This weeks Blog

This week i am blogging about how i have been trying to improve my HDR pictures. I have been experiementing by setting my expouser by more then one F stop. I have been going up to two stops, and i have been using my polarizer. I tried to take some HDR's of the nice sunset we had the other day, I really wanted to capture the detail of the sunset along with the detail of the street i was shooting on. One of the problems i ran into was there was a lot of cars driving by on the street, so by the time I got all three expousres there was multiple cars that drove by. I also found out that the HDR software i am using does not like bright head lights. This created dark spots in my image.

I also tried to take another one on this rims this week. Last time i took a landscape of the rims the clouds made it dark and scary. One of my friends commented on facebook that it reminded him of a bad dream. So i tried to lighten the mood by taking one with a little more sun light and a little bit brighter clouds. I like how this one turned out. The composition is attractive to me.

This weeks asignment

My first photo is a example of diagonal lines are better then verticle. The lines shift upwards and pull your eyes to the clouds above. I shot these from the rims. Using HDR I was able to get the beams of sunlight to light up and i was able to get the clouds nice and clear.

My second picture is an example of using light is better then dark to get depth in my picture, I took an HDR of the clouds that were about me and used a high aperture setting to achieve the deep depth of focus. By making my F stops far apart for my 3 expousers I was able to get the dark and light contrast to be a lot more noticeable.

My third photo is another HDR photo and its is using the Sharp is better then blurry element. I did this by a high aperture and adjusting the contrast to make the layers of the cloud distinct.

First attempt lightning shots

This week I am blogging about my first attempts at taking pictures of lightning, This tuesday we had a pretty big lightning storm roll through the magic city. I was out on a run when it started so I hurried back to my room so I could grab my car and head up to the rims. By the time I had arrived at the spot I would be shooting at, the storm had really picked up and was starting to get really intense. I quickly set my camera up on my tripod and started shooting. It was really windy and rainy outside so I had to take that into consideration while taking the pictures. I used the bulb mode on my camera and counted down for five seconds, any longer then that then the wind would start really messing with the clearness of my shot. I left my aperature at about F8, and I tried my best to sheild my camera from the wind and rain. I luckly enough had a plastic grocery bag siting in my car that I was able to hold over my camera.

             I ended up taking about 150 shots, i would hold my shutter open until I saw some lighting or until five seconds was up, then i would quickly start taking my next picture. This method worked well but did take a lot of time. I was fortunate that the storm was big and had a lot of strikes. I wanted to stick around and take some more pictures but unfortunately I was unable to. The storm was west of me then got blown east right over the top of me. I took off running when the tree right next to me got hit by the lighting. It felt like someone shot a 308 rifle in my ear. I felt really awkward running through a lightning storm soaking wet, and with a metal tripod in my hand.

First attempt at HDR photos

So this week I am blogging about my first attempt to take HDR (high dynamic range) photos. Shumway suggested a website to me that has free software to generate HDR photos, so I went and downloaded it. The free download is nice, but it does put a water mark on all your finished work. Its 100 dollars to buy the software, so I might decided to do that. One probem I ran into while attempting these photos was that nikon was stupid and made the D3000 (my camera) not have the ability to automatically take more then one shot at a time. So it was super important that my camera be held super still.

             The first few photos I took were inside and did not turn out very cool, but it was dark outside so what could I do?  I did three pictures at a time and what I would do is change the shutter speed and change where I pointed my flash. Just today I was able to get a little time before class to go up on the rims and take a few of the city. These turned out better then the inside ones but still need some work. I really wanted there to be some more distinct clouds in the sky to get a little more contrast. One varible i changed to try and get a little more contrast was to instead of going up and down one stop, i would go up and down about a stop and a half. I cant wait to get some better opportunity's to take some pictures.

#2 weekly blog

This week I decided to blog about Shaun Lunt. Shaun Lunt was a doctor/pilot/photographer. Most of his pictures were taken up in Alaska where he spent a lot of time exploring. Shaun Lunt would go on long trips in his super cub exploring the back country of Alaska, it is what he loved to do. Looking at the pictures Shaun took is a little eerie, because Shaun died in a plane crash back in 2008. He was circling a whale vertebrae when he stalled and went into a spin. a lot of his pictures were taken right before he was killed. Shaun's pictures are mostly landscapes of the beautiful Alaskan wilderness, he also has a lot of pictures of aircraft. He was very good at documenting his journey through photography. By looking at his online journal you can really get a feel for what he experienced on his trips.
                 I would not mind getting better at taking the kind of photos Shaun took. Since I am also a pilot I am hoping to have some of the same opportunity's Shaun had. I would really enjoy having enough money to be able to afford to leave work for a couple months and do what he did (minus the dieing part).


http://shaunlunt.typepad.com/shootings/