Once again, I appear to have a space problem. With the recent acquisition of a beautiful, gently-used 16-35mm f/2.8L Canon lens, I can no longer fit all my gear into a single camera bag. Considering the variety of camera bags that I own, this is kind of a scary thing. For the moment, I have settled on one bag (my Crumpler 6 Million Dollar Home) for all of my lenses and the 430EXII flash, and another bag (the Crumpler 4 Million Dollar Home) for the camera with 24-105mm f/4L lens attached, flash cards, and battery. At least that will make it a lot easier to “just grab the camera” for quick trips. And for a camera+lens quick trip I still have my beloved purple Crumpler 5 Million Dollar Home right there on the shelf where I can get to it. (And I’m not going to mention the fact that I had to put things like the memory card reader, rain cover, and flash battery charger in yet a third bag for this weekend’s trip.)
Now I guess I need to go update the equipment page to reflect my new toy. Hopefully that f/2.8 will result in some great low-light Christmas pictures.
And to make up for the dearth of pictures lately, due to the overabundance of work-related stress, here’s a picture of the new lens from when I tested it a few weeks ago:
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Once again, this is really last week’s photo, because once again I’m a bit behind.
This week’s photo is a bouquet of daisies, roses, and carnations that I picked up at the store last weekend as a test subject for my light box. With diffused sunlight coming through the cream background from the window behind the lightbox, and a little bit of ambient lighting from the front of the box, the colors are nice and rich.
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This is really last week’s Photo of the Week, I just forgot to post it. One day last week, while I was working from home, I took the camera out into my backyard at lunchtime. This old bottle has been sitting on the patio table as long as I can remember, and I’ve always been meaning to shoot it. With the sun high, the shadow and lighting was interesting, and when I processed it later, it turned out even more interesting in black & white, which the contrast and brightness bumped to keep the shadow and the hint of the table edge.
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Can make a big difference. For example, take this photo of a basket. Pretty nice, decent color and contrast, not a bad picture.
Then convert it to black and white, adjust the contrast and shadows a bit. Now it’s really interesting!
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Let’s kick this off with my first attempt at actual photography with my iPhone camera. While I tend to use the iPhone for snapshots a lot, there are many times when I see something and think “I wish I had my camera with me” and it never occurs to me to pull out my iPhone and take the picture. But in my wander across the internet yesterday, I came across some VERY cool photography by someone who only uses an iPhone. The key for him was that nearly every photo was heavily edited, which is not something I do very often.
So, I decided that I would make more of an effort to use the iPhone camera when I had a chance, and take the opportunity for some creative editing on the resulting photos. Besides, I could use the editing practice.
First attempt: Through the Bars – click for the bigger version on Flickr
Taken with the iPhone camera, edited with iPhoto; converted to black and white, sharpness adjusted, edge blur added.
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Another week, another site redesign. Probably. I’ve started putting photos on Flickr, mostly for ease of linking when I’m posting for critiques and sharing on other sites. So I’m thinking about removing the gallery I host here and using a Flickr plugin to display the images here instead. It would certainly be easier to keep track of photos that way. Not to mention only having to upload them once, and not worry about hosting them myself. First I have to figure out how to make a couple of small changes to the provided Flickr code, though. As usual. At least I wouldn’t be dealing with the fallout of “merging two PHP/MySQL systems together in unholy matrimony” as a friend of mine refers to the current site setup.
Another week, another new camera toy. I ordered an external flash last week, a Canon 430EX. Of course it arrived after I left town for two days. And then I spent Sunday doing necessary things around the house, and didn’t really get to play with it until tonight. First impression: nice. I love the ability to direct the flash somewhere other than directly at what I’m shooting. Second impression: I’m going to need the off-camera setup a lot sooner than I thought. The flash has some bendy directional options, but it still points forward from the camera. It would be nice to set it to the left or right for slightly more natural light and shadows.
Another week, another fun photo trip. Once again, I headed over to central Washington to see what I could see. Lighting was REALLY bad for landscape photography on Friday, but Saturday turned out beautiful:
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I went to central Washington to visit my parents this weekend. They live in the country, with lots of open land and farms around them. This morning, we took a walk back behind the neighbor’s house. Besides open space, and trees, and a nice view back towards the barn, there is a pond. There didn’t used to be a pond, but the previous owner built it, then cleared a little bit of grass around it and put some nice chairs and a picnic table.
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Unfortunately, plans to visit the Kubota Gardens last Friday fell through, in an even bigger way than expected. So I went down there on Saturday afternoon, instead. Mid-day on the first truly hot summer weekend so far this year was not the best idea either, so I didn’t stay long.
Long enough to get just a few good pictures, though, including this one:
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We’ve had a week of beautiful, warm sunny weather in Seattle. And I have been stuck at work, or running errands that leave no time for photo ops. I managed to sneak in a few photos Monday night, but since then, nothing.
However, today I am scheduled to leave work early (“scheduled” is not the same as “will” unfortunately) and I’m hoping to get back to Kubota Gardens to grab some shots that I wasn’t able to get on my last visit, now that I have my 10-22mm lens.
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There’s a whole area in Tukwila, WA that is commonly referred to as “Southcenter.” This area includes the newly-expanded Westfield Southcenter, Target, Costco, 6 or 8 outdoor shopping centers, and lots and lots of restaurants.
In the middle of it all, there is a pond. And amazingly, considering that you have to park behind the Target building, it really feels like a nice, relaxing middle-of-nowhere pond.
Except for that Sleep Country USA building peeking through:
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