Weekly Challenge: Artistic, Red

This week's challenge from Dogwood Photography is "Artistic: Red--Shoot whatever inspires you. Red should be the focus of the image. Don't be afraid to be creative."

I used this artistic license to colorize an image in Photoshop. There's almost nothing you can't do in Photoshop, and there are thousands of tutorials out there. I used one from Phlearn about selecting and replacing colors. It was a chance to review the eyedropper tool and get more familiar with the hue/saturation adjustment layer.

The original image was of frost on a window. To me it suggested something a bit cosmological.

Red Cosmos

My wife had excitedly showed me a cut red pepper with a graceful structure within. I couldn't resist it either, so I'm including it in this weekly challenge. Maybe I'll get extra credit.

Red Pepper

Weekly Challenge: Traditional Landscape

This week, the challenge from Dogwood Photography is "Landscape: Traditional--Shoot a beautiful landscape and share it with the world. Find a nice foreground and don't forget the sky."

The problem with shooting landscapes on a schedule is weather, of course. It wasn't until yesterday that my free time coincided with some pretty weather. I know, I know: you can shoot in all weather, or at least all the weather you can tolerate. But when both foreground and sky are part of the assignment, you need a certain amount of visibility.

Some incidental lessons from this assignment: Check your battery charge or (better) carry a charged spare. I always do, and sure enough one of them began to conk out while I was shooting. Wear boots. It's always muddy where you want to set up. I took my new infrared remote for the Nikon and used it for some tripod shots before the sun came up, together with the remote mirror-up mode on the D750 (press once, the mirror goes up; press again and the shutter trips. Nice.) At $20 the ML-L3 may be the cheapest Nikon gear I ever buy. Speaking of cheap, my wife kindly lent me a shower cap for a camera cover in case of rain. They're cheap or free and work pretty well.

A more important lesson, I think, is that I'm rushing when I'm out shooting. I had no time constraints, yet I hurried through some scenes. It's a bad habit. When I get back and start processing images it's a sure bet I'll wish I could do some over again: stuff in the frame that shouldn't be there, bad angles, poor composition, wrong exposure. I need to slow down.

Here's my landscape. It's on the Maryland shore of the Potomac River, where
Seneca Creek enters. The bridge once carried the C&O Canal over the creek. Does the bridge count as foreground? Hope so.

Seneca Creek at Potomac River

Weekly Challenge: Self Portrait

It turns out that retirement does not cure procrastination, so I've decided to inject a little discipline into my photography this year. The 52 Week Photography Challenge, courtesy of Dogwood Photography, is an approach that seems useful as well as fun. There are three categories: Portrait, Landscape, and Artistic Impression. Each week presents a variation on one of the categories. Week One is "Portrait: Self Portrait - Start things off right with a 'selfie'! Explore the self-timer setting on your camera."

I've dabbled in this before (see this posting) but I certainly don't feel proficient. Today I set up next to the window for some indirect light and started shooting. I learned a lot.

First lesson: it's very hard to focus when you don't have a subject. Using a 105mm focal length makes for very shallow depth of field. At six feet and f/8, it's 4 inches (per the easy-to-use, free depth-of-field calculator at the Apple App store called TrueDoF-Intro). And I couldn't figure out how to use autofocus without a finger on the shutter release. So it was shoot, look at the image, adjust the focus, shoot again...pretty tedious.

Try to Stay Focused

It occurred to me that a cable release would help. Alas, my old cable release with the mini-phono plug doesn't fit my Nikon, which naturally has it's OWN connector. So I ordered a fairly cheap wireless remote that works on infrared. Did me no good in this session, though.

Next lesson: It's easy to forget basic details like background. And unruly hair, and blemishes, and so on. You can fix some of them in post, but it's better to get it right the first time.

Watch Background to Avoid Funny Hats

I liked the side lighting from the window, but without flash the shutter speeds are very slow even at ISO 1600. I needed to add a lot of noise reduction in post. If I were a serious portraitist I would have flashes. Waiting for the self-timer to trigger also leads to blinking.

Tired of Waiting for Self Timer

Speaking of exposure, I thought (looking at the camera display) that the lit side of my face was much too hot, so I adjusted the exposure down about 2.7 EV. But in post-processing it was clear that I overcompensated. Lesson: don't trust the camera monitor for exposure decisions. Some folks use histograms and little blinking tools to alert them to over/under exposure.  I guess I should join them. 

In the end I had two candidate images. They differ in aperture, f/10 versus f/8. I prefer the f/8 because it blurs the background a bit more and the light is a little better. Okay, one week down and 51 to go.

F/8, softer background

F/10, slightly sharper background

A walk in the woods

I returned to Great Falls recently for a morning walk in the woods. It's one of my favorite locations. A frost still clung to the trees as I walked up the Gold Mine trail. This time of year the sun is low, the shadows long, and the trees mostly bare. In spite of the temperature and the season the woods were inviting.

The image has no people, no evergreens, no snow. But I like it anyway and made it into our seasonal card for this year. I wish all of you a warm wonderful holiday and a peaceful, healthy and prosperous new year.

Gold Mine Trail

Turn around

One of the best pieces of photographic advice I've heard is "Turn around." In my mind that means: when you're working hard on a particular subject or scene, remember to look at the rest of the world too.

Once I was shooting the Potomac River upstream of Great Falls, MD. I was on a rock at the river's edge, trying to compose some foreground vegetation, the river, and trees on the opposite bank. None of it worked very well. Eventually I gave up and turned to go back to the car. Just a few feet away was a gnarled tree with exposed, tangled roots...a wonderful subject that had been right behind me as I was looking the other way.

Tree and Roots

This summer we traveled to Quebec City, Canada. One brilliant afternoon we took a short ferry ride across the Saint Lawrence River to Levis. I wandered about the ship shooting the city and the river. The sun was low and Quebec City was strongly back-lit; difficult conditions. But as I turned from looking at one shore to the other, I noticed the ferry itself.

Quebec-Levis Ferry

In the "About Me" bio on this blog, I said that photography allows and requires me to look carefully at the natural world. But photography, like the world, is limitless. There are more potential images than can ever be captured. If in our concentration on one subject we forget to occasionally look in the other direction, we will miss things. Turn around.

(By the way, I made a print of the ferry shot on Hahnemuhle Photo Silk Baryta. I've been trying out some papers and I like this one a lot.)

October at the beach

We've often traveled to Lewes, DE for fun, food and relaxation. Recently we spent a weekend with family in nearby Rehobeth, DE. I'd never seen the southern portion of Cape Henlopen, which includes marshes and the beautiful Gordons Pond wildlife area. A bicycle ride opened my eyes and I set out with camera the next morning.

But first, I stopped at one of my favorite locations in Lewes, the Lewes and Rehoboth Canal. The combination of water, plant life, and sky in this spot draws me back again and again.

Lewes and Rehoboth Canal, October 2015

The vegetation at Gordons Pond had some autumn colors. It was a sunny Sunday morning perfect for shooting (though it might have been better earlier...I was at the canal at that point.) We are fortunate to have public areas dedicated to preserving environments like this. Thanks, Delaware.

Gordons Pond

New images from an old lens

In an earlier post I wrote that I'd enjoyed working with the old Nikkor 50mm lens from my Nikkormat FT3. Alas it has gathered too much grunge over the decades to be a useful working lens, but I loved the long focusing throw and the largish aperture (f/2) and speculated I could buy a clean used version pas très cher.

My favorite place for buying and selling used gear is KEH. Sure enough they had a pretty decent selection of old 50mm Nikon lenses. I ended up with the lens pictured below. According to Ken Rockwell's terrific site on Nikon lens technology, it's an AI (for automatic indexing) lens circa 1977. It's very clean and was a bargain at $89 plus shipping. It mounts with no fuss, focuses smoothly, and is just fun to use. Kudos to Nikon for keeping the F mount compatible for all these years.

Nikkor 50mm f/1.8, circa 1977

This morning as I labored in the back yard, Susan called my attention to the light in the dogwood branch over my head (I am very lucky to have a spouse with an eye for beauty). Not wanting to waste good light I dropped my shovel and grabbed the D750 and 50mm. Here's one of the shots:

Dogwood Berries

Not bad for old glass. During our trip to the Finger Lakes and Canada, I took the 50mm out one day in Ottawa instead of lugging the whole camera bag around. I took this picture of the National Gallery of Canada with it.

Ceiling, National Gallery of Canada

Obviously I'm happy with my new, old-but-capable lens.