Take a picture once a day, whether you need to or not

[Engels]

Why are people paranoid about showing their license plates? I mean, it's on show when you're driving around every single day. You park it outside your house every night, at which point both your address and license plate (and often your name too if someone wants to make some minimal effort) are readily available to anyone walking past.

Am I missing something obvious?

There are crazy people like Katiri who will try to impersonate your car on the internet. Just the other day on TeamSpeak Katiri was making 'vroom vroom!' noises.

[murdoc]

Tried taking pictures at a fireworks festival tonight and... well.. i didn't succeed very well. After downloading them and taking a look, a majority of them are blurry, which I couldn't tell with the viewfinder.

I got a couple that turned out ok that I'll edit and share, but I don't know how to fix my focus issue since I *thought* I had it set right.

I've learned some big lessons about shooting fireworks over the last few years from similar problems.  Focus has to be set to infinity, don't try handholding, and use a release or at a minimum your timer.  You don't think you're shaking the camera when you press the button, but boy howdy are you.  I'm going to try locking my mirror up this year to see how much that helps, too.  Lastly, narrow your aperture and push sooner than you think so you get the whole spread of the flare.

I had focus set to infinity, but my remote stopped working so I was pushing the shutter on the camera, which probably led to most of the blurry. I was running at 1/4 shutter speed, f8 and ISO 400, which seemed decent for settings. I think you're right, I was shaking the camera way too much.

[Merusk]

Yeah probably it.  Were you doing single release or series?  1/4 seems too short to get the full effect of fireworks.  I think I'm usually at 1/2 to 1 sec and F13-15.



That one I took using a railing to steady me since I didn't carry the tripod in to Epcot and was taking a series of 3-burst shots.



That one I had the tripod but didn't use a shutter release, about 6 months earlier.  You can tell the difference it makes even using an object to steady things. (It also didn't help that it was raining but there's only one drop on the lens. )

[Mosesandstick]

Don't worry about taking long exposures. Here's one at 30s from a set I've shared previously:


DSC_0220_071209 by Aled Moses, on Flickr

[murdoc]

Yeah, there was a few mistakes I made. It was a week long festival, with fireworks from a different country every second night. I was supposed to go at least 3 times, but unfortunately only made the last night and my pictures did not turn out well. Would have liked one more try at it.

[slog]

No sarcasm, I know in my heart that your car loved every second of that.  That looks like so much fun.

It loves it ever since I put Aluminum skid plates underneath it.

[Merusk]

Yeah, there was a few mistakes I made. It was a week long festival, with fireworks from a different country every second night. I was supposed to go at least 3 times, but unfortunately only made the last night and my pictures did not turn out well. Would have liked one more try at it.

Just remember practice makes perfect! If you've got an amusement park in the area, see if you can head out there in the evenings since most do shows in the summer.  I've got the advantage of 2 sports teams, an amusement park, and 3 different big shows a year. (4th of July, WEBN's birthday fireworks aka Riverfest on Labor Day and the opening weekend of the minor league team.)

[slog]

I guess I'll keep posting the best picture I take of my car projects.  I present: Destroyed Subaru rod bearings from my WRX.

[Selby]

I present: Destroyed Subaru rod bearings from my WRX.

Cause of failure?  Junk in oil or poor clearances or bad previous owner?

[slog]

I present: Destroyed Subaru rod bearings from my WRX.

Cause of failure?  Junk in oil or poor clearances or bad previous owner?

WRX with the 2.0 are known to spin rod bearings at high mileage.  Most people blame owners who drive them hard and don't check their oil.

I'm having a machine shop open the heads up so they match an STI block, upping the displacement to 2.5 liters and creating more torque at low RPM. 

[apocrypha]

Sunflower:

[RhyssaFireheart]

That is awesome and a fantastic crop!  Mind if I used it as my phone wallpaper?

[apocrypha]

Feel free :)

[Count Nerfedalot]

just beautiful.  The petals seem to glow from behind while even the deepest shaded areas in front are fully detailed.  How did you do that?

[Merusk]

I'm going with a flash setup of some kind.  And it's awesome.

[RhyssaFireheart]

I just have to say, this looks fabulous on my phone. Showed it to a co-worker and she said this would do well in the NatGeo amateur photo contest.

[apocrypha]

Thanks folks :)

It's just a single flash in a tiny softbox (about 25cm), but it's very carefully positioned, coming at a steep angle with the light that's going through the petals being feathered (i.e. from just the edge of the light) so as to not blow the exposure on them. The outer few rows of the disc florets (with the stamens) are actually in the shadow of the petals while the inner section is getting direct light from the flash, hence the nice specular highlights.

Simple answer: I moved the flash around lots until I liked how it looked. 

[MisterNoisy]

Another bug.  I'm really surprised that he let me get my phone that close:

[Khaldun]

fini

Was given the Tokina macro lens I had my eye on by a family member.

Lotta fun to shoot with. Have to think very differently about what makes for a good shot. It's almost like the logic of landscape shooting taken small rather than a classic isolation shot of a single subject.

Will try to do some portraiture with it too--it seems really well suited to that.

[apocrypha]

Nice. Welcome to no-depth-of-field territory. 

They are potentially good for portraits but I find 100mm an uncomfortable focal length to shoot people with - you're just too far away, especially with a DX. Makes it hard to connect with your subject.

[Khaldun]

With my 50mm I feel like I'm a bit too in someone's face, though.

[apocrypha]

Interesting, I'm going the other way, I've been shooting with a small Fuji with a 35mm equivalent and loving the way that feels. It's all personal preference isn't it :)

[K9]

I've been shooting a lot with my 50mm on a DX and find that I'm not as close as I'd like to be. That said, I'm mulling over the 105mm F/2 DC lens for portrait work, which would be 135mm equivalent on a DX; maybe that's a bit to much...

The picture is lovely, if a teensy bit dark.

[Khaldun]

I'm realizing in general that I process and shoot darker than many other folks. I'm beginning to feel that's pretty conscious or self-aware.

[apocrypha]

Messing about with some light painting.

[K9]

That's really nice; it's a change from a lot of the 'look, I spun a bunch of glowsticks on the end of a bit of string in the middle of a park at night' type lightpainting pictures you see. How did you get such fine points of light?

[Merusk]

I'm going with LED.

[apocrypha]

I took apart one of those cheap fibre-optic lights you get and stuck the bunch of fibres on the end of an LED torch with gaffer tape. Hang on, I'll take a pic of it:



Had a brief go with a friend too, more to come hopefully, it's tricky to get right:

[Khaldun]

Love that one, although it would almost be better without the light painting over the face? Not sure.

[apocrypha]

Yeah we were just experimenting really. It's surprisingly difficult just in terms of how you move, where you stand, the subject keeping still, etc. Definitely want another go, spending more time on it.

Similarly, just had a huge storm here, managed to snap one pic of lightning. Definitely want a better go at this sometime too!

[Teleku]

How do you take lighting pics?  My method is to just set as long of an exposure as possible (20 to 30 seconds) and just take pics over and over again as a storm goes on, hoping a lighting bolt goes off while its filming.  I can only do this in the middle of night, however, and in a pretty low light area, as trying any sort of long exposure will just give me a big white picture.  Looks like you took that picture while it was still somewhat light out, so just curious how you managed it.  Looks very nice though, what sort of camera were you using?

[Khaldun]

Great pic. Lightning shots are high on my list of someday ambitions.

Am toying with trying to do some partial eclipse shots tomorrow morning if I can get myself out of bed early enough to get to a high ground place in time for sunrise here on the east coast of North America.

[Merusk]

How do you take lighting pics?  My method is to just set as long of an exposure as possible (20 to 30 seconds) and just take pics over and over again as a storm goes on, hoping a lighting bolt goes off while its filming.  I can only do this in the middle of night, however, and in a pretty low light area, as trying any sort of long exposure will just give me a big white picture.  Looks like you took that picture while it was still somewhat light out, so just curious how you managed it.  Looks very nice though, what sort of camera were you using?

You just described everything I've read on it with one exception; set a high F-stop to avoid the white-out you describe.  Lighting's pretty damn bright and what I've read said it should expose even if you're at f18. I've never had the opportunity to test it since our storms have too much rain not enough lighting.

[Khaldun]

I suppose if it was a daytime storm, you could also put some ND filters on to get a higher f-stop for a long exposure, same thing as if you were doing long-exposure work on flowing water.

[apocrypha]

Yeah I'd never done it before so I kinda made it up as I went along.

It was dusk, approaching darkness, and I knew I'd need a long exposure to catch the lightning so I played around with aperture and shutter speed until I ended up at 3 secs, f22. The storm was moving over very fast so I didn't think I had time to set up a tripod and I forgot to check ISO which it turns out was at 160. I wasn't happy hand-holding at more than 3 secs and even then I wedged the camera up against the window.

That was literally the last bolt of lightning of the storm that was visible to us. I missed about 10 either in between shots or when I was adjusting focus etc. There were many that would have been way more awesome but I messed every other shot up. I've got about 50 pics of a blank sky though  

Edit: camera was a D700.