TR Forums

That's awesome, Spoofe. Particularly like the girl-under-the-lamppost shot -- very good blend of DoF, angles, and color. Hope you're building your film school portfolio with some of those

Thanks, man. Definitely getting a few prints out of that day, but I also feel like we didn't really extract all the potential out of that location. Heck, we only saw about a quarter of the whole installation. Jeez, I feel like I stumbled on a friggin' treasure; it must be some kind of illness.

Thanks for all of the complements guys, it really means a lot!

Spoofe, sweet pictures, and I really enjoy the fact that we can all tell immediately which images are yours because of your awesomely unique style...which is so important to have, and something I am still striving for...

Here are a couple more engagement shots that I got around to editing today. To set the seen, this couple is originally from my neck of the woods, but have recently moved away. They were in town for the holiday and had a time frame of only a couple of hours that we could get this done...which meant that of course it was completely freezing, misty/raining, and really foggy. There wasn't much light, so a lot of the images I thought were good looking at the camera's LCD were in fact a bit blurry...with that said, I feel I got some pretty good shots, but it just could have been better...

Nice shots, jobodaho, SPOOFE!

I got to play with a Voigtländer Nokton 50/1.1 on my GF1 the other day. Very nice lens, solidly built, and a bargain at $1,100 compared to the Leica Noctilux at $10,500 . It's very sharp wide open and has nice (but a bit in-your-face) bokeh. However, the DOF was shallow enough to cut yourself on (I had some difficulty getting both eyes in focus with my GF1 since I had no PDAF assist or split-screen focusing) and (as I've noticed on the Noktons) has a tendency to polygonize highlights early - I was starting to see hard edges at f/1.4, so I mostly stuck to f/1.1.

Had a few lovely booth babes to help me test the lens out on . Still on the fence about buying one, but it would be near the top of my list if I didn't already have a Takumar 50/1.4 that is still perfectly serviceable.











Also got to play with a CV 35/1.4 and a 75/1.8, but I'd still favor the 50/1.1. The 35 gives a relaxed, natural perspective to portraits, but the bokeh is fussier than the 50/1.1, and the 75 was too long and compressed for my style.

Here's one of my cousin, age 2:
Click for larger image

I mentioned in an earlier post that I had the opportunity to photograph a hospital that my firm designed in London Kentucky, which was a load of fun and I'm very happy with the results. Architecture photography is tough...much tougher than I would have thought. Most (if not all) of these images were taken with the 17mm ts-e lens.

I'll start with my favorite:

That's some amazing work, Jobo. The hospital looks like something out of Star Trek.

Evening time exposures with clouds are so much fun. Makes the subject look like a monolith in a sea of time.

SPOOFE wrote:

That's some amazing work, Jobo. The hospital looks like something out of Star Trek.

Thanks a lot SPOOFE!!!

Very nice, Jobo, I especially like how subtle changes in lighting, perspective and composition made #s 1, 8 and 9 completely distinct. Looks like you're making good use of that tilt-shift lens.

Had a bit of play with some xmas decorations and the SMC Takumar 50/1.4 tonight:

Fun with the Tokina 12-24mm f/4:







Third image is the Jefferson County Hall of Justice and auxiliary government offices, or as the locals prefer to call it, "The Taj".

Wasn't expecting to see a preregrine falcon in the wild today, or for that matter, ever. Fair enough, he wasn't expecting to see me, either:







All three were cropped out of 200mm images. First image was shot with the Tokina 80-200mm f/2.8 installed on my Tamron-F 1.4x teleconverter, which the Tokina apparently Does Not Like. Second and third images were shot at f/11 without the telconverter, which helped hugely. That's a standard 8-foot crossarm in the second photo, which provides some relative scale.

Those are really cool. I like how well you can see the coloration and feather texture in the shot of the bird takin' flight. Go Colorado.

Had a little visitor in the garden today:







Shot with the Leica DG Macro-Elmarit 45/2.8, no cropping.

Nervous little fellow, and I had to wait for him to settle down every time he got spooked. Could have sat there and shot him all day, but eventually the hot sun beating down on my head wore me down .

Also took some videos, but I don't have a vimeo account, so have nowhere to upload them. What was really cool was that the pulsing blood in his abdomen got lit by the bright sun, and it looked like he was a red glow bug.

This is also why fast live view focusing is something the DSLR makers need to work on. Working distance was a bit tight with the 45/2.8, and I had to hold the camera at arms' length so I wouldn't spook him.

EDIT: He came back today, so I decided to do an f/11 test shot:


There is some evidence of diffraction softening starting in, but it's very subtle. I had to do two 100% crop side by side views comparing an f/8 and f/11 shot in Lightroom to find it - chiefly around the small hairs of the body. But it's still sharp at 100% and eminently usable at web sizes.

What kind of fly is that?

ludi wrote:

What kind of fly is that?

Hehe, just a regular dragonfly.

In retrospect, I should have stopped down further in some of the closeups to get more DOF. I thought f/8 would have been enough, but when reviewing the images on the PC, realised that maybe I should have gone for f/11 or f/16 instead (despite getting more diffraction softening at the smaller apertures). It's easy to get distracted when you're shooting in the field, and it's hard to check how you're doing at the moment sometimes.

Also, I decided to tone down some of the curves later - there was a bit too much black crush, and the WB is not always consistent, but haven't bothered to reupload the JPEGs.

Voldenuit wrote:

Hehe, just a regular dragonfly.

There's uh, more than one Don't think I've ever seen that particular variety in these parts, whatever it is.

ludi wrote:

Voldenuit wrote:

Hehe, just a regular dragonfly.

There's uh, more than one Don't think I've ever seen that particular variety in these parts, whatever it is.

Oh, you meant what variety of dragonfly? Sorry, no idea, although they are relatively common near my area. There is also a separate variety that is yellow instead of red. There were some yellows flying outside the house, but none of them came into the yard today. We've had some rain recently, so they're probably mating to lay their eggs in streams and such.

An astounding sundog picture from Stockholm:

http://www.spaceweather.com/submissions ... 904000.jpg

Oh man, thats incredible... probably slightly enhanced in color and contrast, but incredible nontheless.
Thought I recognized the bridge, and yes it was the one I thought it was.

Local Eniro street view

Slightly more pleasent and much faster google street view, including some girl

Google Maps 3D view with more real perspective

Aphasia wrote:

Slightly more pleasent and much faster google street view, including some girl

So...Swedes buy lots of Swedish cars, even if one of them is actually a Subaru

Took the chance to tryout the new Canon 100 IS Macro I got together with the 5D not so long ago... haphazard stuff when I was cleaning the freezer. That said, ice crystals melt fast once they are out of the freezer. Sorry for the extra wideness of it all.

Let's hear it for early Christmas money, eh? After a couple years of lusting (and more recently, pushed by the thread about wide-angle lenses), I finally picked up the Tokina 11-16 f/2.8 I've been itching for. Then I had to wait for a free day until I could grab a subject and fool around a bit with the new toy.

Started at my attorney's recently redecorated domicile:



... And then headed for a nearby train tunnel because, heck, why not?







A quick little jaunt. I also picked up a pair of Lumopro LP160s, powerful little flash units with more triggering options than a bipolar 16 year old cheerleader that just broke up with her quarterback boyfriend. Anyone looking for a lot of illumination for not a lot of bucks can do a whole lot worse.

SPOOFE and a wide angle lens will I'm sure produce some awesome photos! I had the 11-16 while I shot with a Canon 40D, and it is definitely a great lens optically, so I'm excited to see more results!

Very nice work, SPOOFE! I especially like the flash exposure/lighting on #3.

I like 'em, Spoofe!

BTW how well does your Tokina behave for you wide open and full zoom? My 12-24 f/4 is fairly well-balanced at the beginning of the zoom range but it makes for a better pillow than a lens at 24mm f/4, and it's not just the corners, either. Based on those results it's not too hard to see why they cut the zoom range back so far when designing the f/2.8. If your lens is constituted like the one in the review that JAE linked back in this thread, I would still expect some noticeable corner sharpness problems when zoomed and open.

The irony is, I've been toying for months with the idea of picking up either a 500mm f/6.3 or 800mm f/8 mirror lens to play with, they're certainly cheap enough. Oh well, you go to the eclipse with the army you have:

Been preoccupied with a lot of other things lately, just been perusing through the pics I’ve missed. Fantastic stuff, it just gets better and better!

We’ve been having something of a prolonged cold snap over here, even the Öresund is freezing up. I want to get some pics around the bridge but it’s a bit of a trek without a car, and I’ve been tied up with work. Instead, I’ve been keeping things more local.










Triple glazing plus condensation plus bloody cold weather equals some rather 'cool' fractals... Taken with the 90mm Tamron Macro.



This is the same image cropped to 100%.

I just made it out of bed in time to grab this shot...and with only a 200mm lens on my 5D I couldn't get very close. This is a 100% crop:

Oh man, you can even make out part of the Tycho crater in that shot. Can't see myself ever going to full-frame but I think I do need a 7D for the extra low-light features.

Most of the EXIF data is gone, though -- what settings did you use to get that?