Weekly Photo Challenge: From Every Angle

This past weekend was the Festival of Nations in St. Louis, a yearly weekend festival that is full of vendors, food, music, and arts.  Certainly a great place to get photos from all sorts of angles, but I was happiest with the photos I got from the henna art station. To tell this mini-story I wanted the finished design to be in all the shots, so I kept that in mind as I was shooting.  I also wanted a progression, so here is the first stroke:

ISO 1600 50mm f/5.6 1/1250

Then I walked around and was shooting from a spot behind:

ISO 1600 50mm 0ev f/5.6 1/640

Then I went with the finished product:

ISO 1600 50mm 0ev f/5.6 1/500

Which now that you have seen the finished art, you can go back and see it on the paper as well.  As I was shooting at the festival, I kept my ISO relatively high.  This was because despite the bright sunlight, most of my shots were taken in the shade.  I knew I wasn’t going to be too concerned with noise in the final versions of the photos so an ISO of 1600 pretty much guaranteed I could take shots everywhere.  You will notice that even though these three shots that were taken in a similar area, I was changing my shutter speed a lot.  After having set my ISO and also keeping my f-stop at a fixed 5.6, the shutter speed was how I was controlling the exposure on this particular outing.

When I got the photos home, I decided that I did not want to crop or sharpen them.  I decided to apply a photo filter that replicates Polaroid 690 film.  I felt that the slight color change and slightly grainy look was a good match with photos from a festival like this one.  So that you can see the difference, here is the middle photo before editing:

ISO 1600 50mm 0ev f/5.6 1/640

It’s a subtle difference, do you think it adds to the story here? Feel free to comment below.

Cheers!

Angles

I was puzzling over a photography assignment that was supposed to include angles.  By that I mean that it was somewhere percolating in the back of my brain.  What I was actually doing at this moment was taking long exposure photos in the dark.  Well, semi-dark, the sun was thinking about coming up.  It turns out the angle I was looking for was right in front of me:

ISO 160 50mm 0ev f/5 50.0s

Moonlight behind the tree, sunlight struggling to come up.  This is a 50 second exposure.  It turned out to be perfect for my angle assignment, so I headed back inside for a cup of tea.

Cheers!

For the Birds: Part 2

Like yesterday, here I am taking pictures of birds in the middle of the day:

ISO 640 f/7.1 1/200 50mm

I used a higher ISO, so I was able to avoid having to lighten the bird in Aperture.  The only editing I have done here is to crop the photo.  I’ll be honest, I’m not crazy about the angle here.  I am going to have to try putting the tripod somewhere else, see if I like the outcome better.

Cheers!