Travel Theme: Illuminated

This week for the travel theme illuminated, you will have to humor me because the traveling I am talking about is in my mind.  I started a new semester this week, so here is my desk as I am trying to illuminate my mind with Photoshop:

ISO 800 4mm 0ev f/2.7 1/50

To take this image I used my Canon PowerShot.  I chose my point and shoot because I wanted to try a few of the creative settings it has to see if I could tell a story using one of the settings.  The settings I tried before this one were fisheye and toy camera. Neither struck my imagination.  Then I decided to use the setting which lets you choose one accent color and the rest of the image is rendered in black and white.  I knew the accent color I wanted was green.  I wanted to pick up the file that I was working on, the dinosaurs in my screen saver, the textbook, and a hint of the photo that is sitting on the desk.  Because that is a lot to look at, I think it is important that the rest of the image is black and white.

I did choose to blow out the background by having a lot of light behind the desk.  Do you like that effect?  What so you think of the use of the single color green?

I’d also like to know that my awesome screen background was created by The Queen Creative and a link to a blog about that background can be found here.

For those of you who stop by on a regular basis, I would like to let you know that I got an A in the first semester of this class and I’d like to say thanks to all of you who wished me luck and encouraged me through the semester.

Cheers!

Travel Theme: Ripples in Stone

One thing that I like to photograph in my travels, even if I’m not wandering far from home, is cemeteries and other religious spaces.  This particular image is HDR and I shot it at night:

ISO 320 50mm 0ev f/6.3 1/5

It was 7pm when I shot this, so the sky was not completely dark yet, but the sun was down.  It was the longer exposure time that helped bring out the blue color of the sky.  The lighting on the statue of Mary meant that I did have to be careful not to have too long of an exposure or I would risk too many blown out areas with no detail.  I put the f-stop to 6.3 because I did want to show the ripples in Mary’s robes, that is one of the reasons that I also chose to make an HDR of this scene.  HDR can be a very powerful tool to capture detail.  I used a tripod to keep my camera steady as I took three exposures.  I used Photomatix to create this image and then did some cropping and sharpening in Aperture.

Have you ever created an HDR image from photos taken at night? how did it go, what challenges did you face? Did you blog about it? if so feel free to leave a link in the comment section below  Other thoughts about night photography or HDR that you want to share? feel free to do so.

This post was written in response to the travel theme over at Where’s My backpack? this week featuring ripples.

Cheers!

Travel Theme: Flow

These photos were taken in a park near Virginia Tech.  We were in the Blacksburg area for a few days.  Blacksburg is a neat town, but the surrounding natural area is really beautiful.  I have chosen these photos to go with the theme, flow, which is what is featured this week at Where’s My backpack?:

ISO 100 4mm 0ev f/2.7 1/500

This first photo is perhaps not what you would normally think of as flow, but that is what the lines in the wood reminded me of.

Here are some more standard images of flow:

ISO 100 4mm 0ev f/2.7 1/125

ISO 1600 1mm 0ev f/5 1/40

For this hike I chose to take along my Canon Powershot instead of my 50D.  This was just a logistical decision.  We were doing quite a bit of walking to the waterfalls with children, towels, and lunch.  Sometimes, just having a small camera makes more sense.  I do have to say though, I wouldn’t mind doing the hike again with the larger camera and a tripod.

Cheers!

Travel Theme: Peaceful

This weekend I made a short visit to the St. Louis Zoo.  I had my 50mm lens on my camera when I saw this very peaceful looking lion:

ISO 250 50mm 0ev f/5.6 1/160

And right there you see the limitation of a 50mm lens.  I can’t get any closer to the subject, so that is as good of a shot as I am going to get.  So I switched to my 28-135mm lens for these next two shots:

ISO 400 135mm 0ev f/7.1 1/60

How peaceful looking is that? but remember to stay alert around wildlife because I took this picture 15 seconds later:

ISO 400 135mm 0ev f/7.1 1/80

Hello there, not asleep!

For the two shots taken with my 28-135mm lens I did have to increase the ISO and decrease the shutter speed to get the depth of field that I wanted.  I don’t find the rock outcropping that she is sleeping on to be distracting, so I wanted to keep it in focus.

My blogging friend Rosemarie wrote about the St. Louis Zoo recently and also took some great photos.

This post was written in part as for the weekly travel-theme challenge that is hosted on the blog, Where’s my backpack? this week featuring peaceful as its theme.

Thoughts? Comments? feel free to leave them below!

Cheers!

Travel Theme: Light

I didn’t travel too far this week’s theme, light, I just went to a local elementary school.  A friend of mine teaches there and they are doing a life cycles unit, which includes monitoring some chickens as they go from eggs to chicks.  At day seven I went in to take some pictures of candling.  Here is one of those from the series I took:

ISO 2500 50mm 0ev f/6.3 1/10

If you look at the lightest part of the image, you can see the head of the developing chicken.  How cool is that?

The challenge to getting this image is, as you can see, that I was  shooting in the dark.  I used my tripod and asked my friend to stand very still.  You will notice that the ISO is really high here.  I could have tried a lower f-stop to let in more light, but I really did want to preserve a good amount of depth in the photo, so that is why it is set to f/6.3.

Cheers!

Travel Theme: Benches

I read that benches was the theme for this week at Where’s My backpack?  and thought of this picture:

ISO 200 50mm -0.67 f/4.5 1/8000

There is a bench there!  This was taken at the end of the day at Fort Anne in Nova Scotia.  This photo was taken from the Perimeter Walking Trail looking over the Annapolis River.

I had been taking photos in the late afternoon and messing around with my settings quite a bit.  Then I did something that as a photographer you are “never” to do, I took a picture without checking my settings.  So, I can tell you that this photo is all “wrong”.  I like it though.  I could have fixed it up later, but chose to leave it as is.

Cheers!

Travel Theme: Pale

I love that Ailsa at Where’s My backpack? picked pale as this week’s travel theme.  I generally love bright vivid color or the drama of black and white, so it was fun to look for some pale images.   The photos I have chosen I took at the City Museum in St. Louis, Missouri.  If you are a photographer looking for a bunch of unique things to photograph under one roof, you should check it out.  I will say this though, it is a busy place, so maybe go early.

ISO 800 11mm 0ev f/5 1/8

ISO 1600 15mm 0ev f/5.6 1/10

ISO 1600 4mm 0ev f/2.7 1/13

I take more photos with my Canon 50D, but for these photos I was using my Canon Powershot ELPH.  To be honest, that day I had both cameras and used both, but for these photos I was interested in trying some of the settings the Powershot had to offer.  The fish mosaic was shot using a sepia tone preset.  The stone statue I used a blue monochrome setting.  The female face mosaic I used a color picker setting to accentuate the pale reds and make the other colors more monochrome.  I was happy with these particular shots.  Another thing that I was happy to see was the relative lack of noise, despite the higher ISO, 1600, in two of the shots.

Cheers!

Travel Theme: Smoke and Mirrors

Smoke and mirrors or anything that is illusion.  Now that’s an interesting theme provided this week over at Where’s My backpack?.  Last week it was Spring, but it seemed like an illusion considering I took this photo:

ISO 100 50mm 0ev f/8 1/100

In a way the photo itself is an illusion.  It is an HDR image that I created in Photomatix.  I like processing snow photos in HDR.  Snow is difficult to photograph and I think HDR helps give it a bit of boost.

So, I didn’t travel far to get this photo, but sometimes when the weather is bad, it is nice to stay close to home.

Travel Theme: TIme

Kind of funny that the theme at Where’s my backpack? is time, given that I just wrote a few days ago about future tense for another weekly theme.

One of the places that I like to visit and take pictures is the World Bird Sanctuary.  Here is Lucy a Bearded Dragon who lives at the sanctuary:

ISO 1600 50mm 0ev f/4.5 1/200

I picked Lucy for this theme for two reasons.  The first is that she looks like an ancient creature, like something from another time.  The second is because over a period of time she will shed her skin.  Here is a closer look at that:

ISO 1600 50mm 0ev f/4.5 1/200

You can see the split where her tail starts.  How’s that for a way to mark time? simply shed your skin.

Cheers!

 

Travel Theme: International Women’s Day

International Women’s Day.  That is an interesting theme. I was a bit stumped on this one, but I thought of something eventually.  I ended up choosing two pictures:

It’s a photo taken by my Mom.

This photo I scanned and I use it as my gravatar.  My Mom took it.  She is gone now, but she was really computer literate.  It is a line of work she started in when computers were just really becoming fixtures in businesses and then homes.  In some ways, my Mom and I didn’t have that much in common, but I am thinking she would have loved this blog.

The second is this:

Taken on my iPhone, just for fun.

I love tea.  This photo was taken at the London Tea Room in St. Louis.  If you are in St. Louis and “need” tea, that’s the place to go.  Not only do I love tea, I love to share a cup with my girlfriends.  The venue doesn’t really matter, and a few of my friends don’t even like tea (mock horror), but for me it is the connection with my international collection of women friends who are sharing this journey with me that matters. A lot.

Cheers!