I have not processed any HDR image recently, and I figured the skills will rust . To find a good candidate, I had to go back to Iowa Wine Trail trip in November. I remember taking the image with HDR processing in mind in Winneshiek Wildberry Winery. They had very wooden interior, it was just asking for a fancy photograph. I decided on the radical treatment of colors on the image, as there seemed to be ubiquitous red and magenta casts, which I found rather distracting and couldn’t effectively get rid of them otherwise. This preset made it look far more interesting, in my opinion.

I am treating my photography seriously for what? Two years now? And for about that long I am just pondering on the idea of shooting what I know the best- my work place. What makes my work place so interesting, is the fact that I work in the lab. Think chemistry. Which sometimes means stink, but most of the time- it means a lot of objects, a lot of glass. Usually in the afternoon, when sun gets to the side of the lab where the sole window is located, it would shine straight on my bench where all the solutions stand in their glass flasks. I have been looking and thinking to photograph it for some time, but this time I finally took out my iPhone and snapped few images. This is my favorite.

One of my personal resolutions for this year is try to improve my shooting technique in as many areas as I can. Obviously one can’t be master in everything, but I believe that practicing different kind of photography makes you better photographer in all of them. Just keeping the camera in hand, setting up the composition, shooting pictures and then post processing them makes you (as we pilots say) not only current but also proficient at what you do. And then you’ve simply have more time and resources to focus on things needing your attention when taking a shot.

So to fulfill this resolution I’m trying to come up with a list of things Iza and myself could shoot to become simply better photographers. One of the position on this list was ‘water droplets’. Photographing water droplets is a little tricky assignment because you don’t really have absolute control over what is going on on the set. Most of the time it’s just trial and error. But you just have to shoot until you get the one you really like. Here is ours:

Frying pan as a water tank, two Speedlights with color gels on them, fast shutter and over 500 shots taken to get this nice looking contour of snail .

Shooting water droplets also trains your reflex. At the end Iza was able to catch almost all of them.

This isn’t the first our try t catch some water droplets. It definitely isn’t the last one either. I already have some new on the list. Stay tuned…

It is not my main camera. It is not the camera I was taking pictures for the last 6 months or so. It is my second, back-up body. I still have it and I still use it. For many reasons. One of them being that it was my first camera, and did great job teaching me the basics for a year and a half. I am using it now when my main body is in the service, and I see how huge the difference is between entry-level and prosumer cameras. But it gets a job done.
We took the image using a tripod, a mirror, two speed lights, a flash light, and an evening.

After we did this a bit ‘artistic’ version of the bottle the time has come to play with more stock-like photo. This time setup was much simpler, and the photo came up much faster. The only thing worth mentioning is the efect of the bottle floating in the air I was able to achieve by… actually floating bottle in the air. Maybe not exactly, but in fact the bottle was about one inch above the white table so the shadow suggests it’s floating.

Last Sunday I challenged Iza with new task – let’s try to shoot nice picture of some difficult product. Not looking long in my cabinet I found a bottle of eau de cologne which, lets put it this way, is intriguing in its shape. At first it’s just flat glass bottle but then when you try to lit it properly it reveals small imperfections that cause several artifacts to appear and more or less… ruin the photo. So far the only one that is a keeper is the one in which we played with the light.

That’s not exactly what we tried to achieve, so we’re going to try some more.

For some time now I was playing with light. Contrary to Iza I very much like using flashes as much as I can. I like the flexibility they give you to balance lights around the set. Up until today we had only one SB-800 and there were multiple occasions when I felt like I need more power to achieve what I wanted to. Most of the time I was able to get satisfying results with silver reflector or even with pop up flash on our camera (equipped with Soft Screen). But there are situations when there is nothing that can replace that missing flash. in the past when we had bigger projects (like our holiday cards) I was just borrowing set of studio light from a friend of ours. But for day to day playing with images it’s just to cumbersome (and becomes old pretty fast). So I’ve decided that it’s high time to buy next flash. After weighing in several options ranging from cheap no name flashes from Eastern hemisphere, through several ‘general brands’ manual and TTL flashes to the very top of my wish list which is occupied by SB-900 I settled in on SB-600. There are several factors that helped me choose. The biggest probably was the fact that SB-600 is a part of Nikon’s CLS family and can be slaved to SB-800 (or to our D300 working in commander mode). That gives me many options to play with the light without having to move around – everything happens remotely.

Of course that new toy had to be tried as soon as possible. Iza came up with an assignment to photograph some glasses with sparkling wine. Here is how it came out:

We put the glasses on top of the small sheet of acrylic which gave us this nice reflection. One flash was standing behind the table casting high power light on the background while another one was directly above the glasses shooting through diffuser partially covered with black blocking layer to keep acrylic sheet from becoming totally white. Iza’s idea of dropping strawberry into one of the glasses added some nice final touch to the picture.

Happy New Year!

This post is quite special, because it’s not only New Year’s post but it is also a post number 400.

I wanted to do something special, and I decided to share my latest passion. It is to choose my prints for printing, printing them (I recently stated to use WHCC), framing (we did a post on it here), and hanging it on the walls around the house. It started last summer, with Tomasz printing his panorama of the Seabase in Oshkosh, which filled the empty wall in our bedroom. Then after we did a HDR series of planes at Green Castle airport (can you see a trend here?), and we wanted to share some prints with the club, we printed some for us as well. At this point the framing idea came, and now, as we have still a lot of walls to fill, it became a habit. It is fun, both to search for prints which we like, and then find the spot for them, and see how they change the mood of the room. Just look at few examples below, and scroll down to the poll.

How are you treating your photographs?
Vote in the poll, and see what other readers do.

Merry Christmas, everybody. One more, even more Christmas themed image for a post today. Hope everybody has a calm holiday break.
Hopefully, the weather here will finally decide onto one of rain/ice/snow and I will be able to get out of the house and take some holiday lighting displays before people take them out . I need to move to burn some of overeating yesterday.

This week Digital Photography School in their Weekend Photography Challenge wanted a photo of shoes. Or more. Somehow not thinking long one particular shoe came to my mind. My cycling shoe. Then the question was how to present it to extract some of it’s purpose – cycling action – in the photo. I’ve decided to use rear sync flash while pedaling on the bike. I thing it came out pretty decent: