These vines fascinate me and they are on several areas of the parking garages around the building where I work. I think it’s the contrast of the organic shapes with the lines of the concrete, and yet the vines themselves are just lines this time of year as though they were drawn onto the scene rather than being real. I took another photo today of bushes that draw my eye any time I see them around work in the winter (they seem to be planted all over) but it’s devilishly hard to get a photo of them that shows what I see in that first instant. There’s this surprise of the red and it stands forward from everything around it, so clear and obvious–but the camera sees so much more than I do with my eyes and so the scenes look messy. Dawn said this picture reminded her of colored fountains and she’s right. It’s a good observation and lends order to something that (even now) still looks chaotic to me.

Administrivia
This is the last day of January and I have taken and posted pictures (to Flickr, anyway, I’m catching up here on the blog, so you’ll see a number of older posts come through over the next few days) every day this month. Once I have caught up with the backlog here, I will write up a retrospective of the month and note what I have learned. For February, I am setting myself a bit of a challenge: not only will I make photographs each day, but I will take at least 29 frames (this is a leap year and there are 29 days in February) each day. That doesn’t mean I will have 29 frames to post. It does imply a bigger commitment of time for shooting. Today, for example, I took only 16 frames.

Shooting and processing notes
Shot with the 17-40 F4.0 L at 38mm (guess I didn’t quite make it all the way to the end of the range), 1/100 at f8 and ISO 400. Again processed (slowly) through LightZone. I do like the controls in LightZone and the nature of the pictures after I tweak them there. I tried a variety of different things with each of the photos I selected of this vine-covered wall, so not sure quite what I did with this one, but I think I used the "Hard" preset and reduced the opacity a bit, then sharpened the mid-tones.

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Another walk on the trails around work today. This is on the other side of the main campus from my building so it took a bit of time to get over there. I felt like I was forcing the photos today and it shows. This construction zone sign seemed so incongruous among the trees and the trail, although this is not nearly so peaceful a location as it might seem: just the left of the frame is a busy road and the sound of traffic is close. And yet it is peaceful walking these trails with the mossy trees and the tall pines moving in the wind.

Shooting and processing notes
I downloaded a 30-day trial of LightZone 3.4 today to see what it would be like to use it. Uwe Steinmuller has written a lot about it and I had tried it once before when it was still version 2. This definitely has power but–oh my!–is it ever slow on my computer. My computer at home has fallen way behind the power curve but since I still shoot with an 8-megapixel 20D I have never been bothered in Lightroom or Photoshop. LightZone lets me know that my computer is old.

The shutter speed was way too low on this shot even though I was braced against a tree. It was dark under the trees (and the clouds were thick, too, so a double whammy). This was 1/10 sec at f/8 and ISO 400. Shot again with the 17-40 F4.0 L at 17mm. This is one of those places where I could use the EF-S 17-55 f/2.8 with its image stabilization.

As far as changes I made in LightZone, I used the Relight option to punch up the mid-tone contrast and I drew a region around the sign and increased the saturation of the yellow. I also used the tone mapper to deepen the color a bit. From the angle I shot, the sign reflected some of the sky and was washed out in the picture–quite different from the way it looked to me.

Update (31-Jan-2008): I meant to mention Martin Doonan’s blog and a post he made about LightZone that finally pushed me over the edge to try the program. His posts are not just about technical tools like LightZone but about photography, art, and the process of making it.

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I am glad that there are such rich photographic opportunities within a few minutes’ walk from my office else I would taking a lot of pictures of objects around the house given the short days this time of year. I do hope one day to be able to reach the state of sensitized sympathy that Minor White talked about* but I hold no illusions of that right now.

I liked almost all the pictures I selected from today’s shots equally and had a hard time picking out one as the picture for the day. Maybe I just need more time with them. The picture of the sidewalk under construction was the one I had the most hope for when I shot it and the one whose result most disappoints me. I tried to tweak it by duplicating layers, blurring them, and messing with the layer blending modes but should probably have just left well enough alone.

Shooting and processing notes
Like usual, shot with the 17-40 F4.0 L at 17mm, f9, ISO 400. This patch of water and its melting skin of ice surprised me as I turned a corner on the trail. I shot several frames but I never quite understood what to do with all the messy branches everywhere in the frame and I was pulled towards the texture of the ice, and the dark reflections of the tree trunks in the water, and the leaves under the water, and the moss along the shore. This was just a straightforward conversion to grayscale in Lightroom. I opened it in Photoshop but discovered there was nothing else I wanted to do with it.

* "If he were to walk a block in a state of sensitized sympathy to everything to be seen, he would be exhausted before the block was up and out of film long before that." - Minor White.

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We woke up to snow again today. And, as usual, I walked around the yard and took a few quick pictures. I’m not sure why I take pictures whenever it snows except that wherever I have lived, snow has been rare and it was just what we did when I was growing up. Today’s pictures, though covering the same subjects as I have many times before, are a little bit different. Maybe they’re a little bit better. I don’t know that yet and will need some time with them, and then some time away from them, before I can say for sure. But I do know that my approach to the pictures was different and I attribute that to yesterday’s workshop. You can see the rest of the photos on Flickr.

This is the first photo I took of the snow. I saw it on my way up the stairs and just raised my camera and shot and tried not to think too hard. I did make another frame or two of this but by that time I was thinking about it and they were dull. This one has some energy to it.

I think Dawn’s favorite is the one of the sun breaking through the clouds over the lake. I was drawn by the steel-color of the lake and the clouds down close but I didn’t have a long-enough lens on to focus just on that area. I knew that the light would change before I could retrieve one and so, rather than taking the shot with the intention of cropping later, I just looked through the viewfinder to see what I could see with the lens I had. This is better than the original idea I had. Without the experience of the workshop, I doubt I would have made it.

Shooting and processing notes
This was shot at 1/25 sec at f/5 using–you guessed it–the 17-40 F4.0 L at ISO 800. I hadn’t even had time to think about the camera settings. I just dialed in an approximation of aperture and ISO that I thought would let me get a steady shot and made this before the the idea was gone.

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This wall is near our basement and shaded by this huge camellia bush–tree, really–and the light there is sometimes dappled, sometimes streaked, but always subtle and lovely. I didn’t capture what I wanted here, which was the way the moss on top of the wall just seemed to glow in the dark rainy day. But this is still a satisfying photo for me.

Shooting and processing notes
Shot this time with the 70-200 F4.0 L at 73mm (must have tweaked the zoom ring a bit by accident), f13, 1.3 seconds at ISO 200. I told you it was dark. I’m pretty sure all I did was choose the white balance for this one. It was lovely right out of the camera.

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This was one of several shots I took experimenting with an umbrella, backdrops, reflectors, the base, and even a gel over a flash for the background, and compared it to the results from the standard way to shoot this with a light tent. There is plenty of info about how I set things up and changed them in the descriptions on the pictures on Flickr and in the setup shots: #1, #2, #3, and #4.

Product shots like this are a fantastic technical exercise and I want to learn a lot more about using strobe lighting. I have avoided it in the past and told myself it was because flash makes things look fake and I wanted authentic natural light. But the truth is that I just didn’t know how to do it and didn’t have all the right equipment. David Hobby (the Strobist) has opened the curtain on the high-priests and shown that studio-style lighting is not out of the reach of most people.

Shooting and processing notes
Shot with a Canon 550EX shooting into a silver umbrella set up to camera right. Bounced a Vivitar 285HV off a piece of white foamcore pointed at the background (to get an even light distribution, though I should have bumped up the power on the flash). The candy-dropping moose (he says, "Uhh, uhh. Oops. Oh dear," as he drops a piece of candy from under his tail) is sitting on a piece of black granite tile I bought at Home Depot. The background is white fleece fabric that I got on sale at Joann’s Fabrics.

Didn’t do much in Lightroom or Photoshop besides setting the white balance and some minor levels adjustment.

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Dawn was still in Calgary. I was still sick. But I was feeling a little better and I was playing around with some of my flashes, inspired by the Strobist blog and group on Flickr. Maya was patient with me as I played around and took a lot of experimental pictures of her.

I liked the graphic simplicity of the desk and wall on the right part of the frame contrasted with Maya’s organic shapes. I should have gotten rid of the clutter under the stairs although the old printer and box did serve to separate Maya’s shape from the background.

Shooting and processing notes
I think I was using a snoot at this point, or maybe I was just blocking some of the light with cardboard since the coverage seems awfully broad for a snoot–though maybe I was just balancing with the ambient light since the exposure was 1/10 sec at f4 and ISO 800. This was, again, with the 17-40 F4.0 L.

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I was sick with food poisoning this day and didn’t do much. Even Maya was thwarted by the rain.

I remember shooting several pictures like this and noticing that, depending on how she turned her head or where I moved, her ears either lined up with the railing supports or were between them. I liked the ones with her ears lined up the best.

Shooting and processing notes
Not a lot of thought here. Again shot with the nearly-always-on-my-camera 17-40 F4.0 L. This time at the long end (40mm) and f4. I don’t think I did anything to this except set the white balance in Lightroom.

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Maya watches from The Grooming Spa. With Dawn in Calgary, The Grooming Spa provided day care for Maya while I was at work.

This one had potential but I didn’t spend enough time framing it (and Maya probably wouldn’t have held that pose much longer anyway).

Shooting and processing notes
Another shot with the 17-40 F4.0 L. Again at 17mm and f4. It was dark that morning so this is ISO 800. I didn’t get down low enough or make myself parallel to the plane of the windows so the verticals and horizontals that are so important to this picture were out of whack. I used Photoshop’s lens distortion filter to straighten things out but I didn’t do a great job. Not only does Maya end up looking short and squat, the door on the right is still out of whack. I like the transform tools much better for this kind of thing.

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Dawn gets ready to go to Calgary to help Rae move into her new condominium. Dawn isn’t the only one who is sad.

She doesn’t like this picture of her but the obvious sadness in her face makes this picture for me.

Shooting and processing notes
I messed around with the saturation, vibrance, and tone controls in Lightroom to get a washed-out look and cropped to a square aspect. I shot this with my 17-40 F4.0 L at 17mm and f4. It’s tempting to say that this would have been better with a lens with a wider aperture (and narrower depth of field) but I like including some of the detail of the village there to anchor this picture to the time of year.

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