General photography thread [img heavy]

[ludi]

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:

[Richie_G]

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%.

[jobodaho]

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:

[ludi]

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?

[jobodaho]

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?

Well, this is one of those times I really wish I could go back and shoot it again...or at least have more time to shoot it...

Here is how I got this shot (with what I would have changed it I could go back):

Canon 5D mkII
Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 L II
Tripod attached to tripod foot of lens
Remote shutter release
Live View to check focus and Meter off of the moon
Raw capture edited and converted to JPEG via Lightroom 3

Focal Length: 200mm (if I would have known this was happening before the day of, I would have rented a very long lens...800mm with a 2x converter would have been SWEET!)
Aperture: f/2.8 (should have used f/8 or f/11 for maximum sharpness/DOF, but at the time I didn't want to have too long of a shutter speed, which wasn't even a real issue...)
Shutter Speed: 0.8 seconds
ISO: 400 (could have easily gone to 800 and been fine, which might have allowed me to stop down and keep the SS where it needed to be...)

I can only hope the next time one of these roles around I'm more prepared!!!

[SPOOFE]

Man, all you guys and your lunar eclipses.... I was excited until we got the clouds and rains that've been pelting LA for the past week. Missed the whole durn thing.

Oh well. Thanks for the comments from jobo, Voldenuit, and ludi. To answer a question:

BTW how well does your Tokina behave for you wide open and full zoom?

I'll come back to this when I get a couple more shoots in (and I'll probably post about in in the Ultrawide thread you mentioned, just to have another voice on the matter available with others). During that first one I was more interested in the widest angle, and since I was also using my new flashes I was also generally stopped down. Probably in the few days after Christmas I'll put it through a more rigorous trial and come back with a report.

[SPOOFE]

More wide-angle magic, as promised! Took these a few days ago but the hubbub of the New Year (oh yeah, Happy New Year and such and such ) kept me from doing much with the images until now.











Still getting more and more familiar with this lens, and the ultra-wide AOV in general. I'm finding the Tokina 11-16mm to be very respectable wide open, but with only a slight improvement on stopping down. While I don't have any direct comparisons available, I'm finding that this is not "the sharpest" lens available, especially in the corners. However, it's plenty sharp at f/2.8 for anything I'd want to do with it, which makes the decision completely worth it to me (I expect to do a lot of shooting wide open). People that want to maximise the sharpness of their pictures might want to look elsewhere; same with those that want more zoom versatility, because the difference between 11 and 16 mm is so small that you might not even notice, looking through the viewfinder, if you're zoomed all the way in or out.

Don't have many comments about the "focus clutch" thing that Tokina loves so much; switching from MF to AF sure is easy, but I also don't MF all that much so it does me no real good. Hmm... what else can I say? Oh yeah: Bokeh is not the most pleasing. There's not much blurring, considering the focal length, but take a look at the hand-lookin' plant up there. Look at it large size if you wanna. The foliage behind has some slightly harsh halo-ing going on, instead of a smooth, creamy defocus. This might bother some people; I don't expect it to be much of an issue for most photos I'll take, but it's something to be aware of, that's for sure.

Anyway, love the lens, love the new perspective it opens up for me. And again, Happy New Year, ya lunatics... let's get some awesome shots in this 2011.

[jobodaho]

Cool shots SPOOFE, and your impressions of the 11-16mm are very similar to mine when I owned it. I pretty much just considered it an 11mm prime, as the difference between 11mm and 16mm is not that great. If I had to choose a wide angle for a crop camera now I would go for either the Sigma 8-16 or Canon/Nikon 10-22/24...but that's just me, and in reality pretty much every option is good in that class...

Here are a few from today's walk around the lake:

[Corrado]

Not nearly as cool as the above, but I was trying out some new lighting today along with trying to force the ISO on the cam so as to minimize noise in lower light/dark subject shots.

[Voldenuit]

Don't have many comments about the "focus clutch" thing that Tokina loves so much; switching from MF to AF sure is easy, but I also don't MF all that much so it does me no real good. Hmm... what else can I say? Oh yeah: Bokeh is not the most pleasing. There's not much blurring, considering the focal length, but take a look at the hand-lookin' plant up there. Look at it large size if you wanna. The foliage behind has some slightly harsh halo-ing going on, instead of a smooth, creamy defocus. This might bother some people; I don't expect it to be much of an issue for most photos I'll take, but it's something to be aware of, that's for sure.

Yeowch, that's some harsh background bokeh. Foreground bokeh is not bad, though the transition seems rather sudden. In general, though, wide angle zooms don't have the best bokeh in my experience - fortunately, this is, as you say, rarely an issue for the type of photography they are used for.

Also, I noticed the fringing around the blown highlights in the cave shot, but that's also not unusual in digital cameras.

Otherwise, great work as usual!

@jobo: nice ice pics. You captured the transition from ice to water very well - I can almost see the ice melting as I look at the pics. And I liked the bird-shaped blob of ice - it made me think of a fat, lazy duck that was too slow to fly south and got frozen .

[ludi]

The "what I did over my Christmas vacation" post is waiting for further post processing, but meanwhile, and overnight business trip to Gunnison took me over Monarch pass twice and through Buena Vista once. The bulk of both trips was dusk/night, and my coworker, also a photography buff, needed no convincing to pull over and try some time exposures.

Top of Monarch Pass, around 9:30pm, Venus still visible above the treeline. The yellow highlights are from a flashing CDOT sign that warns of steep grade:


A long-haul trucker was parked on the pass for a while, so rather than wait him out, I decided to take advantage of the odd lighting effects afforded by his headlights and the hazard sign:


The sky was clear, but the snow was extremely dry and loose, and a light wind was circling the mountain and creating a gentle snowfall. Still a time exposure, but with my 550ex fired manually from the right:


Same location, at sunset the next evening:


I enhanced this one slightly but the color-banding really was that intense:


Finally, the moon setting over the peak of Mt. Princeton in the Collegiates, with the town of Buena Vista below. The streak is an airplane:

[Mr Bill]

Colorado River Walk June 30, 2010 6:55 pm almost dark
This is an HDR taken with a Nikon D80 at 1/400, f5.6, ISO 100, 32mm, EV @ -2.0, 0.0, and 2.0. It was 6:55pm and the sun was almost set.

[jobodaho]

So I picked up some new gear yesterday and was able to get out today and shoot for a bit in the very cold (and cloudy) weather. I decided to pick up an additional body to compliment my Canon 5D mk II for the weddings I have booked this year, a Canon 60D, along with the new Canon 70-300 f/4-5.6 L and 100mm f/2.8 L Macro. I still haven't made an official judgement on any of them, but so far so good...here are a few shots:

[ludi]

So far, how do you feel about the 60D's reduced rear controls and flip-out LCD? I was handed one at a camera shop when shopping the UWAZ lens market, and while it physically felt more solid than a Rebel, the navigation seemed a bit cludgier.

[jobodaho]

So far, how do you feel about the 60D's reduced rear controls and flip-out LCD? I was handed one at a camera shop when shopping the UWAZ lens market, and while it physically felt more solid than a Rebel, the navigation seemed a bit cludgier.

I will have to get back to you on how I like it. Ultimately it seemed like the best fit for what I was looking for in a second body; smaller than the 5D for when I travel light while still being comfortable in the hand (I do not like Rebels, too small), decent auto-focus, good image quality (pretty much all Canon 1.6 crop cameras are the same), and price...which was already hurting my wallet...

[ludi]

Five words: IT'S ABOUT TIME, LA NINA:



Tokina 12-24mm f/4, set f/7.1, ISO 200, 1/500 second, circular polarizer. (It really was that bright.)

[Voldenuit]

Five words: IT'S ABOUT TIME, LA NINA:

Very nice. I think it would be even more dramatic if you crop off the bottom 1/8th of the picture, but great capture!

[ludi]

Very nice. I think it would be even more dramatic if you crop off the bottom 1/8th of the picture, but great capture!

Thanks! I knocked down about thirty frames at that location using both the Tokina (above) and the Tamron 17-50 f/2.8, and kept eight or so. I felt like that one had the best overall balance.

[SPOOFE]

I'm surprised I haven't posted my latest yet; took a four-day camping trip out to East Jesus, near the Salton Sea and just up the road from Salvation Mountain. The basic purpose of the trip was so a buddy could put together various shots and videos for his band, but whatever, I was out and about shooting whatever the heck I wanted.

To start, I'll just deal with the first cool thing we saw on our first full day out there: A pair of V-22 Osprey's doing what was probably deployment excercises on some bit of land half a mile away or so:



They flew right overhead. What a way to kick off a vacation!







And, of course, there were awesome sunsets:



And then it got dark, and that's when we decided to start playing with fire:



... And, ummm... thermite:



Just a fraction of the total set; all told, I wound up with something like 120 shots post-processed out of... 500? or so. Lot of brain-numbing work after a while... am I a masochist for wanting to go back and take even more?

[ludi]

I likes the ring-o'-fire shot and the sunset. Appears that the EXIF data got stripped in post processing, but are those wide-angle shots coming from the Tokina?

[SPOOFE]

Oh yeah, that fire ring is on the Tokina. Same with the band shot on the rusty car and the guy in the giant concrete ring. Weird about the EXIF data; this was one of the few occasions I was actually shooting RAW, and I don't know where in my chaotic workflow I lost it. Oh well.

[Voldenuit]

Oh yeah, that fire ring is on the Tokina. Same with the band shot on the rusty car and the guy in the giant concrete ring. Weird about the EXIF data; this was one of the few occasions I was actually shooting RAW, and I don't know where in my chaotic workflow I lost it. Oh well.

You haven't lost the EXIF, it's just that flickr doesn't show it in linked images. If you navigate to the flickr page and click on Actions --> View Exif info, it's still all there.

[ludi]

HOO yeah...I've been wanting these shots for months, but I don't drive past these guys too often. Getting a full a moon and a departing snow storm when I happened to be in the area was a sweet, sweet bonus:





Both with the Tokina 12-24 f/4.

[jobodaho]

Taken a few nights ago with my 60D and 70-300 L, this is a 100% crop. I'm going to continue to try and improve my abilities to shoot the moon, but it is a bit more difficult than I assumed it would be...the moon was moving reasonably fast, so I had to make sure I had a pretty high shutter speed to make sure there was no motion blur.

EDIT: I know that the phases of the moon are on most calendars, but I was curious to know if you can find out when the moon will be close to the earth so it is visually bigger?

EDIT 2: Google is your friend...found this: http://www.fourmilab.ch/earthview/pacalc.html



300mm
f/8
1/320 sec
ISO 200

[jobodaho]

Been pretty quiet around here lately...

[Captain Ned]

Nice.

[SPOOFE]

Yeah, holy crap, Jo, that's an awesome shot.

[jobodaho]

Thanks guys!

Actually, expect many images of this particular barn over the next month or so...I have some things planned for it...

[ludi]

Finally got through PP'ing my holiday shots. Don't usually get to work with people too much, mostly due to lack of subjects and opportunities. But I was in Oregon with friends over the holidays and shot the place up.

Self Portrait:


I wish I lived closer to the northwest. Would love to get these two out for a model shoot around the old architecture and the river walk in the West Portland area:


Unposed. Right time, right place (and a fellow 40D photgrapher):


Could have been sharper but the lighting was terrible. Still like the subject and the angle, though:


They say to never work with animals or small children, but this worked great:


Heavily PP'd to increase the film noir aspects:


More black and white. Again, not posed, just lucky:


A fifteen minute break between fast-moving storm systems briefly revealed sun and sky:


Random fun with the Tokina 12-24 UWAZ:


The perfect New Year's Day:

[ludi]

Winter is BACK, baby: