November | 2007 | Learning To Snap

The Moon Shot

“Shoot for the moon and if you miss you’ll be among the stars” – Les Brown

“Poetic, the stuff of romance and mystery. A bugger to capture on picture” – Learningtosnap

During the
night shooting trip a few weeks back, one of the things I tried and failed to
do was to include the moon in a picture. Now, you’d
think a big, reasonably static lump of “space stuff” wouldn’t be that hard to
picture, but damned if I could get it.

I tried
again last night.

I still
couldn’t get it.

In despair I used google and found an interesting
web site talking about how to shoot the
moon. Seems I’d been making a few simple mistakes.

Autofocus doesn’t. Because the moon
is bright and the sky is dark the camera will over compensate and you’ll
get that shiny nonsense.
Actually trying to zoom in on
the moon using a lens is much better than trying to pull the detail out
with crops later

Sounds
simple doesn’t it?

Well, I
went outside and tried again. The results this time were much better.

The first
shot is of an un-cropped, un-tampered moon and the second is post manipulation
to tweak the crop and the colour thresholds etc.

(1/100,
f/16, manual, focal length – 200mm, ISO – 100, 25/11/07 23:50)

There are
still a few issues with this, mostly because I couldn’t get the tripod to the
angle I needed for the shot and so wasn’t stable as I would
have liked. The image is also a little on the soft side I think (which might be down to the lens being at its outer end). I’ll try this
again in weeks to come.

Anyone else
tried this or have suggestions?

The Automatic Rose

I’m going to be away for a few days this week and, having just packed my bag, I made the
executive decision not to take my camera.

I’d always planned that it would become part of my standard kit, but I’m guessing an
industrial estate in Staines isn’t likely to give me a lot of time or opportunity to take good
photo. I have packed my current photo read though, so expect a review of it
when I get back.

In the meantime, since there are flowers in the house at the moment…

(1/400, f/2.2, manual, focal length – 50mm, ISO – 800, 18/11/07 13:33)

This was taken with the canon 1.8 lens that I’m playing with at the moment. It’s taken a
while, but I think the whole aperture thing is finally sinking in and I’m
finally getting away from the “must use extremes” approach that’d I’d defaulted
to on this lens.

In terms of post processing, this shot is based from the raw image with the white balance (left
on auto on the camera) changed to auto using Lightroom. You’d think this wouldn’t
make a difference, but surprisingly it does. Geoff mentioned a few posts back
in some comments that the cameras all use their own algorithms to decide on
colours etc, and he’s right. Take a look at the original below.

I’ve also cropped the image to push the rose out towards the top right corner. There is a
whole theory about this in the various magazines and books and I’ll try to
explain this sometime soon in “snap speak”.

I’m quite concious that all photographs are subjective and that people will prefer the second over the first (or just hate them both). for me, I feel the first one draws you in more and maybe gives a softer feel – course I’m an IT geek, so what would I know about flowers…

One final thing… Having just grabbed the camera settings for this shot I look in horror at the
ISO figure. Once again I’ve fallen foul of a night of messing – ISO 800 was not
intentional!

Rivers of Light (Cheesey huh?)

I finally got out last night to try something I’d been
planning for a while.

So, if you were “exceeding speed guidelines” on the M1 last
night and saw someone standing on a bridge with a fluorescent jacket and a
tripod mounted device, don’t panic – it was just me and my Canon*

What I was specifically out to try was playing with the
manual and shutter speed settings of the camera. Up until now (with the exception
of a disastrous day at a RCC race), I’d purely used the aperture speed setup
(or automatic) on the camera. But, since seeing them on the web and in DSLR
magazines I’d wanted to try my hand at those “Rivers of Light” shots.

I found this to be very much a case of trial and error.
After getting the camera rigged up on the bridge, I played with a series of
settings and shutter speeds ranging from 1/250 up to about 30 seconds and
briefly into bulb mode (oooh look at me).

At 1/250 my picture of the black object in the black night
surrounded by black stuff was…erm….very dark.

At 27 seconds, things were much prettier…

(27secs,
f/8, manual, focal length – 24mm, ISO – 100, 13/11/07 18:40)

Interestingly, I also tried the same shot using aperture
priority and it came out like this after 30 seconds (camera set) exposure.

(30secs,
f/8, manual, focal length – 24mm, ISO – 100, 13/11/07 18:43)

It’s noticeably darker (to me anyway). This confused me
briefly until I realised that all the light in the shot is provided by the
traffic and as a result completely dependent on the number of cars, the
brightness of their lights and the speed of their travel.

If you live near a bridge or busy road, this is a good experiment
to try yourself. Though, I warn you – you will look like a loon running backwards
and forwards trying to see how much traffic is coming and when to press the
button!

*Though the least you could have done was waved hello.

Assignment for the weekend

So, its been a little quiet over the last few days/weeks.

There is a reason for this. I don’t want this place to turn into one of those “waffle” stops that are so common in bloggerville. I decided when I started this journey that “if I’d nothing to say, I’d just say nothing”.

So.

I’m just saying you know.

Oh, and on an unrelated note and the real reason for this post. I’m planning to get out over the weekend with the camera and take some photos using shutter priority to try to get “artistic” blurring effects.

Rather than just turn up next week with some shots, I thought I’d offer up the idea to everyone else. See who wants to give it a go too?

On a related note, I’ve started thinking about another ‘trip/event’ thing. Anyone interested?

Gallery is a go!

I’ve finally managed to get the gallery part of the main site up and running.

It’s making use of iWebAlbum which is a good, free, web album generator. Thanks to Shereen for pointing it out!

Go, take a look.

Go. Go now.

Run, don’t stop.

Go!!!!

Oh, the link?

Oh alright then, here!

Belfast in the raw…

This is the last of the pictures of Belfast I took from the night shooting trip.

I’ve mentioned before that my camera can take both jpeg and raw pictures at the same time. To date I’ve been relying on the jpegs for posts here. There’s never been a coherent reason for this, just one of those things.

But, after the discussions about colour warmth I decided to take a look at the raw files generated and see if you really could do the whole white balance thing after the fact.

OK, so here’s what I’ve found so far…

Most dSLR’s have the ability to change the white balance of the shot as it’s being taken. this is to allow you to compensate for the lighting conditions of the scene. For example, an indoor scenes can have a different cast from different artificial lighting setups. Equally, outside can have different lighting shades depending on the time of day/year.

…So they tell me…

Fortunately most cameras have the ability to handle white balance automatically. So I’ve ignored it.

However, if you use your raw files, your camera editing software and packages like Lightroom allow you to make some post processing changes. On eof these is the White Balance.

Here’s some examples of this:

Automatic White Balance