… your Christmas tree is ready.
We got our first real snowfall of the winter last night. There really wasn’t very much, but it came down wet and heavy. Our poor fir tree in the front yard definitely looks forlorn. I think if we stuck a star on top of it, it would probably topple over.
“Turn the lights off, you’re killing polar bears”. We use that expression around our house to try and shame encourage everyone to turn the lights off after they leave the room. Well it turns out now that we should be saying “turn the lights out, you’re giving the people in West Virginia black lung”.
Enter your zip code into ilovemountains search box and it will show you, using google maps, the connection between your local power company, and sites that mine coal by systematically using mountaintop removal techniques. That’s a euphemism for blowing up mountains in the name of harvesting cheap coal. Finally, something more obnoxious than strip mining.
There are a few photography websites that I check out on a regular basis. After finding these two lists, I have a lot more reading to do. Good stuff.
Chase Jarvis has compiled a list of user-submitted 150 favorite blogs, many of which include photography blogs.
Epic Edits Weblog lists 87 Great Photography Blogs and Feeds.
What do you do when you don’t have a good macro lens that can shoot from a distance, and you just have to get a close up of home-made cranberry sauce cooking on the stove? You cross your fingers and justify the risk of putting your lens 3 inches away from the bubbling, sugary exploding cranberries by telling yourself that your macro filter will take the brunt of the damage if a cranberry explodes onto the lens.
Thankfully the camera and lens escaped unscathed.
“Do not worry monsieur, zee little black spots in your sundae are our own special chocolate”
Mice close NY home of $25,000 dessert
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A Manhattan restaurant that unveiled a record-breaking $25,000 (12,200 pounds) dessert last week has been forced to shut its doors temporarily due to an infestation of mice and cockroaches.
For what they charge for one of their desserts, they could pay a cleaning person for an entire year to keep the place clean.
On the other hand, anyone who indulges in this type of excessive and egregious consumption for the sake of consumption probably deserves whatever they get.
I’ve added a couple of new galleries to the IR photos that I’m hosting locally on this site. You can find links to the individual galleries in the sidebar, or the main page here. I’m getting much happier with the results that I’m getting shooting IR, both from the cameras that I’m using, and with the post-processing workflow that I’m developing using LAB colorspace. In the process I’m also learning tons about using Photoshop for editing photos.
The secondary motive for hosting these galleries separate from my Flickr photos is that these represent what I feel are the best examples of what I’m currently doing at any one time. Many of the photos in these galleries are also being posted to different forums on the Infrared Photography community site.
The IndyFlickr group had our November walk through Holliday Park last Saturday. The weather was gorgeous, once it warmed up. Today’s photo was the sunrise I caught on the way there. It really was that spectacular.
I’ve written up a recap of the walk on photowalking.org. Go check it out.
We had another good turnout last Saturday for the November IndyFlickr photowalk. The weather was beautiful (once the sun came out and it warmed up a bit). I’ll have a post recapping it on photowalking.org in a day or two.
I didn’t plan on it when I went, but I ended up taking most of my photos with the IR filter in place on the front of the 28 mm f/1.8 lens. I’m starting to really love the results that I’m getting with this lens, shooting infrared.
Although it performs really well in IR with the lens wide open at f/1.8 - 2, giving me nice relatively short exposures, even stopped down to f/18 with a 20 second exposure, it’s giving beautiful results.
I’m also getting much happier with the post-processing workflow for digital IR that I’m coming up with. I’ll have to write up another tutorial…
Digital IR continues to surprise me. I’ve been using my new 28mm f/1.8 prime lens quite a bit for shooting IR with my Canon, and have been really happy with the results. As I hoped for, the higher quality lens exhibits a lot less lens flare than the kit lens that came with the camera. One additional reason that I bought this lens is that with a wide open f/2 or f/1.8, I can get good IR images with relatively short (2-4 sec) exposures on my unmodified 300D.
What surprises me, but maybe shouldn’t, is that under a lot of lighting conditions this lens shows a lot of vignetting with the IR filter. Sometimes that’s not an effect that I want, but in this case I think the vignetting adds considerably to the overall effect of the photo.
One of the comments on Flickr is that this photo has what appears to be a tilt-shift effect. I had to look it up, but it definitely does. Maybe it’s the vignetting, or the vast expanse of dark sky, or a combination of factors, but Lucas Oil Stadium looks like a toy construction in this particular photo.
As an aside, I’m also very happy with the false-color effects that I’m getting with my all-LAB post-processing workflow is giving with this lens. There’s very little noise showing up when I shoot at 100 ISO, and unless I stop down to f/11 or so, there’s rarely any noticeble hot spot. I’m able to get much richer, velvety blacks and vivid whites than I was able to get previously with the kit lens.
What a difference a good lens makes.
