All change

I’ve been kind of quiet the last few days due to an opportunity to evolve learningtosnap a little.

The astute amongst you may have noticed that all my pictures have always been hosted on www.learningtosnap.com?

Well, with the help of Geoff @ opinionatedgeek and Jon (who prefers to remain internet invisible lest the alien overlords come and take him home), the new improved ‘Learningtosnap’ blog can be found here.

So, what are you waiting for?

Go.

Gogogo.

Oh come on, I promise it’ll be full of the same rambling nonsense as this one. More importantly, it’ll be…erm….ahhh….Oh just come over and visit already!

More light than right.

I just took this as part of my experiments with that f/1.8 50mm lens I mentioned.

I set this up in a dark room with my trusty desk lamp lighting system and the hot shoe flash pointed towards the ceiling.

(1/160, f/1.8, aperture priority, focal length - 50mm, ISO - 200, 17/10/07 19:47)

To my mind, it’s another one of ‘those’ pictures I take that is close but still just mweh. In this case I think the reflection of the flash on the top of the globe ruins it. But, having tried this a couple of times (OK 30, you know me….) I’m still not sure how to get enough light onto the subject to give it that ‘live’ feeling without ending up being able to see my kitchen in the reflections and a dubious great flash spot to boot.

I guess making use of a proper blacked out environment would help keep the reflections in the globe down, but how do you get direct light onto something for shadows without ending up with that sort of flash feedback effect?

Peeping Tigger

Bouncy bouncy bouncy bouncy

Fun fun fun fun fun

The most wonderful thing about Tigger is!!!!!!!!!!!

  I’m the only one!

I’ve been given the opportunity to play with a 50mm f/1.8 lens (this one), so expect some fun and games with it over the next few days.

Last night I only got 5 minutes with it, but while messing about I discovered I could peep into Tiggers house and see what he was up to. What did I find? Yup, he seems to be peeping on someone else.

Bad Tigger.

The image itself is quite noisy because the camera was on ISO 800. (Not because I’d planned it, but because I forgot to change it from some disastrous night shots I’d taken earlier in the week). That said, I thought it was an OK example of the crazy depth of field possible on this lens. More will follow!

And remember, it’s Tigger spealt…

 T, i, double g, errrrrrrr

They only come out at night…

I was out last night for dinner with a friend from England I’d never met before. After the meal I got talking with Darrell (not the fried from England I’d never met before, he was someone else) about the projects idea. We then got chatting about night pictures and my lack of luck with some I’d taken earlier in the week. That led us onto the all important public safety aspect of walking round a city at night with £500+ of camera gear and how we’d love to do it, but well, you know….. the whole rob, murder, death, kill, thing might get in the way*

Well, suffice to say that gave birth to the “Night Project”. So, who’s interested in a group of us meeting in the evening for a couple of hours in the centre of Belfast to go take photos of some of the nice things there are round there? I’d suggest waiting a few weeks yet until the early evening is properly night like (where do I find out sunset times for the next few weeks people!?). The plan would be we go take photos for an hour or two, then head to a local pub/coffee shop/pizza place and have some beer/coffee/pizza and upload some photos onto a handy laptop thingy for a squizz.

Film people could of course come along and grumble about technology and the importance of a good dark room and such.

Hell, given my ability with my dSLR I reckon people with disposable cameras will get as much out of it as me, but it could be a giggle!

So, you interested?

*Note, for perspective tourists Belfast is a lovely city (seriously) and it’s quite safe. Certainly safer than a lot of other major cities in the world. After all we tend not to annoy foreigners, being too busy having a go at the people from the estate across the road.

Marvelous Mushrooms…

Nope no pictures, but Darrel mentioned wanting to take a photo of a specific brand/breed/species/thingmabobber of mushroom in a comment recently, so when I saw this I thought of him.

The Ulster Wildlife Trust are having a Marvelous Mushroom Meander at Slievenacloy Nature Reserve in Belfast on the 27th October from 12 until 2.30

Event details are here.

More information on the Ulster Wildlife Trust can be found here.

I’m Eggstatic

I took these the other night as part of my continuing adventures with light and f-stops.

I think they’re eggcellent…

(sorry, couldn’t resist)

(3.2secs, f/5.6, aperture priority, focal length - 55mm, ISO - 100, 09/10/07 19:19)

(1 sec, f/5.6, aperture priority, focal length - 55mm, ISO - 100, 09/10/07 19:22)

(0.8secs, f/5.6, aperture priority, focal length - 55mm, ISO - 100, 09/10/07 19:24)

(5secs, f/11, aperture priority, focal length - 121mm, ISO - 100, 09/10/07 19:29)

(5secs, f/11, aperture priority, focal length - 121mm, ISO - 100, 09/10/07 19:31)

Once again, this makes use of the same approach I took with the dice. I set up using a black silk dressing gown as background this time, as I felt the sheen might work well. My little desk light off to the right, set at different angles (or turned off) depending on the shot and then the camera on a tripod and messing about with aperture a little (as the shot data should show).

I’m fascinated by light when working like this. The shadows and the changes in colour just using things as simple as a sheer piece of cloth opposed to cotton or moving the lights about even a little. If I had the money I’d go out tomorrow and buy the tables you can get for this sort of photography, but the more I consider it the more I actually think they might leave things quite predictable and formulaic. As things stand I find myself wandering the house looking for spare lights, things to set them on and things to use for backgrounds etc.

All these shots were taken in Aperture Priority mode and the shutter times vary incredibly as a result. Interestingly (and something I didn’t realise when I started) this seems to have had a fun effect on the actual egg itself, with some of the shots looking quite sinister whilst others look like little Oscars for Martians. aprt from cropping there hasn’t been anything else done….yet…

I haven’t decided which is my favourite, but I figured this one is in the running.

(13 secs, f/11, aperture priority, focal length - 55mm, ISO - 100, 09/10/07 19:27)

I’ve a growing list of things I want to try and photograph. Oddities we’ve picked up traveling or ornaments etc. I may well make it a periodic thing on to try. In this case, we picked up the egg in Austria a few years back in a little rock shop (I kid you not!).

Warning. Geological information follows…

The egg is actually a piece of Iron Pyrite or Fool’s Gold that has been ground down to the shape of an egg. I’m told the closer to a perfect egg the artist gets the more valuable they become, but I actually quite like the crevasses on this - they do fantastic things with the light.

The crystals inside the egg actually come up really well in the uncompressed versions of the pictures and make some interesting and unusual pictures in themselves.

RSS Is Go!

OK, since Stuart asked about it and it turned out to be a widget option thing, you should now find an RSS widget doofer thingmabob on the little pane to one side.

Sorry to get all technical there.

OK, so who uploaded the wrong photo set?

Yup, I had spent last night taking some photos of another odd object from around the house and I had spent hours trying to decide which I preferred. In the end I decided to montage them all and let people decide for themselves.

Course, that would all be great if I’d actually put the right images online wouldn’t it?

If you go down to the woods today

You can be sure of a big surprise.

Yup, that’s right. I might be hiding in the trees with a camera….

erm….

anyway….

Not so much the woods, but the local park for this shot. I remember these trees as a kid. They were young and vigorous and the path between them was neatly mowed and just pretty. I decided a few weeks back I’d go and get a snap to see how they were doing now.

Boy, what a change. I kinda like the slightly more sinister look they’re going for these days.

(1/60, f/4.5, aperture priority, focal length - 18mm, ISO - 400, 05/10/07 17:49)

The only change from the original image was a slight bit of cloning to remove a set of goalposts and some bloke playing football. You’d probably need to see the original (full size) image to make him out, in the smaller (webbed up) versions it was just noise, so I deleted him. Yes, I am a cruel master.

A rose by any other name…

…would be called something else.

A good weekends snapping this weekend. I took maybe 80 - 100 pictures. I have maybe 3 I’ll post. Dear lord I’m glad I’m not paying for developing!

I spent Friday afternoon in the park with the nipper and got some nice shots of her and my missus on the swings (the child was on the swing, not the missus. She made me tell you that bit). These need a little post processing so expect them later in the week.

Yeah, post processing. How about that huh? Whats to say. I think it’s growing on me as much as the actual photo bit. Even slight changes to an image make amazing differences to the finished product. I’m still undecided if it’s cheating.

Anyway…

This rose bloomed in my back garden over the weekend, now anyone that’s seen my back garden will know that it’s probably as conductive to flowers as the central reactor in Chernobyl. Which just goes to prove that (to quote the guy from Jurassic Park) “Life will find a way”

The image has been cropped in to show just the flower and then I used a similar process of the dice to reduce the brightness of the background while keeping the rose bright.

(1/200, f/3.5, aperture priority, focal length - 24mm, ISO - 400, 07/10/07 13:10)

The only other change to the natural state of the rose (apart from some leaf pruning which doesn’t count, does it?) was some gratuitous effect modeling. Yup, that’s right, next stop Digital Light and Magic for me.

I used my latest toy (supplied by the repository of junk known as the cupboard under the sink) to add water to the flower. It was high tech as you’d expect…

Starting out in photography? I recommend a camera, a lens, a water spray.