Chillin' with Santa

Another shot from last Christmas. I hope your holiday is merry, and you are enjoying the time with your families.

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No Peeking!

No Peeking!

This is a shot that I took last Christmas Eve. Hope you are having a good holiday.

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A (Belated) Weekend Challenge

Over on his blog, wildlife photographer Moose Peterson issued a challenge to gauge the interest in his continuing to make tutorial videos. Here is the link to his thread. It shows how he photographs birds in the snow in his backyard while staying comfy in his living room. Give him a visit if you like wildlife and landscape photography. Good stuff over there on his site.

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Let it Snow ...

Winter Storm, Jan., 2008

The picture above is from last winter. Today we had a high near 70 degrees F. I hope to actually see a White Christmas one day. It doesn't look like it will be this year though.

Also a note about my photo-hosting service, Zenfolio. They are constantly improving the service and adding new features. Most of them have been behind-the-scenes kind of things to make managing your galleries better or stream-lining the print ordering and fulfillment process. However, this week they added something for visitors. You can now leave comments on the photographs posted there. There is a "guestbook" feature where you can leave comments on the home page or individual gallery's start page. You can also leave comments on individual photographs. I have turned this feature on throughout the gallery site. You don't have to be registered with Zenfolio to leave comments, but I do get an email notification when a comment has been made and can moderate them if needed.

Anyway, I hope your holiday preparations are going well. My son has had a few Christmas events this week and I am now sorting through those photographs.

Keep shooting.

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Photography and the Holidays

Oh, the weather outside has been frightful,
and the central heating is so delightful.

Cold and rainy. That's what it has been like the past few days. I just haven't been that inspired to do any shooting recently. So instead of talking about a photograph how about something a bit different?


Now we photographers are usually proud of our images. We go to a lot of effort to get the perfect shot. Then we spend a lot of time with the image on the computer processing and editing it until it is as perfect as we can get it. What do we do with them afterwards? Some of us have web galleries to share them. Some of use will make prints from out desktop printers. Sometimes one might make it's way on to a computer display as a background. Others might display them with an LCD "frame". Mostly we horde them away on our computers where no one sees them again.

Well, this time of the year is the perfect time to bring out some of those locked away images and share the memories that they captured with those we love. Many of the on-line photo print services have products that give our images new life. Did you take a great portrait of your children or of your family this year? Why not turn that picture in to custom postcards and send it to your family? Of course, people have been doing this for many years. Now you have a bit more control over the design and final image quality.

Did you take some amazing landscape photographs on your vacation or road trips this year? Do you have a family member that loves seeing images of new places? Why not give them a hardcover book of your best photographs of the year? There are many on-line print services that will allow you to create your own high quality "coffee-table" photobooks for a reasonable price.

Do you have an athlete in your family? A new product that I have been seeing printing companies offering lately are life-sized cutouts. They will take your photograph of a person, blow it up to life-size and make a cutout image of just the person. Some of the cutouts that I've seen are cardboard stand-ups, others are plastic wall clings.

Coffee lover on your gift list? Have a coffee cup make with one of your images. What grandparent wouldn't love a set of coffee cups with all of their grandkids' pictures?

There are many other gift ideas. Good quality prints, particularly mounted and/or framed, will usually be favorites. Some printing companies offer novelty items such as keychains as well as other off the wall (or on the wall) products.

I personally use Mpix and have had great experience with them. They are not the only company out there. There are many to choose from with some offering quite unique and specialized products.

This holiday season why not use those photographs you have locked away in the bowels of your computer and create some unique, memorable and lasting gifts.

Keep shooting.

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Light Painting UFOs in the Backyard

Backyard UFOs

While we were at my parents' house for Thanksgiving, I got to spend some time in the yard playing with the camera. I tried to get some night shots, but those didn't turn out as well as I had hoped. Then I realized that the backyard was nice and dark with the small woods behind it being backlit by some street lights. So, I decided to play around with a flashlight I carry in my camera bag and do some light painting.

The shot above is just one of the images I made that night. They are very simple to make actually. How to do it after the jump.


Light painting is a technique where you leave the shutter open and selective illuminate subjects and/or move a light through the scene to leave a light trail. Here is how I made the image above:

1) Set your camera on a tripod.
2) Set your camera on the "Bulb" shutter speed setting.
3) Manually focus your lens so that the background isn't just a blur ... unless of course that is the effect you are going for.
4) Lock your shutter open with either a manual release cable or hold it open with your finger.
5) Run around in front of your camera waving a flash light around like a fool. Alternately, walk around lighting things up with your flash or flash light. You will need a friend to do this part if you are holding the shutter open by yourself instead of locking it with a cable release.
6) Return the camera and let it stay open a bit longer for the background light to burn in. This will cause the "ghosting" effect through the light trails and the background gets recorded by the sensor/film.
7) Unlock the shutter to close it.
8) Review the image and repeat as necessary or wanted.

The first few attempts won't be very good. The idea here is to play around with the long exposure time in a dark / nighttime environment. You can do the same in a darkened room. There are countless variations of this technique from simple light trails like this one to using 1-million candle-power lights to "paint" small hills in the southwestern US. It is a technique that practically begs to be played with as it isn't just your normal image.

If you follow the above steps what you should have is a lot of streaks of white light going through the scene. How do you get light trials with those colors though? Well, I suppose you could try finding a flashlight that cycles automatically through colors. However, I don't have one of those. That is were your photo editor of choice comes in. I used Nikon's Capture NX2 to because it makes this very, very easy.

1) I placed a color control point on the light trail. This selects anything with that "color" in the point's area of influence. It is NX2's version of Photoshop's masking, and is the feature that makes this so much easier than in an editor like Photoshop as you don't have to generate the masks by hand. If you are more comfortable using Photoshop and masks, go right ahead. There really isn't a right way or wrong way to do this after all.
2) I then adjusted the Red, Green and Blue color channels on the control point until I had the color I wanted. To dark the color I lowered the brightness and/or increased the contrast via the control point. You can also adjust the saturation as you see fit.
3) Repeat the above as often as needed until your light trails are the color(s) that you like.
4) Check your background to make sure you didn't inadvertently affect it. If you do, then use NX's selection brush in the erase mode to remove the effect from the affected area. I used a very soft brush, but a harder bush might be necessary at times.

That's it for the light trails. This particular image probably took 10 minutes to process at most, and most of that time was just playing with the colors until I liked what I saw. Capture NX2 did the heavy work of generating the masks, leaving me to make the color changes.

A couple of suggestions.

1) Wear dark clothing if you don't want to appear in the image. The dark clothing with blend into the dark background reducing the chance that you will cause a "ghost" image as you run around like an idiot. ;-)
2) Keep moving. The longer you stay in one place, the more likely that you will register on the camera making one of those ghost images I mentioned above.
3) If you want to add a "ghost", then do the opposite of 1&2. I.E. wear light clothing and move slowly or even stand still briefly. The longer you stay in one place the more solid you will appear in the image. The trick will be to stay long enough to leave an image, but not so long that you completely obscure the background. Remember that you want to see the background through you, so don't stay in one place the entire time shutter is open.
4) If you want a rainbow effect to your colors remember the acronym ROY G. BIV for Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet. That is the order of the colors that you see in a rainbow.

Anyway, that is it for today. Hope you have fun doing your own light painting.

Keep shooting.
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Lots of Food

Blueberry Pie

Back from Thanksgiving at my parents. The entire family, minus my wife, was there. Unfortunately, my wife came down with a bad flu bug a couple of days before the holiday and wasn't well enough to travel the long distance to my parent's house. She is still not quite one-hundred percent recovered. The bug hit her pretty hard.

Anyway, we had a good Thanksgiving. Ate way too much food. My sister and mother made the pie in the shot above. A couple more food pictures after the jump.


The Centerpiece

The Table

The Turkey

The Turkey ... Afterwards

I hope you and yours had a good holiday.

Keep shooting.

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