Devauld.ca

Today I took some time fulfilling the daily requirement for the 50mm challenge. I was downtown during lunch, and made my way to the Telus building where they have potted flowers along the +15 walkway. I found this guy at about the half way point of the walkway, and found the backlighting caught my attention. After a while on my knees I produces a pile of out-takes and a couple nice shots. This one I like because the backlight focuses attention around the flower. Not that it needs it, being of the hit me red variety. A lot of the lines draw you into the base of the flower, which exhibits a nice soft focus. I then find my attention drawn back up the stem towards the odd red flower. The leaf jutting towards the viewer in the bottom left shows off the depth of field. If you can't see it, make sure to check out the full sized version.

My selection for the 50mm challenge today, isn't quite of the caliber to which I thought I could hold myself. Today was a challenge, with the day being dominated by high intensity work, and then the evening channeled into the Calgary Flames. I contemplated taking the D3 to the game, but I've encountered static before. If I couldn't get my D70 in there, I don't think the security at the door will be convinced that my D3 should be allowed in, regardless of the lens I have on it.

Scrambling for ideas, I ran about the house shooting all the candles and fruit I could find, and then I settled in on the old standby: The cat. I was concentrating on having a narrow focus plane, and spending time talking about how much a shallow depth of field can be used to make better photographs. Since I consider this shot to be an average capture style shot, I'll just direct your attention to the focus on Cara's tail and hind quarter. Whereas the head is sharp to a hair, the blur around the tail makes it difficult to separate cat and blanket. A cat isn't that long, so the focus plane is quite narrow, another big advantage, and disadvantage, of fast glass

Two down, five to go.

Even on the second day, the lumbering camera felt heavy, and I asked myself why I was doing such a thing. I found this location incredibly close to work, and again the morning sun and the cool shadows created the great complimentary yellow and blue contrast. So, between sessions of kneeling on the ground, I was employing the old foot zoom to frame a couple shots.

Shooting with the prime keeps you at a fixed focal length. It's hard to explain to people why the massive digital camera I carry doesn't have a zoom, and I'll be the first to admit it definitely isn't convenient. The prime has it's advantages, moreover; speed and sharpness are the staunch allies of those with less glass in their lens. The crazy wide aperture of my 50mm, being at 1.4, lets in considerably more light than any zoom lens. Compared to my 28-105mm at F5.6, I'm getting 16 times more light. Speed helped this shot in the low light, reducing camera shake. This photo was taken at f2.2, to stretch the focus far enough to get both signs.

Where this photo draws more out of the almost-wide-open prime, this photo exhibits a nice natural vignette. The other photo I took in the morning, another outtake, exhibits an extreme natural vignette. It works for the signs because it focuses our attention towards the bottom sign. I find that my eye gets drawn to the very bright area at the bottom, and if given the chance I'd frame it a little different. Although, at the time I was obsesed with ensuring I didn't get that distant crossbar through the middle of the bottom sign that I forgot about the rising sun. In the end, I had a crossbar going through the top, so why bother? The vignette, in this case, doesn't just stand out and hit you in the face, as the retreating night already gives the sky a nice gradient. You can still see that the corners of the image are darker than the middle of the top edge.

My discoveries on the weekend have led me to wanting to get a lot more use out of my camera. I've started a self imposed challenge, the 50mm challenge. Simply: I need to take a photo a day with my 50mm lens. No other rules around lighting, subject matter, post processing or subject. The only stipulation is that I'm using my 50mm prime. Seven images in seven days is my goal.

I started today off wondering what I would use as a subject for today's challenge requirement. AS I approached the office, I was caught up on how the light reflects off the wires in the early morning light. I love this time of year, as anything the sun touches becomes a wonderful golden colour, whereas anything left in shadow is a cold hard blue. This pole caught a good deal of sunlight, which was directly behind the pole. I was trying to contrast the warm wires against the dark and cold wooden pole. My individual shots were either washed out, or too dark, so I pushed together a tone mapped HDR from the RAW file. Now the image has more detail in the shadow, while keeping the warmth visible on the wires. I finished the image off, with some quick cloning to remove the dust spots that were painfully visible in the sky.

One of my gifts for Christmas was a night in the Blackstone Lodge in Canmore. I guess I've been showing signs of wear, so a night 'away from it all' was in order to restore some of my sanity. The weather co-operated and the sun dominated the cloudless sky, beating down on the snow and ice. At this time of year, we spend more on washer fluid than gasoline.

I coupled together my camera, with my wickedly intelligent vibration reducing zoom lens. Together, they were magic. Since I went to the full frame digital, I've been reluctant to put a DX lens on it. The problem is that the glass I was using were all pretty weak in the zoom category. The 17-35, albeit wonderfully wide on the FX sensor, is just barely over a 2x zoom. The 70-200 doesn't even make a 3x zoom factor. As a result, I end up packing around pounds of glass and protective paraphernalia. Moving in this direction has led to less and less day-to-day photography, just to avoid carrying around what I believed to be the required equipment.

This weekend, I decided to be different. I brought the 18-200, which sports over 11x zoom, and left behind an inconvenient black bag and pounds of worry. I never ran into a case where the lens wasn't wide enough, and the low light capabilities for the D3 allowed for some shots that I normally couldn't take. A coffee shop photo and a capture of some beers were both taken in environments quite inhospitable to most photographers. The conveniences of the single lens outweighed the downsides of slower glass and smaller pictures. It was a lesson I was not expecting, and one I'm glad that I did eventually learn.

The geek in me also played with Geotagging on this trip. Now that Mike showed me how to get my gps to store more than 10,000 points in the tracklog, I've been dying to try tagging my photos. Some internet research led me to the conclusion that Geosetter is the best free tool you can use for this sort of tracklog to photo synchronization. It was easy to geotag the photos, the problem was in visualizing them. I tried Flickr's map, but it doesn't appear to have a way for you to visualize one of your sets of photos. I couldn't even successfully navigate the interface to show only my photos. I then tried Google's Picasa Web. The difficulty there, is when I managed to find the map interface, it appears that the uploader forgot my geotags. GeoSetter has a feature to export to Google Earth, and I created a kmz file and loaded it in Google Earth. It would appear that all my photos made it over, and you can view each one, although only the first few appear on the map itself. The remainder have to be clicked on in the side menu to be discovered. My final attempt was to use an online service, and Locr grabbed by photos, and after some album gymnastics I was able to make a map of the trip with the photos embedded. I was surprised to find it so difficult to map the photos once they were tagged, and now I have scratched that Geotagging itch.