Experimenting with Fall

Annette and I are in the midst of a long weekend.  We travelled to Bath County in Virginia to enoy the fall colors and to see how well we can capture them in photographs.

It turns out that we are not doing a very good job capturing the beauty of fall.  We see the beauty all around us, but when we view our images, it's just not the same.  Landscape photography is more difficult than it looks!

At one stop we made, we were trying to capture a barn in the valley against the backdrop of the fall colors on the mountain.  But, alas, we were five minutes too late.  The barn was in teh shadow of the mountain on the other side of the valley.  Still, I tried to take the picture, but in my haste, I didn't check my settings and the shutter speed was too slow.  I got a blurry mess!

But the next day, I was shooting from the deck of the house where we are staying and I remembered that.  This time I did it on purpose.  I made some abstracts of the fall colors.

Early morning fall abstract

Tree abstract in Fall

I found that the shutter speed is important.  The shutter was open for a longer period of time in the first image than in the second.  You can tell because the lines stretch farther and there is less detail.  There is obviously more detail in the trees of the second image, which was made with a shorter shutter speed.  Experiment until you find the speed that lets you obtain the image you have envisioned.

 If you want the trees to show up as an element in the image, you must move the camera in the same orientation as the trees.  In other words, I moved the camera up and down.

Another experiment, is to modify the colors in post production.  There are so many presets that you can experiment to your heart's content.

After you apply the preset, you can modify the image with the sliders  for saturation, blacks, exposure, etc.

Check out these weird images of the Humpback Covered Bridge near Covington, VA.

Humpback Bridge in Yellows with Blue Sky

Isn't it weird how the image still has a blue sky?

Humpback Bridge in Sepia

Old time sepia color for an old time bridge.

Some experiments work.  Some do not.  The important thing is that we get out there, use our imagination, make images and continue to grow!  

Abandoned School

Another great outing!

Our camera club arranged for a shoot in an old, abandoned school in Shenandoah, PA.

The J.W. Cooper School was built in the late 1800's and went through a few iterations up until it was abandoned in 1992.  It was a high school for a while and a grade school for a while.

In one of the rooms, there were cards for the students.  On the front side of the cards were the students' grades and on the back side of the cards were rudimentary health information.

In this day and age of the ubiquitous computer, it was nostalgic to think back to the time when information was kept on paper in one place.  That piece of cardstock for a given student sat in the file in the school for the entire time that the student attended that school.  Each quarter of the school term, someone had to go the card file, pull the card and enter the student's grade for each of the classes.  Think how different that is from today, where all student information is kept on a network, where each teacher can access the network at their convenience from a location of their chosing.

There are so many opportunities for pictures when you have the run of the building.  And yet I was stymied.  I got stuck taking pictures of the stairs.  I guess I just liked the patterns of the stairs.

One fortunate thing for me was that I had Annette's 10-22mm lens that I had bought for her for her birthday in July.  It gave me a new way to look at things.  So I used it to give my creativity a boost.  You can see how I used it in the two stairs pictures and the auditorium picture below.

Stairs in the Abandoned JW Cooper School

Wide Angle View of More Stairs in the JW Cooper School

 You could never get this much of the stairs and the doorways into the frame without a wide angle lens.

The Auditorium in the Abandoned JW Cooper School

 The wide angle lens was essential for this shot.  One of the other photographers on this trip tried to take this shot with a 24mm lens and found that she could not get as much into the frame.

Light Detail

Today when you buy a light with a milky, white shade or globe, the shade or globe is made out of plastic.  It is almost indestructible.  They want to make it safe for you to tip over the lamp!

However, when we examined a couple broken shades that were lying on the floor, we found that these white shades at the school were made of heavy, white glass.

My theory is this:  Back in the day when the school was built, people had very few possessions.  They wanted to make each item that they owned last for as long as possible.  Therefore, people were more concerned with quality and durability than in how cheaply they could purchase items.  They were willing to pay more if they thought it would last longer.

Today, we all have so many possessions, many of which are designed to be disposable.  We value our things less, which also means that many people value other people's things less.  Are we headed in the right direction?

Panning and Lighting

A couple of weeks ago, my son had the opportunity to participate in Karts Against Cancer at Summit Point.  His employer wanted to race the karts and so he invited his staff to participate.

For Annette and me, this was a great opportunity to get the cameras out and try something a little different than we were used to; panning.  We had done panning before with bicyclists in some triathlons, but it had been quite a while.  In fact it was such a long while that I forgot some of the techniques that could have helped me with panning.

One of the techniques that I remembered on the way home is to:  place one of the focus points on an edge of the subject and then strive to keep it there as the subject zooms past.

Another technical point that I remembered later was to:  choose a place where the subject will stay the same distance away from the camera during the pan.  That's hard to do.

The race started with lots of sunlight.  It was easy to get a good exposure.  But, as the race went on, the sun went down and it became more and more difficult to find enough light to get a fast enough exposure.  In fact, once the sun was gone, I had the ISO cranked up as far as it would go and the aperture wide open, yet I was still getting shutter speeds that were too long.

For panning to work, you must keep the shutter open long enough for the background to blur, but not so long that you can't keep the main subject in the same position on the sensor for the entire exposure.

In the first picture below, you can see some carts in the left background.  These carts were on the back of the track headed in the direction opposite of the main subject.  Since I am panning right and they are going left, the shutter does not have to be open very long for the carts to get blurry.

During the two hours of this race, I shot about 200 pictures and only 20 of them were usable.  That is a 10% rate.  Not too good.

Let's take a look at a couple picture.

Red Helmet at Karts Against Cancer
Look how far the racers in the far background have moved during the time that the shutter was open.

Black Helmet at Karts Against Cancer
The racer is relatively sharp, yet the orange cone is stretched out.

In the Corner, Under the Lights.
I was losing the daylight and was looking for well-lit portions of the track,
when I found this corner, where the carts made a pass directly under the arc light.
I decided not to pan at this corner, but rather I set the camera on the barrier wall as a makeshift tripod.
The first two racers were coming straight at the camera and did not move much relative to the camera.
The third racer had a lot of right to left movement during the time the shutter was open.

Manny and a Wide Angle Lens

We have had two additions to our photographic repertoire; A 10-22mm Wide Angle lens and Manny the mannequin (I'm sure the name is not unique!).

Annette has been wanting a wide angle lens for a long, long time.  So, for her birthday, I got it for her.   (There was no surprise here.  I asked her to help me pick it out.)

Yesterday, we were in a hobby and crafts store, I saw Manny and I thought about the photographers out there who have an object that they place in their pictures as they travel.  I thought Manny would be a good object for me.  He is posable, so he might make some cute pictures.

Well, Annette has been busy with work.  She works from home so it is easy for her to return to her work after supper.  Anyway, she hasn't had the time to experiment with her new lens and I hated to use it before her.  But, today I had some time and waned to try it out.

So I combined the two.  I used the wide angle lens to take some pictures of Manny.

You can see the difference in the zoom with the first two pictures.

You can see that Manny's posing ability has limits in the last two pictures.

Manny stepping off of the platform

Manny pointing foot and hand

I know it's been hot, but you'll never be able to finish that!

That's one way to cool down!  Hug an iced tea!

Hiking Tumbling Run

Today my boys (my sons), Ashley and I hiked up the Trail at Tumbling Run.  It took us about an hour.  It was about 90 degrees and we sweated the whole way up!  Well, yuck!

While we were at the top, we all took some obligatory snapshots.  Winston took some with his phone.  Then Winston said something that resounded with me.  He said, "The pictures on my phone are like a record of my life."  Ain't that cool.

I knew exactly what he meant!  When I look back through all of my pictures. I feel that same way.  These are really a record of where I have been.

Well, sort of.  I don't have any pictures of the day job.  Imagine that!  So I guess it is really a record of all of the great places I have been, which is still a record of the great parts of my life.  The only thing that would have made it better is if Annette would have been able to join us.

So anyway, here are a couple snapshots that are records of where I was today.  They are not artful.  They are a record of one more of the great parts of my life.

This is one tough girl!  She walked up the rocky stream bed in her bare feet!

Our little hiking group.
I'm glad they slowed down enough for me to keep up.

Stupid looks all around!

Once inside the woods, we did not see much of the sky except for this hole in the canopy.

Portraits in the Park with the camera club

One of the camera clubs that Annette and I belong to had a "Portraits in the Park" night on Thursday in place of the regular club meeting.  We had a very good turnout.  I counted almost 20 photographers.

One of the club members brought a model that he has been shooting for almost a year.  However, this was her first time in front of a group.  She certainly put forth a great effort.  She worked hard and she tried to look at each of the photographers.

It was interesting how the passers-by gawked at what we were doing.  One couple asked me who the girl was and if she was famous.  They didn't recognize her so they were puzzled.  It finally made sense to them when I told them that this was a photography club and that we were doing a model shoot.

I asked the club member who brought the model if we could give her direction and he told me she takes direction well.  So a couple of times I gave her some direction and she followed.  Annette also tweaked the model's poses to get a image that she had visualized.  However, the rest of the club seemed to be content.

It actually went quite well with 20 shooters.  It seemed like everyone was conscious that they had to share with the other photographers, so there was an ebb and flow.  A few people would go close for a shot and then ease out to the back while others would move forward.

I also saw a lot of longer lenses there, which was a good idea.  I finally switched to my longer lens.  The longer lens helped to reach past the closer shooters, if you didn't want to step forward.

Here are a few pictures from the shoot.

Just so you know, this is not the model.

This is a found subject.

A Direct Gaze

A Pensive Moment

Flowers Past Their Prime

In the last post I mentioned that Annette and I went to Canoe Creek State Park and saw the ruins of the Limekilns.

While we were there we also saw many flowers.  Unfortunately, they were past their prime.  Annette and  I agreed that we should have been there a week or two earlier.  Oh, well.  Life sometimes gets in the way!

Anyway, we were there and we tried to make the best of it.  Here are some flower pictures.  They are not great, but it forms a baseline.  Let's see if I can improve!

Where's my other petal?

Does anyone know what this white flower and the next purple flower are?

 

Violets?

Jumbled Ferns

Look at the center swirl around!

A Weed, but I liked it.

Are these bugs mating?????