PF Photography: Tips, Tricks, & Photo Sharing

AI Thread Summary
The discussion revolves around photography tips and sharing personal experiences with capturing images. Participants offer advice on hosting photos, suggesting platforms like ImageShack and emphasizing the importance of image size to maintain thread readability. Several users share their photos, including pets and wildlife, discussing composition, focus, and post-processing techniques. There is a focus on improving image quality through tools like GIMP for editing, with discussions about color balance and white balance settings to enhance photos. Users also exchange feedback on each other's work, highlighting the importance of constructive criticism for growth in photography skills. Additionally, there are mentions of joining photography groups for more in-depth critiques and learning opportunities. The conversation touches on the challenges of capturing wildlife and the technical aspects of photography, such as aperture settings and lens choices, while fostering a supportive community for beginners and experienced photographers alike.
  • #1,351
Borek said:
On Saturday I went biking - and saw these people:

EMT_training1.jpg


EMT_training2.jpg


Nothing extraordinary, but berkeman was on the EMT shift during SWAT competition, or he was training as a part of this competition, or he was doing both at the same time - so it was hard to not think about him :smile:
Very cool photos. I can just visualize berkeman there. He'd probably have a hand-held radio in his hand.
 
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  • #1,352
Check it out- a microscope that looks sideways:

http://imageshack.us/a/img845/5889/jqzo.jpg

Last week I happened to see this odd item offered on ebay:

http://imageshack.us/a/img46/153/73ci.jpg

It's not clear what this is- the left is an undersized (for Zeiss) ring dovetail and the triangle on the right is a prism housing. The slider adjusts an internal diaphragm, so the numbers most likely correspond to an f-stop.
 
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  • #1,353
Andy Resnick said:
The slider adjusts an internal diaphragm, so the numbers most likely correspond to an f-stop.

22 32 45 64 are even part of a standard series, so it would be my idea as well.
 
  • #1,354
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y9amyrag.jpg

Pics of school
 

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  • #1,355
4 ZapperZ: thanks for the hints and tips!

http://imageshack.us/a/img34/5444/5irq.jpg
 
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  • #1,356
Fireworkageddon:

fireworkageddon.jpg
 
  • #1,358
Nice photos Kris! I enjoyed the whole album. :D

And you're right, such improvement.. Which gives me hope that I'll master it one day. :biggrin:
 
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  • #1,360
Gad said:
Nice photos Kris! I enjoyed the whole album. :D

And you're right, such improvement.. Which gives me hope that I'll master it one day. :biggrin:
Thank you! It happens so slowly that you don't really notice it until you have a sudden urge to look back. Making small improvements every day goes a long way over the time of a few years.

lisab said:
That's fantastic :cool:.
Thanks! :smile:
 
  • #1,361
I tried my hand at something called the Brenizer Method today, for the first time. Its when you use panoramic stitching and a long focal length lens to create a wide angle shot with a shallow depth of field. It took me 3 hours, several hundred shots, and more frustration than necessary to get this shot, and even then, I can see lots of imperfections with it. Very cool end result when it does work though and that is enough to keep me motivated to experiment more with these. I shot this with a 50mm prime f/1.8 lens, which I think is probably the shortest focal length you can use to make a Brenizer easily, I would really prefer to be shooting at 150mm+ but I don't have that kind of glass. Still cool though.


E09xVTp.jpg
 
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  • #1,362
Such a rich picture, Kris. I like it.
 
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  • #1,363
KrisOhn said:
I tried my hand at something called the Brenizer Method today, for the first time. <snip>

Interesting... thanks for the info!
 
  • #1,364
Andy Resnick said:
Interesting... thanks for the info!
I know you have some long lenses, I would love to see what you can do with this technique!

Here's another shot using the Brenizer Method, this one came together a lot better than the last one, but I think the background is a little too busy and distracting.

fOt6Zi9.jpg



Here is a higher resolution version.
 
  • #1,365
Played around with an old, old flash and the bathroom sink today. I noticed in shots where the water was less stationary than this one that even though I was using strobist techniques, in a dark room with a flash, to get extremely fast apparent shutter speeds, there was still motion blur. I think this must be from how old my flash is and maybe how low the batteries were on charge. I would really like to get a newer flash that could be synced with my camera, but they can easily run $500 or more, so I'll stick with this for now.

1lwkE6o.jpg
 
  • #1,366
What camera do you use? And what flash? While my old flash is probably not capable of very short flashes, it has something called HS mode, which can be used with very short shutter times (shorter than the typical sync time). If memory serves me well when using HS mode I am limited only by the camera shutter. Can yield better results.
 
  • #1,367
I use a Canon 60D, the lens I used for that was a Sigma 17-50 f/2.8 at 50mm f/20. The flash is a Vivitar Auto Thyristor 2800, its old enough that I can't use it as an on camera flash on my 60D, it came with a Minolta X-700 I use for film photography. The technique I used to shoot this uses long shutter times, I used a 2 second shutter time to shoot that. You set up your equipment in a very dark room, and then using a long shutter time, you flash your subject during the exposure, creating an apparently very fast shutter speed. I'm not entirely sure how to calculate the apparent shutter speed, I don't know much about flashes, especially this one I'm using, but I estimate the flash would make it at least 1/10000 sec. This has a significant advantage of doing this by using the actual shutter, since you get fast shutter speeds, with enough light. If I were to attempt this without using strobist techniques, I could only achieve 1/8000 sec shutter speed, and I would need to get the subject lit appropriately or else suffer massive sensor noise.
 
  • #1,368
KrisOhn said:
I know you have some long lenses, I would love to see what you can do with this technique!

I'd be interested to try this method- is there an essential difference between this and 'normal' panoramic stitching? I can see the creative options by controlling the plane of focus, especially to simulate an 'anti-Scheimpflug' effect.

For example, I'd like to compare a stitched image produced with my 85mm to a single image (of the same field of view) taken using my 15mm lens. After the weather gets warmer, of course..
 
  • #1,369
Andy Resnick said:
I'd be interested to try this method- is there an essential difference between this and 'normal' panoramic stitching?
There isn't, the only difference is that most panoramas have very wide focal planes, where as with these shots, you want a very shallow plane.

For example, I'd like to compare a stitched image produced with my 85mm to a single image (of the same field of view) taken using my 15mm lens. After the weather gets warmer, of course..

I would be interested to see this comparison as well, I believe that if you keep the aperture constant, the 15mm lens wouldn't be able to reproduce the same image. But if you could change that, say have an 85mm lens at f/2.8, then a 15mm lens at f/0.5, then you might be able to get a focal plane small enough to reproduce it.
 
  • #1,370
KrisOhn said:
I estimate the flash would make it at least 1/10000 sec

It probably depends on the distance from the object, doesn't it? Or is it working in the "full flash, no metering" mode?
 
  • #1,371
Borek said:
It probably depends on the distance from the object, doesn't it?

I'm thinking about this and I don't think it should. The apparent shutter speed will be determined by the time the flash burst starts and ends, which should remain constant independent of distance. The only thing distance would determine is the start time at which the object becomes illuminated. A more powerful flash should be able to put out more light in a smaller fraction of time, therefore reducing the exposure time.
 
  • #1,372
Flashes vary amount of emitted light by changing the pulse length. At last some early models worked by switching off after they were hit by the reflected light, so their pulse length was somehow proportional to the object distance. That means it was shorter for close objects.

Doesn't mean your flash works this way, but checking won't hurt.
 
  • #1,373
Borek said:
Flashes vary amount of emitted light by changing the pulse length.
Is this standard for all flashes? I'm just curious if they do this rather than varying intensity as well.
At last some early models worked by switching off after they were hit by the reflected light, so their pulse length was somehow proportional to the object distance. That means it was shorter for close objects.

That's interesting, and good to know, I might get a chance tomorrow to do some more water pictures, I'll try to test this by varying the distance.
 
  • #1,374
KrisOhn said:
Is this standard for all flashes? I'm just curious if they do this rather than varying intensity as well.

As far as I know most flashes just vary the time.

But then, what I know is definitely limited.
 
  • #1,375
The Vivitar flash I was using does indeed use a light sensor that detects the reflected light. I haven't tested this yet, but I've found its manual. While the manual doesn't explicitly say that it uses this kind of technology, from reading it, you get a sense that this is what it uses. It also states that the maximum flash time is 1/2000 sec, the minimum being 1/30000 sec.
 
  • #1,376
KrisOhn said:
the minimum being 1/30000 sec.

Sounds good, doesn't it?
 
  • #1,377
Borek said:
Sounds good, doesn't it?

Very. I wish I could consistently get it that fast.
 
  • #1,378
I played around with the panoramic method, the results are pretty interesting.

background- I used two lenses at maximum aperture, a 15/2.8 for the 'truth' image ans an 85/1.4 for the panorama. Here's the 'truth' image:
http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/800x600q90/842/ztwa.jpg

I chose this particular composition because it has a clear foreground, midground, and background so I could maximize the effect of focal plane positioning. For comparison, the 15mm has a 9 ft hyperfocal distance while the 85mm has H = 560 ft.

So, even though the center of the image is only 5 feet from the camera, most of the 15mm image is in focus. When I put the 85mm lens on the camera, the focal plane thickness at 5 ft object distance is only 1cm or so (sorry for the mixed units...)

Here's the cool thing- the focal plane on the stitched image will not be a plane, since I have to pivot the camera around to capture the larger field of view. I used Hugin to stitch the 150 images together, using a variety of cartographic projections. Some 'look' better than others, but they all have a nicely curved plane of best focus.

'Rectilinear' projection:
http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/800x600q90/203/xzbt.jpg

"Trans Mercator' projection:
http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/800x600q90/855/bbmh.png

"Equirectangluar Panini':
http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/800x600q90/191/mq2r.png

'Fisheye':
http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/800x600q90/835/pkte.png

'Orthographic':
http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/800x600q90/689/69ty.png

Lastly, 'Biplane':
http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/800x600q90/20/bm40.png
 
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  • #1,379
Nice! I've noticed that this effect gives a similar effect to what a tilt-shift lens does, but there is something different, I can't quite place my finger on it though. I recommend that you download Microsoft ICE (Image Composite Editor) and combine them into a panorama that way, it's the best image stitcher that I've used and it has very good control over the final geometry.
 
  • #1,380
Alas, ICE is not cross-platform...
 
  • #1,381
I never noticed this thread previously! I have only just recently gotten into photography. I use just a Sony Nex 6, so nothing too fancy, but for a first camera it is quite nice :) Here is one of my latest shots from Pisa:

http://i42.tinypic.com/1znool5.jpg
 
  • #1,382
I didn't take this pic, but it's really interesting and I'd like to talk about what's going on here:

http://boingboing.net/filesroot/299792458mps.jpg

So the kid is blinking. The shutter is going left-right or right-left (depending on if the kid is opening or closing his eyes), "scanning" the field. The reflection part of the photo is taken a slit-second after (or before) the kid part of the photo. Is this correct?

Is there a way to know if the kid is opening or closing his eyes? (Besides knowing how the camera works.)

Do high-end cameras have this "feature", or do they compensate for it somehow?

Has anyone else seen or taken a photo showing this effect?

Edit: my husband just came home, he knows quite a lot about photography (majored in it in college). He immediately called BS. He thinks the photographer took a quick series of shots and photoshopped two of them together.

Thoughts?
 
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  • #1,384
lisab said:
I didn't take this pic, but it's really interesting and I'd like to talk about what's going on here:

http://boingboing.net/filesroot/299792458mps.jpg

<snip>

Interesting... my vote is a (horizontal) rolling shutter- that is, the exposure was scanned horizontally across the frame. Although, as is evident on boingboing, people have a lot of spare time...
 
  • #1,385
Some pictures from my recent hike.

http://imageshack.com/a/img43/8843/stfq.jpg

http://imageshack.com/a/img593/8709/bqs4.jpg

http://imageshack.com/a/img839/9327/78yh.jpg
 
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  • #1,386
I like the first one most :smile:
 
  • #1,387
I'll try to get pics from higher altitudes next time. :smile:

And yes I like it too, somehow observing your surroundings from that angle helps in minimizing life's challenges. :)
 
  • #1,388
Wow, it's beautiful Gad! They make me feel relax and at peace. Was it difficult to breath?
 
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  • #1,389
http://imageshack.com/a/img18/7084/rg52.jpg

http://imageshack.com/a/img27/3585/c0bi.jpg
 
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  • #1,390
Gad said:
http://imageshack.com/a/img18/7084/rg52.jpg

:bugeye:
 
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  • #1,391
bieszczady01.jpg
 
  • #1,392
Beautiful Borek. Thanks for sharing. :)
 
  • #1,393
Gad said:
Some pictures from my recent hike. <snip>

Borek said:
<snip>

Y'alls live where it's pretty. jealous = me.
 
  • #1,394
400 km from here, so hardly "where I live" :smile:
 
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  • #1,395
Fireworks in the sky tonight:

DSC04839_zpsae131a10.jpg


DSC04848_zps11d83bae.jpg


And a detail (200%, no interpolation) showing the individual 'bolts' that occur as the spark propagates back and forth:

DSC04868_zps94eeb92c.jpg


Details: 85/7.1, ISO 100, 'bulb' shutter setting.
 
  • #1,396
Wow! That is beautiful Andy, good capture. Thanks for sharing. :)
 
  • #1,397
Nice ones.

Somehow the last few years we had no photogenic thunderstorm close by (or I was away, or it was during a day, or it was raining too heavily, or whatever).
 
  • #1,399
Dang. I didn't realize how many "flavors" of Rainbows there are.
 
  • #1,400
I posted this in the wrong forum a min ago:

IMG_1112.jpg
 
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