Today’s The Photo Walk

My goal is to experiment with very slow shutter speed, the exact opposite of the way I usually shoot. The neutral density filters will block light. It will be daytime, but my camera will only have as much light as it gets at night. The shutter will have to stay open longer. That changes everything.

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Clicky and I are driving to Seal Beach this afternoon. It’s the annual Scott Kelby Worldwide Photo Walk. There are over 1,000 walks scheduled with 20,000 scheduled to attend.

Volunteers around-the-world organize groups of photographers who meet and take photos nearby. We’ll start at the Red Car Museum (if you saw “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” those red cars… well, the real ones) then end at the beach for sunset.

I’ve done these before with my friend Steve. We did the New Haven and Brooklyn Bridge walks a few years back. Lots of fun.

IMAG1510[1]Overpacking has been a problem for me in the past. Today will be different. Three wider lenses, neutral density filters and a tripod–that’s it! No long impressive football sideline telephotos. It will all fit in a shoulder bag.

My goal is to experiment with very slow shutter speed. The neutral density filters will block light. It will be daytime, but based on incoming light my camera will be set as if it was dark. Shutter/aperture combinations not normally possible will be needed.

It’s an experiment. My experience with this kind of shooting is near zero. It’s a radically different way of taking pictures. Who knows if it will work when I try it?

By the way, I know no one who’ll be there today. Looking forward to it.

Does This Make Me A Professional

It’s tougher than ever to be a professional shooter.

I have become part of the problem. You’re welcome.

Geoff Fox   Fine Art

Am I a professional photographer? I now have photos for sale. More on that in a moment.

“Real” professional photographers complain about well meaning, but poorly trained and equipped amateurs who buy a DSLR and freelance. They complain because those guys steal business. It’s tougher than ever to be a professional shooter.

I have become part of the problem. You’re welcome.

My hobby is photography. Maybe more obsession than hobby. Photography is a technical sport. I have little artistic talent. None is needed. It’s all about understanding the tools… and a little Photoshop.

People say nice things about my work all the time. Maybe they’d like to hang me?

My friend, Catie Canetti, is also a photographer. She’s taken great shots recently in the Tetons near Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Catie sells her work online. I thought I’d try too.

You can see my first three offerings on FineArtAmerica.com. There are a lot more to come.

I believe my $30 is the only qualification to being a fine artist at FineArtAmerica!

I’ll let you and the IRS know how things go.

Sunset At Laguna Beach

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It was a pretty good night for photography at Laguna Beach. I packed my gear and arrived around an hour before sunset. Heisler Park was crowded. There were three others with sophisticated cameras. It’s easy to understand why.

I’m starting to think more about very slow shutter speeds for shots like these. Having the iris open a long time smooths the water surface. It also means using a tripod. Neutral density filters arrive tomorrow to allow these shots in full sun.

There are still some HDR shots to process. A few more timelapse movies too.

The first photo is going over our bed.

A Couple Of Afternoon Timelapses

You see physics in action as you look at the clouds interacting with the rest of the atmosphere at this much faster pace. Everything that happens is dictated by the laws of physics. Nothing is random.

So many things look different when seen at an alternate time scale. Nature is pretty damn cool.

0880I’ve taken a few time lapse videos today. The camera is mounted with a suction cup to the outside of my office window.

It’s a GoPro, one of the biggest breakthroughs in video technology, ever. It’s a cheap, tiny, waterproof, indestructible, high definition video camera that also shoots stills.

Every two seconds it snaps another frame. One hour of real time equals one minute of video. In editing it can be sped up even more.

The GoPro’s secret is its super wide lens–the opposite of a telephoto. Being wide reduces shake and makes aiming shots much less critical. It’s great for things very close or very large–like the sky.

The whole stills-to-video process is a pain. Nothing difficult. Just lots of steps.

You see physics in action as you look at the clouds interacting with the rest of the atmosphere at this much faster pace. Everything that happens is dictated by the laws of physics. Nothing is random.

So many things look different when seen at an alternate time scale. Nature is pretty damn cool.

Hello Hummingbirds

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One of the biggest surprises in SoCal living has been my hummingbird feeder. It was a spur-of-the-moment purchase, now suctioned to a window from our family room. The birds hit my feeder dozens of times a day, year round.

Photographing hummingbirds is tough. Their wings flap rapidly. Very high shutter speeds must be used.

High shutter speed means less light gets in the lens. Even in bright daylight my camera, a Canon 7D, is being pushed near its limit.

Everything happens quickly. No time for autofocus. My lens is open to f/8 and pre-focused where the birds are most likely to light.

Sometimes that works. Most times it doesn’t. Over 300 photos for the six you see here!

Magic Lantern software loaded into my camera controls when the photo is shot. It looks for changes in the frame, then shoots three times.

There are lots of out-of-focus snaps and plenty where the bird is partially out-of-frame. Sometimes a puff of wind will rock the feeder and… click, click, click. It’s expected most shots will be deleted.

This is a technique thing. If you know how to do it and spend enough time, you’ll get the shot. Otherwise, shooting hummingbirds is nearly impossible.

The Hummingbirds Come Into Sharper Focus

Photographing hummingbirds has gone from experiment to obsession. That didn’t take long!

Yesterday I set up my camera with Magic Lantern firmware and shot away. Today I made more modifications. The lens is longer, bringing me closer (though these are still cropped images). The light is a little better.

My shutter speed still isn’t fast enough! 1/1000 second doesn’t freeze the hummingbird’s wings.

If I speed up the shutter and leave the aperture where it is I’m going to start adding too much noise. Where’s the balance? Still to be determined.

Here are the best four of 136.

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A Few More Vegas Pics And Their Stories

Las Vegas is very photogenic. That’s indisputable.

Las Vegas is very photogenic. That’s indisputable. In addition I’ve found it very conducive for HDR photography. HDR is the technique which extends the range of brightness levels seen in a photograph by compressing the range. I know–confusing.

Your eye sees can see dark darks and bright whites at the same time. Cameras can’t. HDR produces a photo closer to what the eye sees. The raw material is usually a series of three photos taken in rapid succession.

Using different shutter speeds you end up with one underexposed, one overexposed and one properly image. A computer program combines the three produce the HDR.

Unfortunately it’s easy to overdo HDR and come up with some “Elvis on Velvet” results. I read complaints from the photo cognoscenti all the time. I mostly agree.

The reason I thought this shot would work was because of the bright clouds above and deep shadows within the Mirage Volcano. A standard photo would show detail in one or the other but not both.

I’ve already posted one photo from our little journey to Blue Diamond, NV. It was very dark and very cold! We really had no idea what we’d see. Actually the photos from Blue Diamond produced detail not visible to the naked eye. It was just too darned dark!

I am disappointed in most of this series of photos including the one I posted earlier. The exposure was too long allowing the Earth’s rotation to smudge the stars. This is one of the shorter exposures–only 22 seconds which cuts down on the motion.

For those interested it’s f/3.5 ISO 400 using a Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 lens at 44mm. I tried manually focusing by looking at stars, but mostly just trusted the infinity mark on the lens. There’s a little help from Photoshop in bringing down the ambient brightness of the sky and helping illuminate the dimmer parts of the butte.

I have no idea how close the butte is, but probably a mile or more away. We were standing on Bonnie Springs Road just off Route 159 pointing reasonably north.

One night we went downtown to Fremont Street. Years ago before the Strip was developed Fremont Street was the heart of Las Vegas. Nowadays it’s an open air pedestrian mall surrounded by older, seedier casinos. There’s entertainment in the street and a pretty good atmosphere.

As we waited for the overhead lightshow to start this guy walked by! I have no idea what he was doing or why he was there. I only had one shot! What you see if what I got with no cropping.

My Tamron 70-200mm f/2.8 lens was on the camera. That’s a lot of lens for a darkened area. I dialed up to ISO 1600 and 1/250 second for the shutter. The image still needed a little Photoshop help boosting the levels and killing the noise. It looks a little soft and runny to me probably more because of ISO 1600 than anything else. It’s still worth showing.

In the movie this guy will be played by my friend Rick Allison.

Finally a shot from our first night in town. We went to dinner at Mon Ami Gabi a restaurant attached to the Paris Hotel with an open air patio overlooking The Strip.

It was cold that night! Luckily Mon Ami Gabi (and loads of other places) have these radiant gas heaters.

This was a shot I visualized before shooting. It came out just as expected. The soft background is what I wanted and very pleasing.

This was shot with my Tamron 70-200mm f/2.8 lens wide open and fully extended. ISO was a noisy 1600 and the shutter speed was 1/125 second.

Wearing The Contacts At Work

Unfortunately when I looked in the little case where they ‘live’ the left lens had escaped!

“Adorable,” said my wife. “You look marvelous,” chimed the guy responsible for me getting hired to host “Inside Space” on SciFi. “You are squinting Geoff, put on the glasses, you look better and more trustworthy,” was the word from a Facebook friend¹. They were all commenting about tonight’s test run in contact lenses. It went reasonably well.

That is the glassless me on the left. Alas, I have my father’s tiny eyes and it always looks like I’m squinting.

The lenses have been on-and-off twice today. I am getting used to sticking my finger on my eyeball. That’s gross just to say. Both lenses stung for the first 30 seconds or so but were fine after that.

I had to work tonight, covering for a colleague whose furnace started a small fire that filled his downstairs with smoke. No injuries. Hopefully no lasting damage.

It is an awful night following an awful day with enough rain to bring flood warnings and enough wind to knock down power lines and trees.

On the drive in what was noticed at home became more obvious. My distance vision is not as good as it was with glasses. I can still see well enough to drive but signs and other objects aren’t nearly as clear.

The “Fitting Guide” for the lenses, instructions for my eye doctor, have instructions to work around this problem. I’d like to try.

My plan was to take the contacts out as soon as I got home which I did easily. Unfortunately when I looked in the little case where they ‘live’ the left lens had escaped! About ten minutes later I located it on the floor. If these things are going to last for three months holding onto them will be critical.

The real question will be how this looks at work and whether viewers accept it or even care.

¹ – Let’s just think of this guy as dentist number five. The dentist who doesn’t recommend Trident to his patients who chew gum.

I’m Trying Contacts Again

First though I watched a video as a nice British woman and the world’s dweebiest opthamologist demonstrated the right way. Maybe my problem is I wasn’t doing it with a British accent?

When I got my new glasses I asked the optometrist about the possibility of wearing contacts. Yes–this is vanity at work pure and simple. Helaine says I look younger without glasses and who am I to argue.

I’d tried contacts before many years ago. The experience was awful enough that Stefanie made it part of her “Geoff” repertoire.

Did I really walk around the house asking everyone if the contacts were in or not? Guess so.

Mary, the optometrist, said she’d order a demo pair of a new more comfortable type made for people like me who usually wear bifocals. A pair of C-Vue Toric Multifocal lenses arrived a few days ago.

I attempted to put them in. Wisely, the last thing your eye wants is for you to stick your fingers in it! I couldn’t get the lenses in.

After Helaine asked today I decided to give it another try. First though I watched a video as a nice British woman and the world’s dweebiest opthamologist demonstrated the right way.

Maybe my problem is I wasn’t doing it with a British accent?

I went upstairs and after ten or fifteen shots I got the left lens in. Two tries later the right was in too.

Not bad. I can see! I am typing this sans glasses. That being said it’s not a perfect solution.

The reading prescription seems pretty close. My glasses corrected eyesight is 20/15. It’s not that good. Still, I haven’t found any type too small to read! That’s impressive.

The distance prescription is another story. I definitely don’t see as well as with my glasses. Distant objects are not sharply in focus. That’s as critical for distance–but it would be nice to have.

There’s one other strange artifact. My vision is spatially distorted. The top edge of my laptop screen no longer looks like a straight line. It’s a concave curve with the center appearing lower than the corners. Weird.

Meanwhile I’ll have to check and see how long these contacts can be worn and whether it’s possible to make the precription better. At the moment I’m cautiously optimistic.