The December desktop background image is here – finally! I’ve been waiting and waiting for some snow and miraculously, we haven’t had any! December in Colorado without snow is unheard of so I had to go back into the archives and pulled this shot of the Flatirons from last spring. Click on your monitor resolution below to view/save the image to your local computer. Enjoy!
The November desktop background image is here! Looking to squeeze that last bit of fall out of 2010 I made another trip to Rocky Mountain National Park two weeks ago and got a couple of memory cards full of shots like this one of Sprague Lake. Click on your monitor resolution below to view/save the image to your local computer. Enjoy!
I received my first set of color slides back from the processors yesterday and eagerly went about figuring out how to scan them in to my computer. After fiddling around for 30 minutes, I finally got some images to look at.
My first impressions are… huh. No, really. Huh. Some of the images aren’t nearly as sharp as I had expected. That could easily be blamed on a) poor technique or b) poor choice of film medium. The saturation of the colors was amazing but that is to be expected with Velvia film. I’m cranking out files that are nearly twice as large as the files off of my digital camera and the dynamic range does in fact appear to be greater.
The one thing that I wasn’t expecting was all of the artifacts, scratches and dust on the slides. I knew there would be some but I didn’t realize there would be THAT much. It is only one roll but I can already see that I will spend MORE time perfecting a film image in photoshop than I ever did with my digital SLR.
I can see some promise in the decision to shoot film but I also see I have a lot of work ahead of me. At the end of the day, I am even MORE eagerly awaiting the arrival of my next four rolls of film to see if they are better or worse than the first roll!
The October desktop background image is here! One of the many treats of living in Colorado is that during the fall the aspens start turning a vibrant yellow. This months image is a shot of some aspens from Hoosier Pass located near Breckenridge, CO. Click on your monitor resolution below to view/save the image to your local computer. Enjoy!
There’s a saying around my house that I hear altogether too many times – “My husband is a moron!”. I guess you could say I’m at it again. In a photography rut, I ponied up some cash for a 1983 Nikon FE2 35mm film camera and a 50mm f/1.8 lens. I am seriously starting to wonder if my wife is right about me…
First, what the hell was I thinking?!? Well, my thought process was as follows: I eventually want to graduate up to a large format camera – probably a 4×5 but maybe even an 8×10. Living in Colorado there is no end to the beautiful nature just waiting to be captured in super high resolution. Sure, I could make the jump straight from digital to large format, but it’s been a LONG time since I’ve had to rely on my brain to make a great photo. I like many you have become a slave to the LCD and Histogram on the back of my camera. I take a bunch of shots, see what they look like, adjust settings, rinse and repeat.
The biggest draw to getting back to film for me was twofold: Resolution and dynamic range. With a 35mm negative strip (or slide), I am guessing that I will be able to see up to a 50% increase in resolution and one to two stops of additional dynamic range – possibly more if I’m shooting monochrome. That’s a big deal. What the heck is this dynamic resolution that I mention? Slight diversion – the human eye can see something like 20 “stops” of light. The typical digital camera can only represent about 6 or 7 “stops” of light. All that detail in the shadows and highlights gets lost when using a digital camera unless you are either a) really know what your are doing, b) shoot a lot of HDR or c) are really good with photoshop. Film traditionally lends itself to capturing more “stops” of light. More light = more detail = one happy photographer!
The last thing that sucked me in to this great experiment was the challenge. Do I take good photos because I know what I’m doing or is it a by-product of machine gun shooting through a scene and picking the one good image out of 100. There’s a time and a place for filling up the buffer and in this time and this place, I want to take my time, enjoy the scenery and still be able to take some damn good photos.
So, here I am with a new (old) 35mm film camera, 8 rolls of film (4 of which are the uber saturated Velvia color slide and 4 of which are the Acros black & white). I’m itching to get out to get some shots taken this weekend and then I wait for the postal carrier to return the fruits of my labor. Will this be successful? Who knows. I surely don’t. I suspect it will be a fun adventure with plenty of ups and downs along the way, of which I will be sure to document in this blog.
The September desktop background image is here! Running water is a necessity and the streams of Colorado have plenty of running water! This months image is from El Dorado Canyon State Park – also located near Boulder, CO. Click on your monitor resolution below to view/save the image to your local computer. Enjoy!
We were met with overcast weather when we awoke this Independence Day, and with it our plans to go in to the mountains exploring were scuttled. So to make the best of the cold and dreary morn, I baked some blueberry muffins!
My wonderful wife knows how much I like blueberries and she had just happened to pick up a pint at the local super-mart. Armed with fresh blueberries, I baked up a batch of six jumbo-sized muffins. During the baking process, I realized that I didn’t have any decent pictures of one of my favorite food items so I broke out the camera and the 105mm Macro lens.
Surprisingly, taking photos of food is actually pretty easy. I placed the muffins on a wood cutting board and placed them near a window with beautiful natural light. I set my white balance to ‘cloudy’ and fired off about 75 shots. One thing to look out for is shadows. If the light coming into the scene from the window is harsh or overly bright, you will want to use a inexpensive reflector set up opposite the window to help even out the shadows. If you don’t want to spend the money on a reflector, you can use everyday items such as a piece of white paper or some aluminum foil. As the name implies, you are trying to reflect some of the light back in to the photo. Trust me – it really does make a difference. In this case however, using a reflector wasn’t necessary because of it being such an overcast day.
Once I got these images on the computer, I noticed that the cloudy white balance (5600 Kelvin on my D300) was a little bit too warm for my liking so I dialed the temp down to about 4700 Kelvin. Being able to change the temperture of the image is one of the biggest benefits of shooting in RAW vs JPG/TIFF Fine. I’m so happy with the end result that a batch of these are going to make their way to the Fotolia stock photography agency.
Finally, the best part about food photography is once you’ve snapped off all of the shots that you want, you can eat some seriously delicious food and after all, isn’t that what holidays are all about?!? =)
The July desktop background image is here! This is a long exposure night time shot of downtown Denver on a stormy, summer night. Click on your monitor resolution below to view/save the image to your local computer. Enjoy!
[UPDATE: The full set of images from the shoot are available here (requires Flash)]
My friends at Boulder Motorsports have been busy building a new bike for the 2010 racing season and they asked if I would like to come take some shots of it for them. Umm. Yeah! The F042 is a custom made kit bike that is truly a work of art. If you are a gear head, you can read more about it here.
I got to the shop at 6AM this morning and Brian Sharp was already hard at work re-building an engine for one of his Californian customers. I set up my gear and tried to stay out of the way as much as possible. Once Will Neville arrived to provide some creative direction and assistance, we got to work. My idea for the first two shots were that this truly is an unveiling of the great work that BMS does. I thought it would be interesting to have a silhouette and some darker, almost flirtatious images of the shape of the F042. As is normally the case, the first 15 or 20 shots were a lot of trial and error but I started dialing in the look I was going for and thanks to my trusty RadioPoppers, I was able to nail it.
Once the darker shots were done, we cranked up the lights and started getting some good product shots of the bike and some of the custom parts that BMS used to create the F042. I haven’t processed all of the images yet, but I can tell from a quick glance that I think that I was able to capture the craftsmanship of Brian and his team.
After we got done documenting the F042, I had an opportunity to ask Brian how this bike does on the track. He response: “it’s been on the podium every race we’ve entered!”. So not only does it look great it’s also a rocket on the track! It was an early start to the day and definitely more work than I would have thought, but hopefully I will be able to give Brian some ‘podium’ shots of his latest creation!
The May desktop background image is here! This image was taken at Sprague Lake in the Rocky Mountain National Park in Estes Colorado. Click on your monitor resolution below to view/save the image to your local computer. Enjoy!
John is a freelance photographer in the Denver, CO. In his spare time, John instructs others in the art of capturing great images.
Understanding Exposure
Bryan Peterson
Within the Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision
David duChemin
VisionMongers: Making a Life and a Living in Photography
David duChemin
The Digital Photography Book
Scott Kelby
The Moment It Clicks: Photography secrets from one of the world's top shooters
Joe McNally
