Category: Photography

Recently posted on my photoblog:

Click on those thumbnails to see the full-sized images.

So, there’s no photo of the week this week. It’s not because I don’t have anything to post, in fact I’ve been sitting on a surplus of (relatively) presentable shots for a few weeks now. I’ve also had this thought rattling around in the back of my head to start what’s called a “photoblog.” It’s a weblog in that it’s personal and updated regularly, but instead of text and links and snapshots of your cat/kids/feet, the emphasis is on photographs. Often they have minimalist designs that put the photos front and center, maybe with some basic commenting and browsing functionality built in.

So, given these two factors, I started fiddling around with PixelPost last weekend and ended up with http://photos.jmadigan.net:

Instead of a photo of the week here on jmadigan.net, I’m going to post 3 (well, 2-3) new pictures a week on photos.jmadigan.net and remind people here once a week about the photoblog. I say let’s call this a little experiment to see how I like it and to see if I can keep up 2-3 new pictures a week. If it goes smashingly, I may register a new domain name (any ideas?) and add some subtle bells and whistles to the site. If not, well, I can always deny that it ever happened and tell you you’re crazy if you think it did, you crazy crazy internet person.

There’s a few reasons for doing this. First, I think it’s cool and that’s almost reason enough. I like the idea of a simple site where I can build up an online portfolio and the photoblogging community seems pretty cool. jmadigan.net has other focal points, and Flickr isn’t as pretty and a bit spastic at times. Also, deep down, some part of me sees this as necessary groundwork to building a side business in photography so that I can actually make some money off this stuff. Right now that idea can still most charitably be described as “fanciful dream born on the lilac breezes of la-la land” but you have to start somewhere and it’s actually part of a plan that I’m putting in place a piece at a time.

So, go on. Click through. Tell me what you think.

This week’s photo was done for an assignment with the theme “Red” but I actually had the idea a while ago and retrieved it from my little photo idea notebook. The penguins came from a Clearance bin at Target at 65 cents each and I took the picture in my home made lightbox. I had to keep the whole thing hidden from Sam, lest she demand that the penguins be turned over to her, because obviously this kind of frivolity isn’t the purview of respectable adults.

After looking at this photo I liked it, but I thought the background might be too light. So I put in a blue piece of poster board and took this one:

Which do you like better? I thought I’d like the contrast between the yellow and blue, but I actually think this darker background makes the little red guy stand out less, which is the entire point of the picture. Speaking of which, all the penguins were yellow to begin with. I changed the one to red using a Hue/Saturation layer mask in Photoshop. Nifty!

This week I’m doing a couple of things differently with the PotW. First, it’s a set of photos on the same subject: a derelict old gas pump that’s abandoned out in the middle of nowhere. I don’t normally go in for the “rusty junk that’s just sitting around” kind of subject, but I kind of like how these turned out.

These shots were taken as part of a recent excursion with a local camera club I joined. I had been looking for a way to get out and meet new people, as having a toddler and a baby comprise the majority of your social network leaves something to be desired. So I did a bit of Google searching and found that my city actually had a very august and active camera club. And their next gathering was coming up soon. Neat!

So I signed up and RSVP’d for the photowalk that they were going to do last weekend. In hindsight, the fact that the club was gathering at the Cracker Barrel restaurant might have served as my first clue as to what kind of people I was meeting up with, but I plunged ahead. Indeed, when I arrived at the restaurant and located the group I was momentarily stunned by hold OLD they all were. After me, the youngest person there was probably in his mid 50s, and the age of the oldest member was probably unfathomable without the aid of carbon dating.

After a hearty breakfast we set out for our trek to the countryside and I took the opportunity to call Geralyn on my cell phone. “They’re all SO OLD!” I hissed into the phone before she could even finish saying “Hello?” She laughed, then said she felt terrible for me, then laughed again.

It turns out, of course, that my prejudices were completely malformed and unsubstantiated. Everyone I encountered that day was friendly, accommodating, and willing to go out of their way to make a new member like myself welcome. Right off the bat when I got lost one of them called me on my cell phone and gave me directions to where he was waiting for me on the shoulder of the highway. Others introduced themselves and chatted me up. It was nice.

In fact, once we actually got out shooting in the field (like literally, we were actually out shooting in a field) it became apparent that many of these old timers really knew their stuff, including digital photography and post production. A couple of people had simple point-and-shoot cameras and a couple more had entry-level DSLRs like mine, but the balance were well geared and nonchalantly walked around with what looked like $4,000 or more worth of electronics dangling from their necks. And I had gotten so used to the idea of old people being incompetent with technology that I could hardly believe it when this 75-year old guy started telling me about how to force your printer to recognize certain color profiles and how to change the blend mode in Photoshop layer masks to achieve certain results.

Over lunch one seasoned photographer even told me about how he had recently been on a trip to arctic Norway where he tried to photograph wildlife from a pitching boat and how a brown bear had once herded him up a chest-deep river for a mile while he held his camera over his head. This is crazy, I thought. I’ve never been chased by a bear. I’m completely out of my league here!

So, good trip after all. I didn’t exactly end up with a ton of keeper shots (shooting between the hours of 10 and 2 is hardly ideal), but I have a few more besides these three that I’ll include in future PotW updates. And I’ll probably get more on future outings.

For this week’s PotW I’m featuring the image above, which I did for The Digital Photography School’s weekly assignment. The theme this week was “Transportation.” I’m going to try to do these things every week just to keep myself shooting.

But wait. There’s more. When I saw the theme of “transportation” it didn’t take me long to remember that there’s a Museum of Transportation right down the road from where we live. So I packed up my gear, waved goodbye to the family, then went and shot two gigs’ worth of trains, planes, automobiles, and trolleys. I thought several of them were worth sharing, so I’ll include them here.

NOTE: As usual, all the thumbnails below are squared off to make them line up neatly on the page. Please click through to see the full, uncropped versions.

While there were various things available to point my camera at, I did have one major problem: the weather. It was brutally hot, but that wasn’t really that big a problem. The main problem was that it was also overcast, which meant that the sky was utterly and completely blown out in every shot. Nothing but white, which looks lousy and immediately grabs the eye to say “Hey! Look at me! Aren’t I ruining this shot? Aren’t I?”

This was too bad, but I worked around the problem by focusing on shaded areas (like the one with the trolley shot above) and by zooming in to fill the frame. So some detail work and close-ups, which is actually a different kind of way of looking at something huge like trains. My first instinct was to do some big, dramatic shots featuring the iconic silhouettes of the big, old steam engines against the sky. Since none of those looked any good with the white sky, I had to get creative.

One of the best examples is probably this shot of the Silver Charger. I couldn’t get all the letters in the shot without showing a bunch of the sky as well, so I ended up tilting the camera. I quite like the effect with the strong diagonal lines that go nicely with the words. It may be my favorite pic of the trip.

One other neat thing about this shoot was that since Geralyn had graciously volunteered to stay home with the kids, I had the whole time to myself and didn’t have to worry about keeping an eye on anyone. And probably just as importantly, I didn’t have to worry about trying to get pictures of the kids. This was surprisingly liberating and I recommend you all try it. It also gave me a chance to slow down and take my time. I took shots of the same thing from many different angles with many different camera settings, and I even had time to break out my new gray card and do some manual exposure settings, which turned out very well on some of the pics.

So, fun trip. I’ll just have to go back some day when the sky is more cooperative to get all the other shots I wanted.

Have you ever been curious as to what’s in my camera bag? No? Well, I’ve already got it all typed up so I’ll go ahead and tell you anyway.

1. Wireless camera remote
2. Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM lens
3. Flash diffuser (the white rectangular thing) and hood for the 70-300mm lens (the black round thing)
4. Canon 430EX Speedlite
5. Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM lens
6. Canon EF-S 18-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM lens
7. Rocket blower
8. Canon Digital Rebel XT SLR camera
9. Lowepro neck strap w/ memory card wallet and two 1GB memory cards

Not pictured:

10. Sunpak DigiPro XLF tripod
11. Canon 18-55mm EF-S USM lens
12. Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II lens
13. Canon EF 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5 II USM lens
14. Lastolite Ezybalance grey/white card
15. Lastolite silver/gold reflector

I’m bending my “No kids in the PotW” rule a bit here, but the idea for this picture came to me while browsing through The Sam’s Story and Parenting archives. This is, unfortunately, how a lot of our family has to experience their grandkids/nieces/whatevers most of the time. But it’s better than nothing. Yay Internets!

See the rest of my Flickr photostream.

This one is another result of a stretch assignment where I wanted to start with an idea and try to clearly communicate it through a picture. I’ve started carrying around a little notebook in which I jot down ideas for pictures as they occur to me, and this is the first fruit of that practice. I found the mouse trap during some Spring cleaning and made the coupon myself in Photoshop.

The background is once again courtesy of my do it yourself light box. I also bought a multi-pack of poster board in different colors so I could try out different backgrounds. I kind of like the orange one, too:

These photos are, of course, dedicated to Admiral Akbar.

Sunset over “The Farm,” Ger’s family’s place out in the middle of nowhere. I like the colors on this one. See the rest of my Flickr photostream.

A jelly fish at the aquarium in Jenks, Oklahoma. I think they were under some kind of funky black light. Far out.

Some petal shaped parts to the overhang at a nearby playground.

Hand modeling courtesy of Geralyn. See also: the testing puzzle. Putting together a small portfolio of potential stock images for sale has been on my list of things to do for a while. I should really do that, and maybe this could be one of them.

We actually don’t have a name for this guy, which is kind of strange. See the rest of my Flickr Photostream.

Not much to say, really. We found this guy out at The Farm and I made him an unwilling model.

Meet the Duckie Family, Samantha’s motley collection of rubber duckies accumulated through various sources. From left to right:

1. Papa Duckie
2. Mama Duckie
3. Baby Duckie
4. Uncle Duckie
5. Aunt Duckie
6. Cousin Liberty Duckie who moved to New York to act on Broadway

You’ll probably want to click on that teeny tiny thumbnail to see the full picture on this one. And make sure you scroll across horizontally unless you’ve got a HUUUUGE monitor. It’s not an interesting or otherwise good shot, but I wanted to play around with making a panorama shot in Photoshop. It was incredibly easy. I just put my camera on a tripod and took a bunch of shots of my backyard, making sure each one overlapped by about 30%. Then I fixed Photoshop with a stern glare and said “Minion! Stitch these together post haste!” And it did.

Seriously, it was pretty much that easy. And the shot came out almost perfectly, with just one glaring problem with depth of field that was an issue with the original picture than the stitching process. Can’t wait to redo this with a scene that’s actually interesting to look at.

This one was kind of fun. In case you don’t recognize what that is, it’s a standardized “fill in the bubbles with a No. 2 pencil” test. Like the SAT, GRE, or what you may have to take to get some jobs. I created it mainly as a test shot for submitting it for the cover of TIP magazine following their recent call for photos. Also, it seemed like a neat idea.

Since pre-employment tests aren’t a popular subject for jigsaw puzzles, I made it myself. I started by going to a children’s resale shop and finding a puzzle that was about the right size. Finding the right size puzzle was actually the hardest part; most were too big. But once I had it Sam and I put it together:

Then I took a blank answer sheet like this one:

And then I married the two together by flipping the puzzle over, smearing some “Mod Podge Matte-Mat” on it, and laying the answer sheet down. I think regular craft glue would work just as well. I pressed it as flat as I could, rubbed out all the wrinkles and bubbles, then let it dry. When it was dry I took an exacto knife and, working from the bottom up, started to cut out the puzzle pieces:

This was tedious, but I quickly realized that I didn’t need to cut out ALL of the pieces, just the ones I wanted loose for the final shot. Speaking of which, I arranged the pieces and took the final pic in a DYI light box using two halogen shop lights and a tripod:

I’m still not 100% happy with it and may play around with it some more (maybe try adding a hand holding one of the puzzle pieces to the shot), but it was fun. I also may try doing it with some other kinds of documents (color pie charts, etc.) to create something more generic.

I like the curves and colors here. It’s a bar at the hotel I was staying at in New York. See the rest of my Flickr photo stream.

A shot of the Empire State Building from the observation deck at the top of Rockafeller Plaza in New York City. I was there recently for a convention and got quite a few pictures, some of which I’ll post in the near future.

You can’t see it in this resized image very well, but if you look at this high resolution version the sharpness and detail I got on this shot using the Canon 50mm f/1.4 lens are kind of amazing. It’s even more pronounced in the original RAW or .tiff file formats. As usual, see the rest of my Flickr photo stream.