Category Archives: photography

Highlights

Posted by Mike on

Delta Lake State Park

Yesterday was a short work day.  My company offers summer hours which allows us to work four, nine hour days and then only have to work four hours on Friday.  With this being a long weekend, and it was a very long week for me in which I had unintentionally worked nine-plus hours all week, I allowed myself to take advantage of the summer hours offer.  It isn’t something I regularly participate in but I needed it this week.

Of course, I never did mention to Mother Nature that this was my plan so she decided to hit us with a little rain in the afternoon.  It was OK with me though, I did some reading and I am not afraid to say I took a cat nap too!  By the time dinner rolled around I was ready to go again.

We actually had a tornado watch in affect most of the evening up until 9:30pm.  As far as I know a tornado never did make an appearance.  With me being the adventurous kind (not really) I decided to catch the sunset but chose to stay close to home for my exploration.  I drove to Delta Lake State Park as the clouds started to roll in.  The earlier rain had basically cleared the beach area and I found I had the sunset to myself.  I was running back and forth along the beach capturing images for over an hour.  It was a good way to end my work week!

I found an interesting composition which included a small, water filled depression in the sand.  I aligned myself with this small water pool and the setting sun which created a very nice line of highlights.  By including the sun I had to be careful about lens flare and as you can see in the first image I wasn’t able to remove it all with camera orientation.  I ended up using my ‘finger blocking the sun’ trick to get a second image without the flare and used Photoshop to combine the two images.

After processing the image I felt there was empty space on the left which was not adding anything to the composition.  I regretted not turning the camera into a portrait orientation while I was at the beach.  It is a practice I typically follow but in my enthusiasm over the empty beach I forgot.  I decided I still liked this image but needed to change the orientation through a drastic crop in Photoshop.  I basically threw away over a third of the pixels I had captured but the end result is the image I wanted to have.

 

MLCreations Photography: Blog Post Related &emdash; Highlights-1

Highlights – Start
Olympus OM-D E-M1, M. Zuiko 12-40mm f/2.8, 1/8s, 12mm, f/16, ISO 200

 

MLCreations Photography: Blog Post Related &emdash; Highlights

Highlights
Olympus OM-D E-M1, M. Zuiko 12-40mm f/2.8, 1/8s, 12mm, f/16, ISO 200

Depth

Posted by Mike on

In The Yard – ITY14

The other evening while I was in the yard playing with my macro lens I decided to try out a cool feature. I have written about exposure bracketing before, which is a technique for increasing the dynamic range in an image, well my Olympus camera has focus bracketing as well.

After I set my exposure and my focus point the camera will adjust the depth of the focus above and below that point capturing an image at each slice. It will then combine all the images into a single image with a larger depth of focus than possible with a single exposure. You can read a better explanation of the technique here at Digital Photography School.

 

MLCreations Photography: Blog Post Related &emdash; Depth

Depth
Olympus OM-D E-M1, M. Zuiko 60mm f/2.8 Macro, 1/125s, f/5.6, ISO 200

Florida Fresh Corrected

Posted by Mike on

International Flower & Garden Festival

My original post and image of this truck I found at the Epcot International Flower & Garden Festival has never really sat right with me. It didn’t speak to me nor did it make me feel the way I did when I captured the image. I have been reading quite a few books about photography lately but none of them have been technical books. They have been about creativity and expression.

A few of those books are:

Creative Visualization for Photographers – Rick Sammon
Learning to See Creatively – Bryan Peterson
The Creative Fight – Chris Orwig

and a few eBooks:

Chasing the Look – David duChemin
The Evocative Image – Andrew S. Gibson

These books have fueled a change in my approach to photography. Not only am I trying to capture a beautiful or interesting image, I’m trying to capture and process an image that conveys more of a feeling.

This is what has bothered me about my original Florida Fresh image. It was a very colorful image of a scene I found in Epcot. But for me it lacked a connection to that day when I clicked the shutter.  On that day I was feeling deflated.  Disney was losing some of its luster.  It was crowded, I felt I was being nickle and dimed to death and I was not being successful in what I wanted to achieve photographically.

When I found this truck I was both excited and frustrated.  I waited patiently for my turn to grab a picture but there was a lack of etiquette among the guests.  When I am at Disney I always wait my turn and make every attempt not to interfere with someone else’s enjoyment of the parks. I was not getting back what I always tried to give…

I eventually gave up and sat down on a bench away from the truck.  It was then another idea for this image came to mind.  I switched to my 60mm macro lens (I brought very few lenses that day) and waited for that brief moment when my long view would be clear.  I was able to grab one image before the guests returned to the area.  Success!

I felt like a hunter who stalked and captured his prey from the safety of distance.  I grabbed an image in a very narrow window of opportunity.  I also felt like this compressed view of the truck is more how I would find it in an orange grove back in the 30’s.  My original processing didn’t bring any of this out.

Below is my second attempt to present Florida Fresh…

 

MLCreations Photography: Blog Post Related &emdash; Florida Fresh Corrected

Florida Fresh
Olympus OM-D E-M1, M. Zuiko 60mm f/2.8 Macro, 1/80s, f/11, ISO 400

Hinckley in the Morning

Posted by Mike on

Hinckley Reservoir

Sunday morning was the perfect day to get up early and catch some pre-dawn images.  I finished reading Below the Horizon by David Delnea (you can see more about the eBook here) and was inspired to drag my butt out of bed.  This book talks about light at the edges of the day.  I spend a lot of time getting photographs during this time frame but David’s book still provided me with great information.  I truly enjoy the authors and books you can find on the Craft & Vision website.

The two pictures in this post were captured only 4 minutes apart.  As the sun approaches the horizon the light is changing drastically.  You can see this in the color tone shift between the two images.  The first image is cooler in tone with blue hues being the most dominant.  The second image is starting to get warmer as more of the sunlight is crossing the horizon and lighting the sky above the reservoir.

This was another chance for me to play with my filter set.  Not only did I have the circular polarizer working for me but the first image also has the 2-stop ND graduated filter.  It is a soft edge filter which means the transition is gradual.  That zone is centered on the horizon. By using the graduated filter I was able to get a single exposure image without any areas being too dark or light.

For the second image I added a 4-stop ND filter which allowed my to get a full 1 minute exposure time.  This allowed the slow moving clouds to blur as they worked their way toward the horizon.  It also allowed me to show the slight breeze with the blurring of the lake grass as it swayed.

I’m going to keep my eyes open for more opportunities like this…  🙂

 

MLCreations Photography: Blog Post Related &emdash; Hinckley Pre-Dawn

Hinckley Pre-Dawn
Olympus OM-D E-M1, M. Zuiko 12-40mm f/2.8, 15s, 17mm, f/16, ISO 200

 

MLCreations Photography: Blog Post Related &emdash; Hinckley on the Move

Hinckley on the Move
Olympus OM-D E-M1, M. Zuiko 12-40mm f/2.8, 60s, 12mm, f/13, ISO 200

Down the Drain

Posted by Mike on

Buttermilk Falls State Park

 

MLCreations Photography: Buttermilk Falls &emdash; Down the Drain

Down the Drain
Olympus OM-D E-M1, M. Zuiko 12-40mm f/2.8, 3.2s, 12mm, f/16, ISO 200