISO 100, f/10.0, 1/200 sec, shot in raw
Processing: cataloged in Aperture v1.5.3 -> export as .jpg to PSE-CS3 -> black and white (high contrast red preset) -> brightness +10/contrast +10 -> resize -> crop -> USM (200%, 0.5, 0) -> border + text -> save as .jpg
Photo-a-week goals addressed: #1 (b+w), #3 (vertical orientation), #11 (architecture), #16 (street photography)

brookie...

May, week one:
This beautiful brook trout is the first fish that I caught with my new fly rod. It is a native brook trout (not stocked by the state), and had amazing colors. This is a reasonable followup to my previous blog entry, although photographically it is not the greatest shot. However, keep in mind how hard it is to get this shot! It would have been nice to have my 30d with me, with a circular polarizing filter, but since my 630 ended up sliding off some rocks into the water while i was carefully removing the fly from the fish, I think it's better that the dSLR stayed at home. The fish was then released, and swam back to his little feeding hole (catch-and-release with gentle handling and barbless hooks are important to preserving this beautiful fish).

The processing was simple, but it was also delayed (May is now almost over). It got delayed because the day before this shot the hard drive on my laptop crashed. Then, I had to start working nights for a little while. Once I finished with my night shifts, I focused my time on resurrecting my hard drive and reconstructing all of the data from various backups. I've also since purchased several additional external hard drives and have set up a comprehensive backup schedule. I also use Mozy for online backups, and I strongly recommend this service (free 2GB backups) to everyone. Public service message: don't forget to backup!

Image details:
Date and location: 5/4/7 at 14:45 EDT, Rapidan River, Shenandoah NP, Virginia
Equipment: Canon SD630, handheld
Settings: 10.09mm, f/3.5, 1/100 sec
Processing: cataloged in Aperture v1.5.3 -> monochrome mixer (20, 80, 0, 0) -> contrast +50 -> resize -> USM (150%, 0.5, 0) -> border + text
Photo-a-week goals addressed: #1 (b+w), #17 (wildlife)

angler...

April, week four:
A little change of pace from previous entries. FIrst, I didn't take the picture (my fly fishing instructor did). Second, it's with my point-and-shoot (I didn't want my 30D going for a swim). And third, I hate the composition... but, I love the subject, a feisty little rainbow trout that I caught just as I was getting ready to finish up for the day. Shortly after this picture, I went home smiling and the fishie swam back to the part of the stream I found him in. I was doing an Orvis fly fishing school, coordinated by the Albemarle Angler here in Charlottesville, and it was one of the most fun days I've had in a while. Even though I got some better pictures that day out on that farm when I was wandering around with my dSLR, I thought I'd use this picture since fly fishing is all I've been able to think about for the last week or so :-)

For the processing... simple black and white conversion, resize, sharpen, and that's about it. I know it's a stretch to list this as addressing the portrait and wildlife goals, but otherwise all it accomplished was vertical orientation. Anyways, hopefully I'll get some better nature photos on some fly fishing outings in the near future.

Image details:
Date and location: 4/28/7 at 17:14 EDT, Rose River Farm, Madison, VA
Equipment: Canon SD630, handheld (by fly fishing instructor)
Settings: 5.8mm, f/2.8, 1/100 sec
Processing: cataloged in Aperture v1.5.3 -> monochrome mixer (30, 30, 40, 0) -> resize -> USM (125%, 0.5, 0) -> border + text
Photo-a-week goals addressed: #1 (b+w), #2 (portraits), #3 (vertical orientation), #17 (wildlife)

tossed around...

April, week three:
I was wandering around earlier tonight with my camera and ran across a group of people juggling. i asked if i could take their picture, and they humored me... and, performed for me! they were really good, and seemed like fun people. i may try and join them sometime and work on improving my juggling skills. in this shot, three guys are passing nine juggling pins around, with the guy in the middle passing them behind him! the girl in the picture was watching in this shot, but was pretty good at juggling also.

the processing was fairly straightforward for this... i'm not that good at taking photos of people (i think the only other shot with a person in it for this project is my nephew, who was an easy subject since he couldn't crawl away fast enough to escape my camera). i feel somewhat comfortable taking action shots, because i did a lot of sports photography in high school, but this reminds me i need to work on my portrait skills. i just need to find someone to take a picture of.

Image details:
Date and location: 4/24/7 at 19:38 EDT, UVA campus, Charlottesville, VA
Equipment: Canon 30D, 17-85mm IS lens, Hoya SMC UV filter
Settings: 17mm, handheld with IS, ISO 400, f/5.6, 1/60 sec, shot in raw
Processing: cataloged in Aperture v1.5.3 -> export as .jpg to PS7 -> monochrome mixer (20, 40, 40, 0) -> contrast (+15) -> crop -> resize -> USM (150%, 0.5, 0) -> border + text -> save as .jpg
Photo-a-week goals addressed: #1 (b+w), #9 (action), #16 (street photography)

dendritic...

April, week two:
There was a thunderstorm that started less than an hour after the "night photography" challenge started on DPChallenge. I went on to my balcony and tried to start taking some shots. It was hard to time it right, and out of a few dozen images only two or three turned out decent. This is my favorite. I learned a lot about timing lightning strikes, and am looking forward to future opportunities. Unfortunately, since I was in my apartment complex, the lights in the parking lot didn't allow the dark background that I needed to do very long exposures and still have decent contrast. The longest exposure I could get in this setting without the background looking too bright was about 2 seconds... so, most images had no lightning. Here's one that showed some of the nice dendritic branching that I was hoping to capture. I wish there were more lightning storms around here.

For the processing, after a simple b+w conversion I adjusted the levels to darken the sky a little. Resizing, sharpening, and then I went with the asymmetric (top/bottom) border again... this time to compensate for the wide crop ratio that I was forced to use.

Image details:
Date and location: 4/4/7 at 01:01 EDT, my balcony, Charlottesville, VA
Equipment: Canon 30D, 17-85mm IS lens, Hoya SMC UV filter
Settings: 17mm, tripod, ISO 100, f/4.0, 2.0 sec, shot in raw
Processing: cataloged in Aperture v1.5.2 -> export as tif to PS7 -> monochrome mixer (0, 100, 0, 0), -> crop -> levels (0-222) -> resize -> USM (300%, 0.5, 0) -> border + text ->save as .jpg
Photo-a-week goals addressed: #1 (b+w), #6 (extended exposure), #7 (night photography), #10 (landscapes)

streak of light...

April, week one:
There's a great little crêperie in downtown Charlottesville, in a tiny little brick building. You just walk up to the little window, get your food, and eat it on the patio out front. Unfortunately they are closed on Monday's so I couldn't get a crêpe but i was able to get some cool pictures. Making use of my handy-dandy tripod, I was able to get some extended-exposure shots with cars driving by leaving streaks of their lights. A trick I learned is that you often get a better effect if you can time it so that you only have cars driving away from you... the red tail-lights don't over-expose as easily as headlights do, and you get the added advantage of their headlights illuminating some of the subject. That worked well here. This image addresses a large number of my goals for this project... more than any other single image to date (although admittedly "action" is questionable).

The black and white conversion process wasn't very complicated, although because of the detail I wanted in the bricks I did a little bit more sharpening after resizing than I normally do (USM with 200% instead of 150%, still at 0.5 pixels). Also, since the image was slightly under-exposed, the total percentage for the various channels in channel mixer added up to 110%, followed by a slight boost to brightness and contrast. Doing this in post-processing, as opposed to getting full exposure with the original image, kept the street-lamps from being too blown-out. Lastly, I toyed around with an asymmetric border... I hadn't ever tried this before, but I really like the way it turned out. I need to experiment with this more to try and maximize the impact the borders can have.

Image details:
Date and location: 4/2/7 at 20:47 EDT, downtown, Charlottesville, VA
Equipment: Canon 30D, 17-85mm IS lens, Hoya SMC UV filter
Settings: 28mm, tripod, ISO 100, f/4.5, 5.0 sec, (pattern metering ; - 1.0 EV) shot in raw
Processing: raw conversion in Aperture v1.5.2, export as .jpg -> photoshop -> USM (200%, 0.5, 0) -> monochrome channel mixer (50, 50, 10, 0) -> crop -> resize -> USM (200%, 0.5, 0) -> brightness +10 & contrast +20 -> border + text -> save for web
Photo-a-week goals addressed: #1 (b+w), #6 (extended exposure), #7 (night photography), #9 (action), #11 (architecture), #16 (street photography)