An Eclectic Mind

So far, so good.

Yesterday, the two lenses I rented from BorrowLenses.com arrived. This morning, Mike, @AnnTorrence, and I headed out for an early morning photo shoot to get a feel for them.

It might seem odd, but I rented two almost identical lenses: the Nikon 10-24mm f/3.5-4.5G AF-S DX ED (shown here) and the Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6 EX DC HSM for Nikon. Lately, I’ve been enjoying the challenge of wide angle photography and want the ability to get up close and personal with my subject matter while still fitting much of it in the frame. I like the oddness introduced by a wide angle lens — the way a wide angle photo makes you look closer to see what’s not quite right. I’ve had a lot of fun over the past two years with my 10.5mm f/2.8G ED AF DX Fisheye Nikkor Lens, but that introduces too much distortion. The photos I take with that lens look downright weird. I want a lens without that much distortion that still has the ability to frame big landscape backdrops to my foreground subjects.

This could be just a stage I’m going through, but I feel a need to explore it fully to see where it takes me as a photographer.

I want to buy the Nikon 10-24mm lens. I wanted to buy it before I rented it. It has the kind of range I’m looking for to complement the 16-85mm f/3.5-5.6G AF-S DX ED VR Nikkor lens I keep on my camera most of the time. But it’s a costly lens and it wasn’t readily available from my first choice supplier. With an upcoming photo shoot, I figured renting it was a good alternative. And since my husband would also be shooting with his Nikon, it made sense to rent the Sigma so we could compare that lower-cost alternative.

The photo shoot is in Tucson, at the San Xavier Mission. About 15 members of the Arizona West Shutterbugs “Meetup” Group will be gathering there on Saturday to shoot the mission and then head into Tucson for a museum with an Ansel Adams exhibit. I’m looking forward to trying the lenses at the mission, although I am a bit concerned that my up-front-and-personal approach might put me in front of the other shooter’s lenses. I hope not. If the group shoot turns out to be a bust but the location has potential, I’ll likely return on a weekday when there will be fewer people around.

This morning, we headed out before dawn to nearby Rancho de los Caballeros, a local guest ranch. At night, their horses — all 93 of them — are kept in a big fenced in area at the south end of the property. At about 7:30 AM, the wranglers herd them all into a smaller enclosure closer to the ranch’s main buildings. They return the horses to their nighttime enclosure at around 5 PM. This movement is referred to as the “running of the horses” (even though they don’t actually run the entire mile or so). I thought it would be interesting for Ann and she did seem to enjoy it, although I don’t think any of us got any good photos. (I’ll try again another morning, perhaps from a different vantage point.)

The east side of Vulture Peak, shot at 10mm with the Nikon 10-24mm lens.

Afterwards, I took us all by Jeep down a few of the more rugged Jeep roads on the east side of Vulture Peak. The light was still good, at least for a while. We all made lots of photos from the two or three places I stopped and we got out. Then the light got too harsh and we headed back to my house.

Mike and I each tried each of the 10-24mm lenses. Mike thinks the Nikon may be better, although we really don’t have a good test yet. He’s in love with the lens and it’s very likely that we’ll buy one. But not yet. We still have 6 days with these rentals and we plan to shoot a lot of photos.

About the Photos Arizona, cameras, photography

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When photographers get together, it’s time for show and tell.

One of my Twitter friends, @anntorrence, author of U.S. Highway 89: The Scenic Route to Seven Western National Parks, rolled into town yesterday on a book signing tour. Highway 89 runs right through Wickenburg and that’s where we first met, in person, about two years ago. Ann stayed overnight; later today she’ll visit a few local shops and then continue her trip down to Phoenix and beyond.

Last night, after dinner, we started pulling out our camera equipment and playing with each other’s cameras and lenses. Ann told us some things about our Nikons that we didn’t know. We played with her flash in “commander mode.” We discovered that she and I each had the same old 50mm autofocus lens and it worked on all our cameras: my lowly D80, my husband’s newer D90, and Ann’s far superior D700. We also played around a bit with the two lenses I’m renting for a week from BorrowLenses.com, both of which arrived yesterday afternoon.

I snapped this photo with my Nikon Coolpix point-and-shoot to document the mess of equipment on my kitchen table. Fun stuff!

Days in My Life cameras, friends, photography

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And likely to stay that way.

I’m away right now, on a business trip in CA. Although I used to keep my computer on from about 6 AM to 8 PM every day, even when I wasn’t there — please, no green lectures; I am aware of the wastefulness — I’ve got my computer shut down this week. That means no Webcam.

I’ve had a Webcam on my Web site for as long as I can remember. It was easy when I hosted my sites from a server in my office — the computer had to be on and running flawlessly anyway. But the server has moved to a better place, so that’s no excuse to run the computer when I wasn’t around.

Then, for a while, I was using Back To My Mac, a Mac OS X feature that enabled me to access the contents of my hard disk from away from home. For some reason I still don’t understand, that simply stopped working. I have had the time or inclination to troubleshoot it. So that’s no excuse to run the computer when I wasn’t around.

For the past few weeks, my computer has been acting weird. While I don’t think it’s a virus, it could be something like that. Mac users are notoriously careless about these things since there are very few viruses out there for us to fear. I have virus protection software on my machine, but it was turned off. Typical.

The symptoms of my computer problems include freeze-ups, applications that unexpectedly quit, spurious restarting, and kernel panics (dark gray screen with multi-language instructions for restarting). Lately, I had a Time Machine backup disk tell me it was write protected — until I restarted the computer. Yesterday, many of my e-mail preferences reset themselves. WordPress can’t seem to remember if I’m logged in or out. And my permissions are screwed up and can’t seem to be fixed.

It’s either a hard disk problem — time to reformat the hard drive and start fresh — or a more sinister logic board problem. I’ll have to troubleshoot one and then the other when I get home.

Until then, there’s no reason to keep the computer running when it’s likely to lock up anyway. Plus, on the very remote chance that it’s been hacked into, it’s much better to keep it turned off anyway.

Annoying, inconvenient, but not earth shattering. I do have three other computers — well, five, if you count the ones in the garage waiting for Craig’s list — to get work done on.

But it does mean that the Webcam is off for the week. And if I find any evidence of hacking, it’ll stay off for good.

Call Me a Geek cameras, software, troubleshooting

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It works!

The other day, I got my first exposure (pun intended) to the world of tilt-shift photography. It was a link tweeted by one of my Twitter friends, @jebro, to a series of videos by Keith Loutit on Vimeo. These videos used time-lapse tilt-shift photography. The result were videos that looked as if they were created painstakingly with miniature models.

Take a minute right now and check out Keith’s video, “The North Wind Blew South.”

I’ve heard of time-lapse photography, of course. In fact, I used to play around with it using my Webcam software. You can see some examples here, here, and here.

But I’d never heard of tilt-shift photography. I did some research and found an excellent article on Wikipedia (of course) that included photos of camera equipment used to make the images. Per Wikipedia, the basic explanation is as follows:

Tilt-shift photography refers to the use of camera movements on small- and medium format cameras. In many cases, it refers to tilting the lens relative to the image plane and using a large aperture to achieve a very shallow depth of field.

The end result is that only a small portion of the image is in focus. This became popular in portrait photography. But it also has become popular as a technique to make fake miniatures — in other words, photos of full-size, real-life objects or people made to look as if they are miniature models. Wikipedia has a separate page about tilt-shift miniature faking that includes sample images.

You can also find plenty of sample images and videos on Smashing Magazine’s article, “50 Beautiful Examples Of Tilt-Shift Photography.”

Photography is one of my hobbies and I was extremely interested in this technique. I think the photos look kind of silly and cool. But I wasn’t interested in buying special lenses just to give it a try. Fortunately, I didn’t have to. The Smashing Magazine article included a link to a tutorial on the Tilt-Shift Photography Web site titled “Tilt-Shift Photography Photoshop Tutorial.” It explains how you can use Photoshop to create a fake tilt-shift photograph.

I tried it today with a number of photos that happen to be with me on my laptop. The one shown below is my fifth try. It’s a photo of Juneau, AK (I think; forgive me if I got the wrong port city), taken from an upper deck on a cruise ship. In the original photo, the entire image is in focus; for this fake miniature, I focused on a boat and two buildings in the foreground. The color is saturated and the contrast is increased as recommended to give it that painted model feel. I think this photo is a pretty good example of the tilt-shift photography effect. What do you think?

My first four tries simply didn’t look right. I think it was a combination of the image I chose and the lens blur mask I used. The photo here uses a radial gradient mask rather than the reflected gradient recommended by the tutorial. That makes it possible to pinpoint the in-focus area, which worked for this image. The example image in the tutorial had a horizontal strip of the photo in focus; that simply doesn’t work for all photos.

But I apparently did get the hang of it. Here’s my next try, with another Alaska port city:

And here’s a shot from last January’s visit to San Francisco. That’s the dome of City Hall with Sutro Tower in the background. I took the photo from my hotel room at the Nikko. I think it comes across pretty well as a fake miniature.

And here’s a shot my husband Mike took on a helicopter trip up the Colorado River last year. It’s the Hoover Dam with the new bridge under construction:

And one more…this is the power house downstream from Lake Chelan in Washington State. It’s another aerial photo — they certainly do make good subjects for this kind of exercise. The heavy equipment looks like Tonka trucks!

Anyway, now that I’ve tried this with a certain amount of success, I think I can get it out of my system. If anyone out there has experimented with this kind of photography — especially using a camera and lens rather than cheating with Photoshop — please use the Comments link or form for this post to link to examples of your work. And feel free to share any tips you might have for folks who are interested in giving this a try.

About the Photos, Call Me a Geek cameras, photography, Photoshop

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I’m going HD.

Captain Video is one of my “personal nicknames” — a name I apply to myself when I do something that’s silly or dumb or, in this case, an attempt to explore something new that’s currently beyond my skill set.

I’ve been interested in video for the past 10 or 15 years. I write for a living and I always thought it would be interesting to be involved with a video documentary project. Although one of my dreams has been to work on the research and composition of a documentary’s narrative, I really wanted to be part of the project throughout the video acquisition process, watching the cameramen and other professionals at work, seeing interviews conducted, listening to the director explain his goals for each shot.

I also toyed with the idea of doing my own video. We’ve owned various video cameras from the time the first shoulder mounted VHS machines hit the scenes. Cameras have been getting better, cheaper, and smaller. Over the past five or six years, I bought two different Canon video cameras. I used them a lot when I first bought them, then put them aside. Now their batteries never seem to be charged when I want to use them.

But earlier this year, I did make the big plunge into video production. I did it what I thought was the smart way: I hired a production team. Their job was to acquire the video that I could not shoot — mostly because I was flying a helicopter while the shots needed to be made. They would then take the video and put the best shots in the proper order using the proper transitions and adding the proper music and narration. The result: not one but three final broadcast-length/quality videos.

I won’t go into detail on how this is working out. It’s still to early in the process to say. In general, we have a lot of good footage — almost every bit of it in true high definition taken with professional video equipment. But there are gaps in the footage — scenes I need to tell my stories. And I simply can’t afford to get the video crew back up on location for a few days to get the shots I need.

Enter the Sony HDR CX12 video camera. It’s small, lightweight, easy to operate, and shoots true high definition footage on Sony memory sticks. My production crew has one of these cameras and a lot of the footage shot with it was very usable. While not exactly cheap, it was affordable. I ordered it on Amazon.com yesterday, along with a spare battery and an 8 GB memory stick.

In December or January, Mike and I will head up to Page, AZ to pick up the video clips we need. We have some other business up there to attend to anyway, so we’ll be able to kill two birds with one stone. We’ll watch the weather and pick a weekend with calm winds and clear skies. We’ll fly the helicopter up with doors off on a Saturday, picking up needed clips along the way. Then we’ll do some late afternoon flying over the lake, spend the night in a motel, and follow it up with some early morning shots. Mike and I will take turns shooting, using the camera on the side of the aircraft with the best view of what we need to shoot. Then we’ll fly home, where I’ll put all the footage on a hard disk or series of DVDs and send them to my production crew for inclusion in the final videos.

At least that’s the plan.

Realize that I’m very worried that once this project is over, this camera will sit in a drawer with the others. The power will drain from its battery and I’ll be frustrated every time I take it out to use it. It’s going to take real effort on my part to keep using it. Probably a few small projects. None of those projects require HD, but it will be nice to save the footage in that format for future use.

I do need to mention here that I’ve been sitting on the fence about buying this camera since I first heard of it. My fears of not utilizing it and the price tag were the main things holding me back. But the need for HD video to complete my projects was a big motivator. It’s a lot cheaper to buy the camera and get the footage myself than to transport a video crew from San Diego to Page, AZ and back. To be honest, I’m also worried that they won’t get the footage I need on this second try, either. (You know what they say about wanting to get things done right.)

The thing that convinced me was the September 3, 2008 review on Amazon.com by Allen C. Huffman. It’s the first review that appears — probably because everyone who voted on it said it was helpful. He gave the camera 4 out of 5 stars and then provided some extremely helpful details and advice about using the camera with a Mac. He listed pros and cons about the camera, comparing it to another Sony model he owned and liked. This “real life” review by someone who is obviously not easily impressed helped convince me that this was the right camera for me.

Anyway, I’ve taken the plunge. Let’s see how much use I get out of this new piece of equipment.

About the Photos, Call Me a Geek, Multimedia cameras, computers, helicopters, videos

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