Photography Thread

[mussa]

ha, if you want to see faces ill post another fire pic i took. has some freaky lookin faces. let me find them.

[Susquehanna Birder]

Experimenting with a new lens today.

[Father Demon]

Don't you have the same camera I have?  Powershot S3 IS?

A) What lense are you using, and
B) How do you change lenses?

[Susquehanna Birder]

I do, and I can't change lenses on that. This is another new camera. I still keep the S3 for times when I need a good, portable, point-and-shoot...but I moved up to a DSLR. The bird photo was taken with a 70-200mm/2.8 lens.

[Susquehanna Birder]

[Rome]

Took this shot this morning in Ponce Inlet here in Florida.  First time I've ever seen the jetty swamped without a hurricane nearby.  I got farging soaked taking these shots but it was worth it.

[Rome]

[mussa]

those are some big waves for florida, wow

[Rome]

There are more shark attacks in that spot than anywhere else in the United States.  I've surfed it many times and when someone yells "pick up your feet" you damn well pick 'em up.  There was a lot of birds feasting on bait fish towards the end of the jetty and where there's bait fish there's sharks.  Lots of them.

If you look at the jetty on the left side is the ocean and on the right side is the inlet.  When the waves aren't washing over it's a really nice place to hang out with a beach chair and a cooler of beer.

[Susquehanna Birder]

Looks great!

[Susquehanna Birder]

Fun with icy tree.

[Cerevant]

Looks awesome.  Did you muck with exposure, or use a flash on that one?  Since it gets darker near the ends, I'm guessing flash.  Might be an interesting subject for exposure bracketing.

[Susquehanna Birder]

Thanks.

Actually, I tried a plain long-exposure shot, and it looked flat. I tried flash, and it looked too stark. If I had a couple of external flashes, I'd have used them to light up the branches...but I haven't gotten them yet. So I gave it a 20 second (or so) exposure, and while the shutter was open, I ran around the tree and "painted" it with a flashlight.

The resulting image had a white streak across the bottom of the image, as it captured the flashlight moving across the shot. So I cloned it out in Photoshop, then toyed with the levels to bring the surroundings out a little.

In hindsight, I probably should have gone for a few more seconds of exposure, so that I could hit all the branches, rather than concentrating on the core of the tree. The darker ones are the ones I didn't paint long enough,

[Susquehanna Birder]

Here's one I did similarly. I wanted to get a lighted desk lamp in a sea of black. But the light from the lamp was too bright, and I couldn't get the body of the lamp to look right. So I put a dimmer on the lamp, and then with the shutter open, I painted the lamp with an LED flashlight (I liked the cold blue effect it gave).

I had plenty of black stuff around the shot, but there were still some bits showing up that I didn't want (including the edges of the table that the lamp was on)...so I spent some time posting it with the clone and band-aid tools in Photoshop.

[Cerevant]

I was reading somewhere online that when you need different light levels, you can use Photoshop to pull two exposures together: take the foreground with a flash & short exposure, then get the background with a long exposure.  I'm too lazy for all that

What is cool is that the new digital cameras have "auto exposure bracketing" where the camera will take 3 quick pictures at different exposures when you don't have time to set up the shot.  I've played with this, but I'm mostly obsessed with taking pictures indoors with no flash.  I love my 50mm f/1.4 lens but you have to stand in the next room to take a picture with it because the field of view is so small.  I picked up a 17-200mm f/2.8 wide angle but it is still too slow for where I end up taking pictures.  I guess I'll have to invest in a flash with a diffuser.