Doppler: This Shot Captures Her Essence

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If Doppler ever learns to talk, her first words will be, “Turn off the damn camera!” I’m taking advantage of the situation. She can’t say no. She’s been my photographic subject thousands of times.

Every once in a while a single photo will stand out. This one does to me.

Helaine was drying Doppler after her shower. The blow dryer was farther down her back. Doppler was prone with her snout flat on a towel.

I was flat on my belly and on the other side of the bedroom when I snapped away. It wass a 300mm F/4 lens, a telephoto. I shot at 1/200th, slow for this focal length but OK because of image stabilization.

The ISO was 4000. Very high. You get tiny noise specs on the photo. It’s the price you pay for sharpness in low light.

This lens, configured this way, produces a shallow depth of field. On shots like this you try and get the eyes in focus and forget everything else. That wasn’t happening. Her bangs worked fine. Doppler’s nose is slightly out-of-focus while most of her body is softly blurred.

I like this shot in part because of the incredible contrast in her fur. Bright white to shadowy dark grey are represented. Each cluster of strands lies a different length from the lens, so not only is there contrast in luminance, there’s contrast in sharpness.

When Doppler speaks, after she tells me to stop, she’ll let me know this photo captures her essence.

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.

4th Of July Fireworks Photos

These shots were taken from an athletic field at the Foote School in New Haven.

I enjoy seeing fireworks and, since I now seem to be totally obsessed as a photographer, I also enjoy shooting fireworks.

“It’s not the same,” said Helaine when I came back from shooting the New Haven fireworks. “It doesn’t have the same excitement.”

She’s right (as usual). A still photo will never bring the oohs and ahs you hear from the live crowd.

On my drive home I was thinking this is a technical exercise more than anything. You never really know what’s going to be in the frame during the 5, 10 or even 20 seconds you’ve got the shutter open! The only thing a photographer must/can scope out is the shutter speed, aperture, ISO, lens focal length.

These shots were taken from an athletic field at the Foote School in New Haven. I used a Tamron 70-200mm f/2.8 lens and varied my shots from 70mm all the way to 200mm. I was far enough from the fireworks that this was a near perfect lens choice lens.

The view was good but there were some trees that blocked a little of the action.

Click any photo for a larger view.