Just a small gratuitous piece of color on a Sunday evening, before I get back to work after a long weekend. This was another macro from crawling around on my belly during November’s Indy Flickr walk at Eagle Creek Reservoir.

I don’t have any thanksgiving images to show today. No images of turkey, or feasts spread out across the table. Just a simple, serene scene that clears out the ever-present clutter and noise in our lives that distracts us from remembering how many things we have to be thankful for.

I spent a fair bit of Saturday’s Indy Flickr walk at Eagle Creek crawling around on my stomach, looking for interesting things to take macros of. I got a very nice Canon EF 50mm f/2.5 Compact Macro lens in trade last year around this time, and really haven’t used it all that much. Saturday I corrected that oversight.

Unfortunately the tripod that I’ve had for the last several years wasn’t up to the task of getting down low to the ground shooting macros. Of course I’ve known for the last year or so that I needed to get a better tripod. There have been several motivating factors, including a reluctance to trust a couple of thousand dollars worth of camera gear to a $70 tripod, but also the recognition that the tripod that I’ve been using has limitations, such as the aforementioned inability to get close to the ground, and a desire to get a tripod that can handle a panoramic head.

After the experience of trying to get good macro shots low to the ground, without the benefit of a tripod, I decided to head down to the local camera shop Saturday afternoon to remedy the situation. I came out with a Manfrotto 055XPROB tripod with a 468MGRC4 Hydrostatic Ball Head. Going into the store I had planned on getting the carbon fiber equivalent tripod, but after giving them a heft side by side I decided that the weight savings wasn’t going to be enough to justify the price differential.

The photo above was taken hand-held without a tripod last Saturday. What I particularly like about this image are the strong horizontal lines from the log, balanced by the delicate vertical lines from the frost.

In the future I’ll be taking these shots whenever possible with a tripod.

One other unexpected benefit of going into the camera shop last Saturday afternoon… I got to play for 5 minutes or so with Canon’s new 5D Mk II. They’re supposed to start shipping after Thanksgiving. I’m on their waiting list. edit

What does that all mean? In the past it meant that every few weeks, as Wordpress released a new version (often a critical security update), I would spend anywhere between 30 minutes to an hour backing up the site and installing the new version of Wordpress. Ugh.

That quickly got old, and before too long it became an excuse for me to ignore the blog, because more often than not when I logged into the administrative control panel to write a post, there would be a notice telling me “Your version of Wordpress is out of date. Please update now.” There it would sit, nagging and nagging and nagging me until I would bite the bullet and spend time going through the ritual of upgrading the site (all the while crossing my fingers that any plug-ins that I’m using would be compatible with the new version).

Friend, photographer and fellow blogger Paul took a different tack on this, running his blog on Blogger. Of course that carries with it a different set of issues.

Then I stumbled across a new plug-in that has probably singlehandedly seduced me back to maintaining this blog.

Click Here to Automatically Upgrade WordPress to latest Version.

Holy crap. This makes it easy. Now when I’m greeted by the friendly reminder that my copy of Wordpress is out of date and needs to be updated, it takes me less than 10 minutes to update things. This is a perfect example of how things should work.

I took this photo last summer at Gas Works Park in Seattle.

This is another example of how I think occasionally breaking the rules creates a more powerful image. In this case (like the one I wrote about earlier) I was shooting into the sun. This time though I was using an infrared filter, and getting a lot of lens flare which is usually the fastest way to get the photo dumped off my hard disk. And that was my initial impulse when I first looked at it in Lightroom.

I’ve gotten into the habit of often shooting 3 images in a row, with automatically bracketed exposures. I don’t do this all the time, but in cases like this when the lighting conditions are difficult, it gives me a safety net to try and ensure that I get the shot that I want. The other two exposures looked unsalvageable, but once I took this into Photoshop and started my typical infrared post-processing, it started to take on a life of its own.

For the most part at this point, I prefer this type of rich black and white image from shooting infrared. Too many of the false color infrared images that I see look quite striking when I first see them, but they don’t seem to hold up over time. Black and white has a minimalist quality to it that does seem to hold up better though. When you see a black and white photo, even if it’s from an infrared exposure, your mind isn’t distracted by thinking “hmm, I wonder why those colors look off?“. I wonder if there’s a difference in how your mind processes black and white imagery, as opposed to color imagery?

I still experiment occasionally with infrared photography, using a Hoya R72 filter on my Canon 300D (the original Digital Rebel). I haven’t spent a lot of time shooting IR, mainly because I’ve gotten tired of needing to plan out the long exposures necessary when using an unmodified camera. Too often, the results aren’t what I want because of the necessity of framing and focusing the shot on the tripod without the filter, then carefully screwing the filter on, hoping that I haven’t mucked up either the focus or the tripod position.

At this point I tend to prefer IR shots that have been converted to B&W, rather than IR images that have had false color applied in post-processing. Having said that, this is one IR shot that I’m quite happy with from last summer. The post-processing was a bit of a happy accident in Photoshop, but as with many accidents it’s opened my eyes to new possibilities for how to process images. The day I took this photo there was hardly a cloud in the sky, it was bright and sunny. In this case, the combination of the IR image and post-processing gives the image a very dreamy, almost otherworldly ambiance.

I plan on getting the 300D converted to a dedicated IR camera once I upgrade to a new body in a few months. Until then, I’ll keep occasionally experimenting with the setup that I have, and keep experimenting with different ways of post-processing the images, looking for happy accidents…

Wow, it’s been quite a while since I paid any attention to my little blog. Really just a confluence of a lot of little things that piled up and conspired to keep me from posting. Things are settling out a bit though, and I’m getting back into the creative groove that I feel has been missing from my photography for a while, and with that is a desire to start getting back to blogging on a somewhat regular basis.

This photo was taken at the tail end of an extended vacation to the Pacific Northwest back in July of this year. It’s one of those rare photos that I take that captures almost perfectly the image I had in my head when I snapped it.

Indianapolis has a couple of things that make photographing its skyline a challenge. The first is that… guess what, the Midwest is flat. When you don’t have a good vantage point, and you’re shooting from ground level with buildings intervening between you and what you want to see, then it’s difficult finding good views of the downtown.

It’s even more difficult when the few good vantage points that there are, fall victim to development. That’s the case with the vantage point that I took this next photo from a few months ago. What was a nice open field on the northwest edge of downtown, is now being developed into condominiums. It was clearly too good to last, although I wish it had been developed into park area instead. As it is, I’m glad I took the chance to photograph the downtown area from that vantage point when I had the chance.

Some cities are famous for their views. With a little digging you can find websites that list vantage points for photographing their downtown skylines. That’s how I found the vantage point where I took this last photo of downtown Seattle recently.

Sometimes you just need to know where to stand.

Although a lot of people would consider shooting with a 28mm prime lens to be pretty limiting, I’m using it as an exercise in learning how to let go and just get the shot. Before getting this lens, I used to spend time zooming the lens back and forth, trying to compose the image in the camera frame before hitting the shutter. I don’t know how many spur of the moment shots I probably missed by fiddling with the zoom, instead of just taking the damn picture.

This is a roundabout way of saying that although I originally bought this lens for it’s low light performance, when it sits on your camera and rarely gets switched off, I inevitably use it under any and all conditions. And even though I love shooting under low ambient light conditions, I also tend to love the dramatic images possible from breaking the rules and occasionally pointing the camera towards the sun. Since I’m very attached to the idea of keeping my retinas intact and functioning, my strategy usually involves pointing the camera in the general direction that I want, glancing through the viewfinder with my eye a couple of inches away, and then looking away while I fire off a couple of frames.

Rules are made to be broken, and sometimes I get lucky.