Putting this darkroom together has caused me to be a little too busy to actually take photographs. I’ve been lately confined to the subject matter of the acreage or the drive home but tonight there was something quite fascinating to take pictures of. Actually, I always find the clouds right after a rain storm to be fascinating.
This Zeiss 35mm F2 Distagon is probably my favorite lens I’ve ever owned. I have a feeling that my next lens for 35mm SLR/DSLR will be another Zeiss. It records colour and contrast excellently and the micro-contrast lends itself very well to landscapes. The grass in this photograph was exquisitely defined through the Zeiss glass. Handling the lens is just amazing too, after using it for about 2 months. Manual focus is an after thought for Canon lenses, even in the L series. Shooting for infinite, like in this photograph, is stupidly simple. Just throw it to infinity and you’ll know you’re in focus.
Throughout the entire day storm clouds have been threatening us. With the help of a friend I finished shingling the soon-to-be wet photo studio. I’ve had ideas galore swimming through my head as to what I’m going to attempt when it’s ready. Here’s a shot of the rain clouds that have been slowly surrounding us. We keep hearing thunder and every 30 minutes we’re battered with heavy rain but it hasn’t developed into a real storm system yet. Beware, this is an 800kb jpeg.
I’ve been shooting with a Zeiss manual focus lens for almost a month now and I can safely say my manual focusing ability is getting better. I’ve previously had frustrations with auto-focus on wide angle lenses because I usually want to focus on a single point and doing that is tough. I either have to pick the point with the camera’s controls, or focus the center point and re-frame. Picking a focus point wastes valuable time and re-framing often leads to out of focus shots.
It takes me about a second, sometimes two, to get a shot in focus with the Zeiss. When I try to manually focus my Canon lenses it’s horrible. The focus rings have “slip-play” where I can move them slightly and the focus mechanism inside isn’t moving. There’s a gross grinding feeling of plastic-on-plastic, even on many of the higher end L lenses when I handle them in a store.
So overall I am VERY satisfied with my Zeiss 35mm F2 Distagon. I am no longer nervous to bring it for an event and I’m sure I will consistently get many good shots from this lens. After using it for a month I have to say again, it’s highly recommended.
Out of curiosity I daytripped to Kananaskis Provincial Park in Alberta, Canada. I was disappointed when I arrived to discover I forgot my 35mm at home and was left only with my 85mm. I decided to stick it out and see what I would come up with. I turned off at the first “tourist area” which turned out to be a popular kayaking/white-water-rafting spot. I walked along the creek and found some guys using body boards on the white water. I was thankful I had the 85mm with me and shot a few pictures of the guys trying to stay in a powerful eddy.
The weather has been rainy and stormy and I’ve been getting home late almost every evening. However, today I saw something I probably haven’t seen for 3 years: a rainbow. I took a snapshot of it.
I drove all the way to the Highway 21 and 564, about 40km east of Calgary in order to get away from the light pollution. I’m glad I did the results were worth it.
I first tried shooting with my Scotch mount. Unfortunately I didn’t put much effort into where it was aimed and took pictures of an uninteresting section of the sky.
Afterwards I re-aimed my camera at a section of the Milky Way and fired off as many 30 second frames as I could until my battery died. I only got 3 frames fired off but fortunately I got some half-decent results.
It’s been raining for a couple days now so my photos haven’t been plentiful, really. Here’s a shot of rain drops falling in to one of our rain barrels. At least the rain’s good for our vegetable garden. The lettuce is growing like mad under it.
I’ve been excited about a special location I’m visiting tomorrow for a shoot and I spent the evening learning a bit more about HDR photography. Adobe Photoshop has an auto-import wizard to merge multiple, bracketed shots into an HDR image. First you shoot several images, maintaining the same ISO and f-stop, changing the Tv. If you change the f-stop you alter the depth of field mid-merge and if you choose an ISO other than the smallest available in your camera you’ll just introduce more noise.
Then you select the photographs in the import tool. It gives you a quick thumbnail overview for all the shots; it’s good to pay attention to this because in one instance I accidentally imported a photograph that wasn’t part of a bracketed series and didn’t realize it until later on.
I used the local-adaptation method of HDR merge. Here you set the pixel radius for microcontrast, as well as the threshold. If you set the threshold too high you’ll get haloing/banding of your tones.
You can tweak the tone curve in this mode, just like regular curve window. Here’s an example of a tone adjustment I made. The left hand spike is the dark ground regions. The right-hand spike is the sky region. You can use multiple tweak-points to give a nice contrasty spike for whichever regions of the tone you want. Here I made the ground region ultra-contrasty.
One thing I noticed is that the branches of the trees in front of the sky were shifted in tone due to the micro-contrast radius setting of the HDR merge. I think I would need to lower the micro-contrast radius or try to keep things like that from happening in the original composition of the shot.
I performed these experiments so that tomorrow I have a better picture of what the end-results look like when photographs are merged together. I plan on keeping this in mind as I shoot so I can attempt to compose my images in the best manner possible to take advantage of what Photoshop’s HDR merging can bring.
After arriving home I went for a walk along the highway with our dog, Lily and took a few shots of the crisp, wet grassland. Not until I lived out here for a bit did I realize how much wetland is close to Calgary’s city limits. We got a lot of various birds that come through, feeding off the frogs and insects that thrive in the wet regions of our acreage. This was done with a circular polarizer and a graduated ND filter, again. I can’t stress how much these two filters are vital to landscape photography.
I’ve also created a new post category, Photo a Day. I’ve realized I post almost every single day so I’m going to force myself to post a photograph of some sort every single day. It will keep me in production mode and hopefully I’ll be able to come up with some serious concepts & ideas.
My week-days are usually pretty busy during the day-time so I’ve been snapping shots of the sunsets each evening during the power hour (the last hour before sunset). On the way home today, I was watching this more than I was watching the road…
I knew I had to pull over right then and there. Once I get on to this section of the highway the road banks so steep into the ditch it’s impossible to pull over so I asked the fiancé for permission to stop on the side of the exit ramp. I took off at a full run so I could get a view that didn’t include an overpass and shot a few pictures. I ran back, through the mud, to climb back into a car with some images I was hopeful would turn out. I’m glad they did because I caught some serious Über Rays here…
