Nature Light Photo

Giving Back – Annie

I had the opportunity to shoot our school’s fall musical, Annie.

Shooting in a dark theater is a challenge, but I have learned to trust my D300 and pushing the ISO up to 1600. If I go much over that, I begin to get some noisy images. Open up my 70-200 to f2.8 and wait for the spot to hit the subject and I can get some pretty good images.

Annie

Orphan Girls

The other thing I did was produce a picture of the entire cast. Not an easy job, given the situation. Low light, limited room, and a wide subject on stage. The solution? A panorama. Yes, a panorama. I took a series of shots of the cast and stitched them into a panorama. Photoshop has a great panorama stitching capability.

Cast and Crew

If you want to see more of the images from Annie you can see them in my gallery.

Please feel free to leave a comment and tell me what you think.

Pre-Sunrise South Tufa Panorama at Mono Lake

Honestly, I have not discovered a better place to be at sunrise than the south tufas at Mono Lake, CA. The light is magical. The formations are inspiring. And the location is remote, yet accessible. I am sure that there are places that are better, but I haven’t discovered them yet.

Because of the situation, it is easy to get a good shot, but difficult to get one that brings you the whole scene. This shot does that. It isn’t a true panorama in the sense that it was taken with a wide angle lens and cropped, but it is still in the panorama format and it shows the birds, both in flight and on the ground.

I took this before the sun was over the horizon, but the birds were still active. I was trying to give a sense of the movement of the birds and used a long shutter speed to blur their movement. Those wispy blurs above the tufas are the birds in flight. By using a long shutter speed and my tripod, the moving birds are blurred, but the rest of the scene is still sharp.  In Lightroom, I tried to bring out the details of the tufas, but leave the dark atmosphere of the time of day present by using fill light to lighten up the tufas just a bit.

The shot was taken with my Nikon D300 and a 18-70 3.5-4.5 lens at 31mm. The camera was set at and ISO of 200 and a relatively slow shutter speed of 1/5 of a second to blur the birds, but the aperture was small (f11) in order to increase the depth of field as much as possible.

Tufa Panorama

You can see more images from Mono Lake by visiting my Mono Lake gallery.

Please feel free to leave a comment and tell me what you think.

Panoramas

After spending the weekend at the Morro Bay Photo Expo and listening to George Lepp, I have decided to really embrace some of his ideas. One of his ideas was to produce panoramas.

A panorama is a series of pictures put together that produces an end product that is longer (or taller) than can be produced with a regular camera.

Below are a three examples of how a panorama can be used to show a scene.

The first was taken at Zabriski Point in Death Valley. I got there about 45 minutes before sunrise and there were already a bunch of photographers there waiting. I thought the scene would make an interesting image, so I set up my tripod and did a quick  series of images that brought both the expansive view and the crowd into perspective. Simply shooting and cropping the image would never have been able to produce the quality of image that is here. (The irony is that it produced such a large file size that I can’t upload it to Smugmug.  Oops!)

Zabriski Point Panorama

The second was taken at the Painted Hills Unit of The John Day Fossil Bed National Monument. There are many images that show the hills, but none that I have seen that show the entire vista like this one.

Painted Hills Panorama

The last was taken late last week on the way to school. On a clear day, you can see the San Gabriel Mountains. On this day, the sunrise was had a nice affect on the mountains so I pulled over on a small rise on the way to work and, again, shot a series of shots. Ok, the light post in the middle kind of takes away from the image, but you get the idea about how a panorama can be done on the spur of the moment.

Van Buren Panorama

Please feel free to leave a comment and tell me what you think.

Death Valley Redux – Pt. 4 – Panorama Pictures

As I said in my first part of this series, I went to Death Valley for some great images and to try some new techniques. I tried HDR and the use of a wide angle lens, but that’s another post. I also tried lots of panorama images.

The idea of a panorama is fairly straight forward. Capture more in an image than the camera lens can see. In other words, make any lens wide angle.

The execution is also fairly simple. Start taking your panorama by setting up your camera to capture one side of the image, usually the left, and take pictures until you get to the other side, usually the right. The only thing you really need to worry about is making sure that you overlap the images by about 1/3 of the frame. Ok, there is more to it than that, but for the basics, that covers it.

What you end up with is a series of images that don’t look like much. In Lightroom, export the selected images into Photoshop by clicking in the Photo>Edit In>Merge to Panorama in Photoshop. Photoshop will run a series of actions that will blend the images into one panoramic image. Save it back into Lightroom and you are done.

Below are two image of one of the joshua tree forests in Death valley that I merged into one small panorama.

You can see how the image on the left side doesn’t quite cover the same area as the image on the right side, but when you put them together, you get the entire field of view.

Above is just two images put together into a panorama so that you can see how it works. You can actually stitch together MANY images to make a huge panorama. The process works the same, but you select more images to stitch together.

If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to leave them below.

They Closed Death Valley

Ok, not really, but it sure seemed that way.

I took a quick trip to visit and explore Death Valley over the long President’s Day weekend. The idea was to explore the national park, get some shots of the landscape, and kind of get a lay of the land so I could go back and visit with a more definite plan what to shoot next time I visit. I also wanted to take my new FJ Cruiser out and test what it out on some of the backcountry roads.

We had a major storm go through California on the Tuesday and Wednesday the week before and I was excited by the possibilities of some great clouds in the sky over the areas that I had researched before going.

I was wrong. I got to DeVa and it was mostly closed. The rangers had list of roads open had 15-20 different backcountry roads and other points of interest on it; only five of them were open.

Apparently, the rains the week before had dumped over an inch of rain in one night. Death Valley is not the environment to handle an inch of rain in a 12 hour period. It is a desert, the water doesn’t soak into the ground very quickly; it just runs off downhill. The park flooded. Every road that I drove on had signs of the rain.

Mostly debris and dirt that had washed from the sides onto the road, but some of the roads showed major damage. Apparently, those that were located in some of the canyons got undercut and/or covered in several feet of mud. The surprising thing was that the dirt roads, if they weren’t closed, were just fine for the most part. The disappointing part was that there almost wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

After revamping the itinerary, the trip turned out better than I expected. After I had eliminated some of the spots that I wanted to visit and rescheduled some others, I had a great time, got some great shots, and tested the FJ in some pretty good conditions. The FJ could REALLY use a bath right now and it will get one sometime in the very near future.

I will be posting some of those shots here in the VERY near future. I know it’s been over five weeks since I posted here, but it got kind of busy recently and I have since made a resolution to post at least three times a week.

I did get the opportunity to use what is becoming one of my favorite iPhone apps, AutoStitch. You use your iPhone to take pictures for a panorama and the application does a GREAT job of stitching them together into a very usable image.

I took two of Scotty’s Castle in the northeast corner of the park and one of my campsite near the Racetrack Playa.

The clock tower and generator room.

The courtyard in Scotty’s Castle.

The view from my campsite near the Racetrack Playa.

I also got to use the video camera on the iPhone a few times. The only one that is worth seeing is this one. After viewing it, you might be able to understand why the FJ needs a carwash. To see the video, click here.

You can see the results of the drive through Death Valley mud.