One of those Photos I Like, but No One Else Does–I Think?

April 9th, 2012 Thomasso

Yes, this is one of those photos that I like, but perhaps no one else does, or at least I think no one else does?

Anyway, I think it is cool. A little dog just came out of the water for a brief dip in the river, and I shot several images in a row of it leaving the water. This shot is just the ripples in the water afterwards. Cool becuase the water was dead calm, and the Sun was setting, making for a neat colour on the water and the shoreline.

I will have a larger version of it later in my personal image gallery soon.

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Today’s Beautiful Sunset From Fort Langley

April 7th, 2012 Thomasso

It was a beautiful sunset, and me and a friend walked down to the river to do sunset shots on our after diner walk from the park. The sky was clear and the light was a very orange colour as the Sun sank below the horizon. The river water was like glass, and it made for a nice effect as the sun light reflected off from it in this golden colour that you can only get late, or early, in the day. For me, after such a cloudy winter, seeing this sunset was nice, as we are deprived of these sunsets here along the West Coast.

See what I mean about the colour, in the above image?

The above image was shot with my 30mm macro lens, and the bottom two were shot with my 55 to 200mm telephoto lens.

The above image was just after a fisher cast a line across the river.

The colours are just stunning! The above image is some driftwood sticking up above the water near the shore.

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Testing my 14mm Lens Out in the Field

April 5th, 2012 Thomasso

I took the 14mm lens out into the field on Brae Island across the Fraser River from Fort Langley, BC, and walked the hiking trail shooting like crazy with my Sony A33. Field testing this lens, I learned right away that focusing and adjusting the F Stop is very picky when running in full manual mode. I guess I got too lazy with a camera that does really good automatic mode shots, and completely forgot how old school cameras worked.

It is freaky looking through a 14mm lens! I never had such a wide angel lens before. I basically have a 90 degree field of view and with a good F2.8, the images are fairly sharp.

Extreme macro shots are very nice with this lens too. My minimum focus distance is about 29cm, so I can some good bokeh with it.

However, I bought the lens for doing land scape shots – and this lens does that very well. I also want to some night time photography shooting star trails and sky shoots. When I get some cloudless nights, I will set this up for that.

So, off into the sunset I kept shooting. The day turned out great, and I met another photographer along the way too. He invited me to the local camera club. I may go to it, just to check it out.

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Camera in A-Mode

April 2nd, 2012 Thomasso

I have tried setting my Sony A33 in “A” Mode so that I could have a custom setting when I do close-up macro shots, the aperture is the only setting I change, but for my custom settings I still need some more time to figure this out. But then, the camera already has this setting built into it, thus the “A” Mode, so why would I need to make custom control settings in the first place?

Oh the dilemma of having a camera with too many buttons on it.

Anyway, I experimented with setting just the aperture, and I made a leap forward with understanding how the “A” Mode work. “A” Mode, or aperture priority, means that no matter what F stop I set, how big the aperture is, the camera will automatically set everything else up to make that shot. For example, it will set the shutter speed, and other settings to suit the scene I am shooting in.

The image, above, is four smaller images of the same shot, changing each image with just a different F stop, or F number. The higher the F number, the greater my focusing depth of field is. The upper right image has the widest aperture setting, and it also has the narrowest focusing area, so the foreground an background are blurred out leaving the subject nice and focused. At the smallest F stop setting, F22, most of the image is in focus, like what most point and shoot cameras do.

I am experimenting with this becuase the next sunny day I get, I want to start trying out more macro shots, close up, with the spray bottle, to get better rain drop photos. Stay tuned!

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Water Drops and Plant Photography

March 27th, 2012 Thomasso

I can see what I am doing next time we get some sunny weather: water drop plant photography! A friend of mine sent me an email of some photos that have been going around the net of macro shots of various plants covered with water drops. The effect looks really awesome. So awesome that I want to try this with my camera too. I set up my plant on my kitchen table this afternoon, putting a plate underneath it to catch all the water, and I started spraying it, while shooting the water as it beaded off the plant. I think I have the settings to go further this this and take it outside when the weather is good.

The image (uncropped) I shot setting the camera at manual, with my remote flash, ISO100, F2.8, and 1/125 exposure with my trusty 30mm macro. I think I can get these easily outside with this setup. I will cheat–I will use a spray-bottle for the water effect. Do not tell!

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Bud

March 26th, 2012 Thomasso

I took this on Sunday Morning. I cannot wait for the explosion of green to take place here in the Fraser Valley, ushering in the spring season.

I am not sure what plant this is, but it is nice to see plants budding, even though it was bitterly cold out on that day. Cheers to “bud.”

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The Last Bit of a Great Weekend

March 25th, 2012 Thomasso

Parting is bitter sweet, but it was great great to finally have a Sun filled weekend with no interruptions of clouds, even though the nights were brutally cold. Now, the clouds have moved in, high clouds, but nonetheless this qualifies as overcast, but it seems to be trapping in the heat. So one last push to get outside and enjoy the weather, and do some photography in the good light as it could be another long stint before we see unobstructed skies like this again.

The above image was taken down by the railway tracks in Fort Langley. The pile of metal bits looked cool, as I have walked by these things so often. I thought why not take some abstract shots of patterns and weird composition?

The image was also the first of three editing procedures I have never done before either. First, I converted and did post-production editing straight from RAW. Second, I saved this into a JPEG, as normally I save my images in PNG format. Lastly, I re-added the EXIF metadata tab back to the image, so that it displays only my copyright information embedded within the image.

I will still put my coveted water marks on my images, but now I can also make sure that the metadata is also correct too showing me as the copyright holder. You know, that owner’s paranoia thing that everyone is so freaked out about when uploading content to the Internet.

With shooting so many photos this weekend, I may spend the rest of the week going through them all, and perhaps posting a few  then on the blog. I estimated that I took over 300 images in the last two days? Wow!

Posted in Around Town, Art, Bitching about weather, Diatribe, General, Photographs, Software | 1 Comment »

A Sure Sign of Spring in Fort Langley, BC

March 25th, 2012 Thomasso

A sure sign of spring, if there ever was one.

The image is a window display at the The Old Candle Factory in Fort Langley, along Glover Road. Although I am not a big candle user, I will plug them here as I am using their window in my photographic art. I have a friend who also works there on and off.

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More Photos From Today: Apple Blossoms

March 23rd, 2012 Thomasso

These were two additional photos that I wanted to get up here becuase they are, in my humble opinion, really great shots. This apple tree is right in the field by the Post Office in Fort Langley. I just walked up to the nearest branches with my 30mm macro, and got as close I could, and started shooting. The blossoms looked awesome. Having the Sun high in the sky made all the difference.

I am getting better Bokeh with this lens. This tree is in a really great location–full Sun, and no building on the Northern side of it.

I am even amazed at the cool effects this little lens gives me. These blossoms are only about 1cm in diameter.

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Last Day for Playing With My Camera Shooting Water

March 22nd, 2012 Thomasso

Being that it was so dark outside, as the clouds beat me home from Langley and covered the Sun up, I went and set up my bowl of water so I could continue to master my new flash and photographing splashes of water with it. I also brainstormed an idea that I had kicking around this morning when I  found a really good water-dropper that works great, an old bubble jet refill cartage. Now that I had the perfect delivery system for a water dropper, I felt like I was going to capture that perfect shot of a water splashing. I also set up my camera slightly different than before, hoping that I could getting better light and faster shutter speeds. Off I went catching those water drops as they fell into the bowl–see below.

I started moving my flash around to different positions from the bowl of water. This above shot, I had the flash just over top of it, set to 1/36 (low power) to get this shot. I was now going down the right path I wanted.

Above–sadly I had the flash pointing away from the bowl of water and almost lost all off the light, but because the splash turned out so great I kept this one to post. It is a really cool splash!

Above, I used a 30mm macro lens, f2.5, ISO 100, leaving the shutter wide open and using the flash to freeze the moment. Focusing the lens was the most challenging task of getting these shots as the depth of field is so narrow. The focus was just off by a little bit.

Way too much flash, but the splash turned out good. Again, focusing was a problem. To get these shots I have to use manual mode on my camera, shut off the auto focus, and run my flash wirelessly. So setting everything up and getting it perfect was the hard part. Then there is hoping that when I press the shutter button, I get the drop in the right position, capturing that perfect splash. It was hit and miss! Out of 20 shots, eight images had good splashes in them.

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