Several thoughts after Saturday’s, superb photo walk. One, I cannot handle wide open just yet. Using Lensbaby with f/5.6 and zoom f/3.5-5.6 set no lower then f/5.6 increased a number of keepers. Significantly. Second, I don’t know how to take pictures with 35 mm lens. Using my 18-200 mm, I came back with enough different pictures, views, landscapes and details. It either better suits my style, or I need to work more with prime lens. I use it from time to time, mostly when I need to shorten the shutter speed, but as far as composition is concerned- it is still a challenge for me. Either way, this was my first really good photographic day this summer, and I needed this bust of confidence. And, having all those different photos, I decided to try a photo essay. Let’s take a look at life in a military fort at the beginning of 19th century.

The first time I saw a collection of tilt-shift photos in AirVenture 2009 program book, I was convinced it was a collection of Lensbaby images. After reading this blog post, and then visiting Tiltshiftmaker web page and their Flickr gallery, I am not so sure anymore. Don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to convince anybody one way or the other. I am just curious to see side by side, how similar it really is.
So, let’s make an experiment. The first photo is taken with Lensbaby composer, f/5.6, no tilting, just straight lens.

The next image was made with different camera, different focal length, but cropped similarly and run through tilt-shift software on the web page. There are few sliders, you can control strength and gradient of effect, but… the area is rather limited to horizontal line. Fun, but a bit disappointing… and limited compared with a real thing.

For the record- I had polarizer on both lenses, and images were done just few minutes apart…. The exif data was stripped when I run the photo through the tilt-shit maker, but the image was taken with Nikon D40x, ISO 200, 31 mm focal length, f/4.2 at 1/640 sec.
Bottom line? No bottom line, really. Draw your own conclusions.
But, I do have my Lensbaby and take it with me every time I go out shooting. Sometimes it is fun, sometimes- a frustration.

Just a quickie today. Something fresh from the card. It is getting late, but since I am downloading photos from today’s trip to Southeastern Iowa, organizing and sitting in front of computer anyway, I might as well pick up something and post. I took it while exploring garden in reconstructed old fort in Fort Madison, Iowa.

It seems like I hardly went back to my few photos from California. Which means I forgot about this image. I took while having a drink in an outside bar, waiting for the rest of the party to show up for a dinner. A colleague of mine rose his head and commented on the tree and the “roof”. So I picked up the camera, and snapped this shot, BTW- this is single exposure, no Photoshop, no tricks. If you wonder how I achieved the effect- read from beginning .

For a Lensbaby Wednesday, a photograph I took several weeks ago on a picnic with my colleges from work. The farewell party for one of them was on as sunny Saturday evening in the nice spot on the lake. We had a large shelter for ourselves, but there was a lot of smaller tables around. I liked especially this red picnic table.

It actually ended up being a fun image. Maybe not very “technical”, maybe not sticking to too many rules, but I find it very visually interesting. I did not try to reduce “ghosts”, especially those of people close to me, on the stairs. Which blurred their faces, and gave a look of busyness of the place.

This is a switch in an old-fashioned telephone operator, were by choosing two-digit number, the appropriate position on the board is taken and the connection made. The idea was to shoot the parts moving between different positions. It was one of the photos I took in the small communications museum at Iowa State Fair. Click on the image to see a small gallery of old telephone related images.

I had a crazy week at work, thus a long blog break. There was just no time and energy for both. The summer-long project is done, so I have no more excuses. I am sorting through the photographs I took yesterday at Iowa State Fair. By far the best fair in US, or so I heard. 6 hours walking, and about 300 photographs. Hard to choose something cool for a blog, though.
One of my State Fair assignments for myself as to shoot wide-open at the vegetable display. I wanted to have a colorful, but blurry background for my subject. What did not work for me was the distance from which I could focus, which I didn’t notice until I looked at the images on the computer. But I think this one is my favorite.

I am looking through the few shots I took in Davis, California last week. Not enough for a gallery, but I will probably put few on a blog. This is one of my favorites, the way it turned out. It was done towards the evening, but it was still enough light to fool the meter when shooting up in the sky. The effect is a nice silhouetted bird on the silhouette of the tree. Apparently, turkey vultures have a favorite spot in one of the city parks, close to the river, as I was passing them all those times I was out with my hosts and their dogs. I actually turned the shot Greyscale, but there was hardly any color before that!

I took this photo while spending couple of hours with my brother at the local airport. Mind you, ‘the airport’ in this case is a little bit of overstatement, but it has some hangars and a runway .

What is interesting in this photo is the light on top of the tail fin. It’s strobe. Very bright and very fast strobe. It blinks about 5 times per second with 2-3 seconds between series of blinks. This one was the very first time I was was able to caught it on picture, ever.

Plus if you look closer you’ll see that my brother (who was at the controls) was actually flying at this moment about six inches above the ground.